Professionalism: English Teachers' Rights and Responsibilities

Abstract

a time in some golden age of yore when English teachers had been trusted and respected, even beloved, a time when we taught the true and noble and moral. But declining SAT scores, lack of classroom discipline, filth like Catcher in the Rye and The Lottery in the literature program, invasions of family privacy through the use of journals in the writing program, lack of standards of grammar in the language program, and secular humanism rampaging through the entire English curriculum-all these (and more, she implied) proved that we English teachers had relinquished our right to be trusted and respected. I've heard all that before and since, but in truth English teachers have never been widely respected or trusted. For too many people, English teachers are either Ichabod Cranes at our worst, timid and impractical, or Mr. Chips at our best, sentimental and impractical. public contempt or disdain often comes through on social occasions. Sooner or later, the Fates decree that we tell what our occupation is, and the inevitable follows: My God, just said ain't, or I'd better watch my grammar, or I hated English in school. Those incidents depress the hell out of me. I've been an English teacher all my adult working life. I'm proud of being an English teacher, and wonder why we don't work to make English teaching a profession that we can be proud of, one that others will respect. And we are not a profession. One galling and demeaning reason is that in too many schools, the principal or superintendent or school board runs our English department. They (that ubiquitous they) control our teaching lives, telling us that we must teach toward their minimum essentials lists, th ir idea of what a good writing program is, their idea of what is (or is not) essential in teaching the English language, and on and on. In effect, we and our English departments are controlled by what they say, or we think we are controlled, which may be worse. believe there are ten rights and responsibilities basic to anything we'd call a profession. key word is rights and responsibilities, for we can't have the rights without the concomitant responsibilities.