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David J. Klooster and Patricia Bloem
Teachers are optimists. We think things will get
better: Students will learn. New ideas will brighten our world.
Better textbooks will help students enjoy learning. Improving
schools will help society change and grow. We will become better at
what we do.
Teachers are also realists. Our experiences in the
classroom, in the teachers' lounge, and in our communities tell us
that some people never change, that some kids never learn, that each
program to "improve" the schools or the curriculum
also has the potential to make things worse, and that changing
our own practice is harder than it looks.
In this column in the issues ahead, we hope to
explore with you the ways thoughtful teachers negotiate between
the pull of our optimism and the push of the realities in which we
work. We want to examine new trends in the field of education as well
as the abiding, enduring, old-fashioned satisfactions of the
teaching life that educators have known since ancient times.
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Teachers, classrooms, and change. Optimists and Realists