Patel 1

Saral Patel
English Paper #1
Ms. Fitzpatrick
23 September 2015
The Negligence to Educate
It was my freshman year of high school where I earned my first B in my educational
career. This grade was not the result of a lack of effort, rather the result of an ineffective teacher.
The argument about whether failing schools are the teachers fault or the students fault has been
going on for a while now. This argument can take both sides, in the sense that it is never only one
partys fault. Both must act to flag a school as failing. For example, if a teacher is a poor
educator, the students will lose interest and neglect doing their homework, thus causing a failing
grade. Freshman year biology was an awakening call for me as I learned that not all teachers are
as engaging as the ones I grew up with having in my elementary and middle schools. I had a
handful of poor educators throughout my high school career, however my first bad teacher stood
out to be the worst I have ever had. Many argue that passive teaching can be effective to all
students because pupils learn the material on their own. However, my first biology teacher
proved that instructing students to memorize notions while neglecting to actually demonstrate the
concepts can lead to poor grades and an even worse understanding of the topic.
The failure of an educator to teach a class is far worse than the failure of a student in that
specific course. High school is a time for students to expand their horizons to find particular
passions that they would want to pursue in college or further education. Many people argue that
reading information off a screen can be more effective than being taught the material in an
interactive manner. They preach this because students may learn more while teaching the

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material to his or herself. In my high school, about sixty freshman students did not gain the
experience to learn biology and build an ongoing interest in the topic. The class was not
educational since all we were told to do was cram what was being fed to us. The teachers job
was simple: allow the students to learn the material while making the process enjoyable and
educational.
A particular memory that always stands out when I relive my days sitting in biology class
is when my class was learning the composition of an animal cell. My teacher, Mr. Lewis of
Biology 1 at Northern Valley Demarest High School was silently voted among all students as the
worst educator to teach at the high school. It was the first week of class when I slowly raised my
hand to ask Mr. Lewis a valid question about the nucleus of the cell. He abruptly told me to put
my hand down and look the question up on Google. From that day onwards I branded him as a
teacher that does not care about the material being taught in the class. In each and every class,
my instructor would read off of the slides from a downloaded PowerPoint that could be found
online. There was never any further explanation on a topic. As opposed to actually understanding
the material and applying it to real life, I was forced to remember the words on the screen. This
lack of motivation to teach was stemmed from his ideal that since he was tenured there is nothing
he can do to risk losing his job. Paulo Freire in Pedagogy of the Oppressed argues that passive
education is ineffective and there is no point for feeding a student information which he or she
will not fully comprehend. He claims that, Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in
which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor. Instead of
communicating, the teacher issues communiques and makes deposits which the students
patiently receive, memorize, and repeat. This is the banking' concept of education, in which the
scope of action allowed to the students extends only as far as receiving, filing, and storing the

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deposits. (Freire 1). In other words, Freire believes that this style of teaching is what is retarding
Americas educational systems. I strongly concur with this statement because I had to deal with
the banking education first hand freshman year. Mr. Lewis was in essence the depositor as I
was the depository. Information was inefficiently fed to us while we passively withheld that
information until the test made us regurgitate what we stored in our memory. In this case, I never
actually processed the information taught during the various dull lectures.
The negligence to teach was a recipe for failure among the students taking my teachers
course. The tests would differ significantly from the presentation we were urged to remember
during class. This difference in material tested and learned resulted in poor grades and a growing
hatred for the subject amongst all of the freshmen students in the class. When a student asked Mr.
Lewis why the tests were so different from the information learned in class, his response was
simply Its your job to learn the material. This statement undermined everything he had told us
before hand because it was very difficult for students to learn the brand new topics when the
teacher has never properly taught it. Mr. Lewis, although a nice man, was an appalling instructor
because of the lack of engagement he showed his class.
It is never only the teachers or students fault that a pupil fails a class. To illustrate, the
lack of energy and passion that my biology teacher put into his class caused me to set aside doing
my homework and studying for quizzes and tests in that class. The monotone voice and sluggish
body language Mr. Lewis taught his lectures with made the students believe that he did not want
to be there at all. This negative attitude that I had towards biology class was a huge detriment to
the rest of my high school career and maybe even onwards. In fact, going into high school I
always had a passion for biology. The way the human body worked fascinated me, and all of that
fascination was lost after having to go through one year of biology with Mr. Lewis. It was not

