Is it the teacher or student's fault?

For those of you who have not heard, there is a rather healthy lot of us who take 621. And in that healthy lot, we all are supposed to have English 100 student who we are supposed to tutor. Setting aside all political implications of “basic writer” and “tutoring”, I need to have a cathartic moment as new and personally jarring thoughts have come to mind in the wake of one of these tutoring sessions.

In multiple classes, we talk of “empowering” the student. Making the student “take hold and control” of their education. There have been theories thrown around of “liberating” the student. We want the student to be “master” and “direct” their education. I tend to agree with these. I want the student to be self-sufficient and capable of operating in the fields of discourse unaided and unbridled. In addition to these theories of student supremacy, the question has always been asked but never fully answered, “Where does the teacher fit in?” And we thus are the “empowerer”, “liberator”, “director”, or whatever type of “-er” you prefer. I don’t think I am the only one who feels this, in a way, alters the role of the teacher in the classroom from authority to companion of sorts. I am not saying all teachers adhere to this model, but it is certainly one we all have heard. I have now decided that this mode of thinking is escapist, delusional, and self-perpetuating to a near harmful level.

In this mode of thinking, when the student fails, the blame falls primarily on the students shoulders. The teacher is a companion offering opportunity which the student fails to grasp and take hold of. I understand that this may not be how anyone views it, but it certainly is the implication. In placing the blame on the student, we remove a decent size portion of the blame from ourselves. And this type of rhetoric is inherent in the discipline of teaching. “I don’t give grades, student earn them.” “All the other students understood the assignment, why not this one?” “I can’t help stupid.” There others we all can think of, but I feel you can get the gist of what I mean.

I know/understand/realize that there are several students we simply cannot get to; the ones who sit in the back of class flipping the bird for the full hour or the ones who come to a whole two class periods. But what I am primarily worried about is that the current line of thinking unintentionally removes the teacher from a certain level of blame. With shifting the role of the teacher from less of authority to the companion, we not only give the students power and responsibility, but we remove it from the teacher and decrease the amount of responsibility they have towards the class. So if the student fails, we absolve ourselves from blame. In the most exaggerated sense, it is a way to say, “It’s ok that the student didn’t learn to write. It’s not your fault.”