One of the biggest challenges I have faced in this classroom, where I am now writing this article, is having to find a way to balance my own needs with the needs of the reader. This same issue of balancing personal teaching style with the needs of students is seen in many classrooms today and has been the cause of many of the miscommunications between students and staff that I’ve discussed in my articles this year.

If you ask most students and even some parents and teachers how they view the current school system, you’ll get words like conformity, ineffective, and outdated. But why is this? Students, like me, are writing articles presenting issues with the current system. Teachers, similarly, discuss the effects the job has on their mental health with the high stress scrutiny they are constantly under. Both are trying, but still conflicts remain between the two groups.

A familiar example of this tension is a situation where students are not working as teachers expected in lessons. Teachers scream at students to “focus, just focus, it’s not that hard,” not realizing they are facing people with different neurotypes, for some of which it is not that simple. Students get triggered, then teachers are left frustrated, and the cycle just repeats. Unnecessary guilt obstructs any learning that would have been done on either side.

All of this begs the question, what is the ideal picture of school? What is the point?

One perspective on school is exposure to different perspectives, more so than the actual memorization of material. “I prefer to see how students use the information they find and learn. I would rather see discovery than memorization,” said Christopher Meyer, a history and psychology teacher at East. Especially at McCaskey, diversity provides a strong opportunity for learning, and with it a need for accessibility. “I do not pretend to understand other people’s lives but listen and learn from other people’s experiences,” continued Meyer, who is mindful of respect as a white man teaching a multicultural studies class.

Mistakes will always be made, and it is a teacher’s job to teach that mistakes, in any format, are key to learning. “My approach: first, teach kids that mistakes are part of the process. If you aren’t making big ones, you aren’t working at understanding.  Second, find ways to make it interesting. Use crazy pictures of yourself to make graphs, complete work with sidewalk chalk. Take the “seriousness” away and try to make it enjoyable,” said Eva Shore, a math teacher at East.

Accessibility forms itself when people are put in charge of their own learning while still being guided. Life is all about adapting, and so is teaching. “Some children need more background on a concept and some want only to ‘see’ how to apply the information. Teachers have to provide both, to different degrees for different kids,” said Shore. Things won’t always go as planned—adjustments will always need to be made for kids who need accommodations, such as for an illness or for absences—but that allows both the teacher and the student to learn together and to have fun doing it.

In short, solving the external conflict between students and teachers (and therefore making an accessible classroom for all parties) means solving the internal conflict within both. It is a teacher’s responsibility to set boundaries for themselves, such as due dates that give them enough time to grade assignments. It is a student’s responsibility to take initiative. In both parties, communication is necessary. Students must ask questions if confused and teachers must allow those questions and give feedback on expected mistakes students make.

As long as people allow them to, the skills to adapt and stand up for yourself will be learned in school and will stick with people for the rest of their lives. There will always be mistakes made, that is part of the process, but as long as people have developed the skill to learn from these mistakes, the entire school system will be consistently improving. Regardless of topic, teaching style, or learning style, school acts as a way to practice these skills before the application: the final exam of life.