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until my senior year of high school when I decided to give this subject another chance and take
AP Biology. My passion was rekindled because of the new engaged and informative teacher. As
opposed to Mr. Lewis, my AP teacher, Mr. Ryan, was actually an expert in the field of study and
allowed the students to gain a true perspective on biology and learn material outside of what was
presented on the PowerPoint slide. He did this by making class interactive and allowing our
minds to really comprehend the material as opposed to just memorizing it. Mr. Ryan taught the
class with passion when he would incorporate real life examples related to the topics in order to
truly appreciate biology and the impact that it has on our daily lives. For example, his style of
teaching was different from that of Mr. Lewis because instead of just speaking information at his
class, Mr. Ryan would have the students create projects and lectures to teach the peers in the
class. This method of allowing the students to help each other after the lecture proved to be
extremely efficient. This renewal of a passion made me pursue a bioengineering major in
college. I do not believe this would have been possible if I didnt force myself to give biology
another chance. A high school teachers job is to jumpstart an interest in that topic so that the
student knows what he or she wants to pursue later on. If my freshman year biology instructor
was a more effective teacher, there could have been many more biology or bioengineering
majors graduating from my high school. The way I look at it is that a portion of the class was
forbidden to take biology as the teacher made the class a joke.
When relating my biology teacher to school systems in general, I learned that teachers
like Mr. Lewis may be the issue with Americas failing school systems. The negligence to teach
could be why students are failing out of school and turn to drugs and crime in place of
homework. In Can Teachers Alone Overcome Poverty? Steven Brill Thinks So by Dana
Goldstein, Goldstein argues that teachers alone cannot revive a failing school system. On the

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other hand, Steven Brills argument claims that effective teaching can allow students to rise
above the problems raised by poverty. Goldstein puts down Brills argument as she says, Most
pernicious is Brills repeated claim that the effects of poverty can be not only mitigated but
completely beaten back by good teachers. A snowballing network of education reformers across
the countrywere producing data about how teaching counted more than anything else, Brill
writes in the books opening pages. Later, he devotes a chapter to economists Thomas Kane and
Douglas Staiger, whose work on value-added teacher evaluation has powerfully influenced Bill
Gatess education philanthropy. It wasnt that poverty or other factors didnt affect student
performance, Brill summarizes. Rather, it was that teacher effectiveness could overcome those
disadvantages. (Goldstein 4). In other words, Goldstein argues that Brills statements are
invalid because outside factors like family, income, nutrition, and health affect a childs
education more than the effect of a teacher does. My experience with Mr. Lewis has taught me to
have a stance that is in between those of Goldsteins and Brills. I believe that a good teacher has
the ability provoke an interest within the student which can, in turn, allow the student to put forth
as much effort as possible in order to do well in school. If my freshman year biology teacher was
put into a school where income and outside problems played a huge role in the performance of
the students, the results would be disastrous. Mr. Lewis is a teacher that belongs in a rubber
room so that the students can receive a proper education in biology with an effective teacher. If
every teacher was like my AP biology teacher, Mr. Ryan, I would presume the education system
in America would be greatly improved because of an increased interest that students would have
in class.
A failing student is typically the result of a lack of effort or responsibility. However, there
are many cases where a failure is the result of a poor teacher that refuses to educate the class.

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Although I never failed my freshman biology class, Mr. Lewis made me close to it. An
unacceptable instructor is one who neglects to motivate and teach the students new information
that can spark a hidden passion. This disinterest to train the pupils is a part of the reason that
Americas school system is failing today.

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Works Cited

Goldstein, Dana. "Can Teachers Alone Overcome Poverty? Steven Brill Thinks
So." The Nation [New York] n.d.: n. pag. Print.

Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum, 2000. Print.