Whose in Charge Anyway?

When I began my long an illustrious career as a graduate student in Education I spent an unfortunate five weeks in a summer class where the professor had selected the thesis of "authority" as our focus. Her whole theme was centered around whether we has future teachers intended to consider ourselves as the authority in the classroom as opposed to a classroom where the students helped in choosing the course work, having a say in assessment, and leading the class through questions as opposed to selected questions with appropriate answers. This would have been an interesting exercise if the professor had not made it perfectly clear from the onset what our response was to be. Maybe I was missing something, but...

Authority is a tricky business. Those of us born before the 1990's (and those of you who were born after 1990, I mean no disrespect) fairly understood the difference between being in authority as opposed to being under authority. I was born in the 1960's. I never questioned the authority of my teachers, even those whom I hated a with a purple passion. I had never been taught otherwise. Your teacher tells you to do something; do it. Don't question, don't talk back; just do it. Now, back to the graduate professor. Even an old woman like me recognizes that the don't question approach to authority is full of holes and potential problems. Some folks have no place in authority. Like the Freshman Civics teacher who was such a stickler for rules that he left my fourteen-year-old self alone on a deserted street at 8:00 a.m. on a Saturday morning because my parents had the audacity to allow me to go on a field trip without the appropriate permission form. This was before the days of cell phones and I had to walk to a nearby store and borrow the phone to call my father (who happened to be the newspaper editor of our small town) to tell him I had been left behind. That Civics teacher never left another child again. He nearly never taught again. But I digress. My point is that I understand that teachers are not meant to be dictators, tossing out impossible orders under impossible situations. That being said, I think that somewhere we have lost the importance of one chief. We are after all a democracy. I try my best to give my students as much say as I can. I take a democratic approach as to what we read, how they are to be assessed. I consider how my students learn, how some of them do best with certain types of assessment as opposed to others. I want them to succeed. I want them to learn. In the end, however, someone has to be accountable for what they learn and that they learn. That someone is me. If half my class fails Junior English, I cannot tell my principal that I left it in the hands of my students.

I am thinking about this today when our president was left with the unenviable task of firing Gen. Stanley McCrystal. In all my years of listening to NPR, reading the papers, watching CNN, I have never witnessed such a meeting of the minds as I did today. Today, Republicans, Dems and media alike appeared to be on the same page; the President had no choice. My politics aside, (I am a Democrat) I was reminded of a West Wing episode when a young Republican was hired by the democratic president. The young woman was getting criticism from some fellow GOP's and her response was, "I serve at the pleasure of the President." I was reminded also of a time when my eighteen-year-old-smart-ass self said something rude about then President Reagan. My mother, who was such a liberal she makes me look like Sarah Palin, nearly slapped me in the face. "He's our president; don't ever talk that way again." I was stunned. She hated that man. But she respected the office. I guess what I am pointing at is that as long as we as a culture recognize that there are figures of authority, whether they are teachers or presidents, the buck has to stop somewhere. Someone has to be held accountable. My students are accountable for their grades. I, however, am accountable in terms of whether they learn what they are supposed to learn. I accept the responsibility of whether they pass the finish line or not. Some one does have to take authority.