30 Years in Education: Have We Forgotten What Teaching Is Really About?

Oct 20, 2026 · @Aimee Urdiales

I Thought I Knew This Job. Then I Went Back to the Classroom.

When I started teaching almost thirty years ago, I believed my job was pretty simple to describe, even if it was hard to do: help kids learn to think. Grades mattered. Paperwork existed. But the heart of the work was the student in front of me and what was happening in their head.

Since then, I've worn a lot of hats. Classroom teacher. Curriculum leader. Administrator. I've sat in the front office making decisions that landed on teachers' desks, and I honestly thought I understood the classroom from every angle.

Then I went back.

My second day back in the classroom, I handed out a primary source, a short excerpt from a letter written during the Revolutionary War, and asked one question: What was this person worried about? Before most of the class had finished the first paragraph, a hand went up. ‘Can you just tell me the answer?’ I asked him what he noticed in the first few lines. He shrugged and waited. He wasn’t being rude. He honestly expected me to hand it over. And it hit me that he didn’t see the document as something to figure out. He saw it as something standing between him and the right answer.

Being back has reminded me why I fell in love with this work. It has also made me face some uncomfortable truths about how much it has changed, and not always for the better. Some of what I'm seeing frustrates me. Some of it worries me. And some of it has me asking whether we've lost sight of what school is actually for.

I'm not writing this because I have all the answers. I'm writing it because I think we need to start asking better questions, and I'm including myself in that.

Somewhere Along the Way, the Grade Became the Point

Here's something I didn't want to admit: it is easier to give a student a grade than to actually teach them.

Entering a score takes thirty seconds. Figuring out why a child missed it, reteaching it a different way, and checking back next week takes time most of us don't have. So the gradebook stays updated, the deadlines get met, and the student who didn't understand fractions in September still doesn't understand them in December. On paper, everything looks fine.

We've gotten really good at documenting how students perform. I'm not sure we've gotten better at helping them improve.

And families feel this too. I've noticed a shift in the conversations I have with parents. There's a big difference between these two questions:

• "What does my child still need to understand, and how can we help at home?"

• "Why does my child have a B instead of an A?"

Both are fair questions. The trouble starts when the second one becomes the only one, when a grade turns into a negotiation instead of a reflection of what a child actually knows.

A few weeks into this school year, I had a conference with a parent about her son's social studies grade. He had a B. She had printed out the gradebook and highlighted every assignment that wasn't a perfect score. For twenty minutes, we went line by line. Could he redo this one? Could that quiz be dropped? Was there extra credit?

I kept waiting for a different question. Does he understand the causes of the war? Can he read a primary source and explain what it means? What can we do at home to help? It never came.

When she left, I sat there with the highlighted pages in front of me. I didn't feel angry. I felt a little sad. We had spent twenty minutes talking about her son, and not one minute talking about what he'd learned.

So let me say this gently, but let me say it: parents are part of this picture, too. More and more, I see families who are focused on the grade and far less on whether their child actually learned anything. A good grade brings relief. A low one brings an email. But a child who earned an A without understanding the material hasn't been helped. They've just been moved along.

I don't say that to blame anyone. I'm a big believer that parents love their kids and want what's best for them. The problem is that, for years, schools have sent the message that the grade is the learning. Report cards, portals, and honor rolls all point families toward the number. So of course that's where they look. We taught them to.

But when every adult around a child focuses only on the score, that child learns that school is about collecting points, not building skills. If we want families to value learning over grades, we have to help them see the difference, and that starts with us.

The Paperwork Nobody Reads (and My Part in It)

If you're a teacher, you already know this list by heart: the intervention logs, the data trackers, the lesson plan templates, the forms for the new initiative that got layered on top of last year's initiative. Every one of them takes time. Time that could have gone to planning, giving real feedback, or sitting next to a kid who's stuck.

And here's the part that stings. A lot of it never gets read.

I have to be honest with you: I've been part of that problem.

As an administrator, I asked teachers to fill out forms, submit documentation, and meet deadlines. Some of it was truly necessary. Some of it, if I'm being fair to myself and to them, was done because it had always been done, and I never stopped to ask what we were actually doing with it.

