I was a high school science teacher for many years, the last 23 of which were in suburbia.  My students included children from some of the wealthiest families on Chicago’s North Shore — and some of the poorest.  At the time I retired, a full third of the school’s students were on the school lunch program, meaning that their families were low income.  The school’s population was split almost exactly between white students and students of color.

During my career, I had conversations with high school students of every level of academic achievement, every race and ethnicity, and every socioeconomic background.  I found there was an amazing consensus about how they viewed their academic experiences.  Here, in my words, is a brief synopsis of what they told me over the years:  

Learning is not the central purpose of school.  Teachers want to make students cover the curriculum.  For students who care about school, the purpose is to get good grades.  Students who don’t care just want to escape unscathed.  Learning isn’t on top of the list for anyone.

The battle of wills between teachers and students has a game-like quality.  All teachers use grades to reward and punish and to motivate their students to cover the curriculum.  “Good” students are better at figuring out how to do what each teacher wants and get rewarded with good grades.  Each teacher makes up his own rules about how the game will be played in his classroom. 

The student’s job is to do the work that the teacher requires, whether or not it is meaningful or useful.  How it gets done isn’t as important as turning it in for credit.  Most importantly, a student needs to remember what was just “learned” long enough to do well on a test.  Remembering it after that only becomes important if there is a cumulative exam at the end of the semester, but, of course, it can always be “relearned.”

When they are finished with the curriculum at the end of a course, students don’t have much to show for it.  They don’t remember much of the content they “covered.”  In other words, they didn’t learn very much.

In part, this is because the actual content they are covering feels arbitrary and meaningless to them.  They often don’t know why they are being made to do what they are doing. They don’t see how it has anything to do with their lives.

In my experience, this disturbingly jaded point of view is, more or less, how most students feel.  They are made to go through the motions of learning.  They are doing school.  Honors students are good at doing school; failing students aren’t.  But regardless of their level of success, they believe that doing school has little to do with learning.

In contrast, the hundreds of teachers I have known, almost without exception, believe that the central purpose of school is for students to learn.  There is a huge gulf between what students and teachers think school is for — that is, why they are working together.  As a result, despite the often heroic efforts of dedicated teachers, many students remain dissatisfied and disenchanted about school.  They are commonly driven by motivations that have little to do with learning and personal growth.   

This chasm between beliefs is a central feature of the experiences of both teachers and students.  Teachers are often judgmental about students who seem motivated solely to get good grades (“grade-grubbers”), or who are flat-out bored by the curriculum (“slackers”).  Students often feel their teachers are disingenuous, even hypocritical, when they insist students are there to learn.