What Every Child Deserves - Justin Ormsby

There are few things I like more than a good conversation about education.  More often than not I afterwards feel invigorated, charged, passionate and excited about education, but at times I feel drained, defeated, frustrated, hopeless and on occasion even angry. 

Recently my good friend and colleague Jonathan Hall called to vent his frustrations upon hearing a teacher proclaim that “deadbeat students are a waste of air.”  My first reaction was of sheer anger but the more profound and troublesome emotional response that followed was of frustration and hopelessness.  Every time I hear a statement like this, and certainly it has happened more than once, I’m reminded that there is a very real and dangerous attitude amongst some educators, albeit a minority, that represents a severe misunderstanding of the role of the teacher in the educational process. 

Students who are difficult to reach are not unreachable.  It is the teacher’s primary responsibility to identify the needs, abilities, strengths and weaknesses of every student in his or her care and work tirelessly to reach, teach and motivate them all.  Every teacher in every classroom faces a diversity of learners.  We are given the brilliant and we are given those who need more attention.  We are given the motivated and we are given the lazy.  We are given the dedicated and we are given those whose personal lives are in such shambles that school work is not (and should not) be their immediate priority.  Yet none of those variables are prescriptions for success or failure.  What distinguishes great teachers is both the understanding that every student can be successful and the dedication to achieve that success.

Teaching is difficult.  Differentiated instruction is time consuming, students can be frustrating, and our efforts often go unnoticed and unrewarded.  Yet it is important than we never forget that the product of our industry is people whose lives are forever affected by their experiences in school.  Consider that often we as teachers may be the only opportunity a student has to experience love, to be challenged, to be trusted, to be praised or rewarded, to be made to realize his or her potential, to experience success or to become a role model.  This is especially true of those students who we find the most difficult.  Ignore and disrespect those students and you are acting in the same vein as the parents who beat them, the society who ignores them and the bullies who pick on them.  Teachers save lives.  They pull kids from the gutter, dust them off and set them back down with new perspectives, new ideas, new goals, ambitions, and dreams.  We must be here to guide those students committed to learning but we must be here to an even greater extent to breathe new life into those students whose futures look the bleakest.  That is our duty, our meaning of life and the greatest challenge from which we should reap the greatest reward.  With all of this in mind I challenge every teacher to take a moment to pause, look around your classroom and reconsider which of your students really need you the most.