As an administrator, I require teachers to submit detailed weekly lesson plans every Monday: objectives, standards, activities, assessments, differentiation. I’ll be honest: some weeks I skimmed them. Some weeks I didn’t open them at all. Now I’m the one typing up my social studies plans on Sunday afternoon, formatting every box, knowing it will take longer to write the plan than to teach the lesson. And I can’t help but wonder how many of those plans I never read.

Now I'm the one filling those forms out at the end of a long day, and I keep coming back to a question I wish I'd asked more often from the front office: What are we doing with all of this?

If we ask teachers to document something, someone should read it, use it, or give feedback on it. If no one will, we should be brave enough to ask whether it needs to exist at all. Teachers shouldn't have to spend hours proving they're doing their jobs when they could be spending that time doing them.

"Just Tell Me the Answer"

If I had a dollar for every time I've heard that sentence since coming back, I could retire.

I see it every day. A hand goes up before the directions have been read. A student stops the second the answer isn't obvious. Someone asks, "Does this count?" instead of "What am I supposed to learn from this?" They want me to confirm they're right without explaining how they got there.

We were comparing the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution, and one student had a perfectly worded answer about the weaknesses of a weak central government. Almost too perfect. When I asked her to explain it in her own words, she hesitated and then said, “I don’t know. That’s just what it said when I looked it up.” She had the answer, but she couldn’t tell me what it meant.

I don't believe kids today are less capable than the kids I taught thirty years ago. But I do think many of them have had fewer chances to struggle. Answers are a search away. Adults, myself included, jump in quickly because watching a child be frustrated is hard. And somewhere in all that rescuing, we may have taught them that being stuck means something has gone wrong.

What concerns me even more is what I'm not hearing. Students don't question much anymore. I rarely hear "Why does it work that way?" or "How do we know that's true?" or "Is there another way to do this?" They want the one right answer so they can finish and move on.

In a world where AI can hand a student an answer in two seconds, the ability to question that answer, test it, and explain it has never mattered more. If our kids leave school knowing how to find an answer but not how to think about it, have we really prepared them?

So What Do We Do About It? It Still Starts With Us.

I know how easy it is to read all of this and feel defeated. We can't control the mandates handed down to us, every parent's priorities, or the habits students walk in with. But we can control what happens in our own rooms. And after all these years, I still believe that's where the real change happens.

We can shift the conversation from grades to growth. When a student asks, "What did I get?" we can follow up with, "What did you learn?" When we talk with parents, we can lead with what their child has mastered and what's next, not just the number on the report card. Parents aren't our opponents. Most of them want the same thing we do; they just need us to show them what real learning looks like.

We can let students struggle (a little). It's faster to give the answer. It's kinder, in the long run, to hand back the question. Ask them to explain their reasoning. Ask them to try another way. Let them sit in the confusion long enough to discover that confusion isn't failure; it's the beginning of learning.

We can make room for curiosity again. Celebrate the "why" questions, even the ones that take you off your lesson plan for five minutes. Ask students how they know something is true. Show them that a good question is worth as much as a right answer.

We can be honest about the work we create. This one is for those of us who lead, or have led. Every form, meeting, and initiative should be able to answer one question: How does this help a child learn? If we can't answer it, we owe it to our teachers to let it go. We can't ask teachers to be reflective if we're unwilling to reflect on our own leadership.

And we can remember why we started. I know this job can be exhausting. I know what it feels like to have more tasks than hours. But I also know that one teacher can change how a student sees learning. One conversation can help a child believe they're capable. One classroom can be the place where questions are welcome and mistakes are part of the process.

I don't want to go back to the way things were thirty years ago. The world has changed, and our students have changed with it. But the purpose of what we do hasn't. We're here to help kids learn, grow, and think for themselves.

We may not fix the whole system overnight. But we can refuse to let grades replace growth, paperwork replace purpose, or easy answers replace real thinking. One lesson, one conversation, one classroom at a time.

After almost thirty years, I still believe what we do matters. I'm still learning. And I'm still in.

Your Turn

What's one thing you could change in your classroom, your school, or your leadership tomorrow that would put learning back at the center?

Tell me in the comments. Sometimes real change starts with one small decision and one educator willing to make it.