Editorial: Students Need a Voice

“She will just fail me. She don’t care,” was an immediate reaction of a student one recent afternoon when asked about her “worst class” and why she disliked the teacher. This student, slowly making her way to the nurse, shared her frustration emotionally, as if no one had asked her about her educational experiences previously. “Sometimes I wonder why I come here.”

T.C. Williams is a collection of students of all backgrounds. From the privileged and wealthy who arrive to school in their BMWs to those who leave school in the afternoon knowing their next meal will be at school the next morning, T.C. serves students from an array of backgrounds. Or does it? Is ‘serves’ the correct term?

The student I encountered in the hallways disagreed with the statement that TC Williams and Alexandria City Public Schools serve all equally. “No one listens to us students,” she said so loudly that hall monitors began to converge on our conversation.

Despite our differences, I can relate to the student I met that afternoon. Students have no voice in their school. There is no forum for student input and there are hundreds, if not thousands of students just like my hallway-loitering friend who have never been listened to.

Students need a voice at T.C. If there is a teacher that needs help or input to improve their performance, students should be able to provide it in a constructive manner. A personal example of how instrumental this could be in the improvement of T.C. Williams lies in a recent personal experience I had here.

For the entire first semester of one of my classes, things were going horribly. The teacher was confusing, off-topic, unproductive, and simply did not cover any material. And the fact was, every student in the class knew it.

“It was an incredible mess,” said one of my fellow students in the class bluntly.

After a an entire semester of this class, I, along with the majority of the rest of the class, was growing weary and began to not really care about the class. Here I was, a pretty good student discussing climate change and the significance of the Tea Pot Dome scandal in my other classes, and I was barely scraping by in this class. I consistently showed up to school without any homework for that class done.

Then one day, the teacher asked if we had any student suggestions to help him improve the quality of his instruction. There was a shared sense of elation throughout the class with this announcement, as many of my fellow students had previously felt uncomfortable with the idea of telling the teacher that he wasn’t measuring up.

But after asking for suggestions from the students, the teacher received generally detailed, thoughtful suggestions from disillusioned students throughout the class.

After reading the suggestions, the teacher seemed shocked. The shortcomings every student in the class had known all year had been a mystery to the teacher. Since the student input however, the class has improved significantly. The curriculum began to be covered and the class suddenly felt slightly more serious. Though today it remains far from an excellent class for college-bound students, improvements were made when the students were asked what they thought on an issue.