By Jacob H. W. Wolf
When my daughter was in the second grade of public school in Meadowbrook PA. A suburb of Philly, she came home everyday very upset and sometimes in tears. She told my wife and I that her teacher was very mean to her. My daughter had had no previous difficulties either in kindergarten or first grade. So I called the school and made an appointment for us to visit her teacher. We arrived at my daughter’s school at the appointed time. I told her teacher that my daughter was very upset with her attitude towards my daughter. After ? conversations her teacher said to me, “Mr. Wolf, what do you want mo to do?”
I said, “I want you to be kind loving and gentle with Lisa.”
She replied, angrily, “I can’t do that. I can only be myself!”
I was so shocked at the teachers’ response that I could hardly speak. I immediately had my daughter switched to another teacher. There were no problems with the new teacher. This episode reminded me of my own experience with my second grade teacher at a Philly public school. I was a rather timid child, and I remember that one day in school my second grade teacher, an old grey-haired women with a clubbed food, grabbed me by the neck and threw me down the aisle. I will never forget how humiliated I felt.
These two experience made me wonder at the acceptance criteria of teachers’ colleges for elementary school teachers. The first thing that a teachers’ college should consider when evaluating a prospective applicant for a teaching position in the elementary grades is, in my opinion, whether she is a kind, loving and gentle person. If she is not she will never be an effective teacher, because a child can sense the attitude of her teacher towards her if the child feels that the teacher’s attitude if not an accepting one, the child will learn very little.
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