New Blog Address

Hi everyone, I have moved my blog to www.edu-truth.com

I hope you will continue reading the site, and now that’s it has been moved over, I will resume updating it more frequently.  Thank you for reading, and feel free to comment on the new site.

If you have any questions or topics you’d like me to explore (or want to write a guest column), just let me know and we can work it out.

 

Teachers In a Bottle

When I first stood in front of a class of students with a planned lesson, it wasn’t high school students.  It was college ones.  It was in a class called “Microteaching” at Oregon State University, in which we got to plan lessons and then teach them to the other future teachers in the room.  They would each pretend to be students, and we would go through our lesson as the teacher.

It helps you get a feel for things, work out the kinks, see how things work in practice rather than just on paper.

How did I do?  I still remember this vividly.  I just stood there silent, unsure of where to begin.  I hadn’t planned it out well enough.  I didn’t have an opening.  Was it stage fright?  In front of eight other people?  Who knows.

Eventually, I worked it out, and with future practice sessions such as this, as well as lots of time observing other teachers and doing my own student teaching, I figured out how to structure and implement a lesson, a sequence, a unit, and a full year of curriculum.  I learned how to do it.

Three Wishes?
Why am I telling you this?

Because there’s a growing movement out there, full of misinformation and fantasy, that thinks we can find new teachers by rubbing bottles.

You’ve heard them say it.  They talk about “all those lousy teachers out there.”  The ones just there for the paycheck (as if no other professions have people like this too…).  The ones who read the newspaper in class. (Yes this is inexcusable, but how many actually do it?)

And then they go on to talk about accountability, about holding teachers to standards, and about eliminating seniority (which I personally don’t disagree with, as a sole factor).  You hear stories about whole schools being fired, or about half the staff being replaced.  This is presented as a good thing, even by President Obama when it happened in Rhode Island last year. (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/03/AR2010030303720.html)

Somewhere in the midst of all this, you’ll hear about the need for better teachers. Some demand  a “certified teacher” in every classroom.  The school I work at has this.  So we must be a great school, right?  Nope. We’re just like any other.  Great in some ways, struggling in others.  But mostly just working hard, trying to get our students along and help them learn.

Certifiable
Gail Collins of the New York Times recently wrote a column about this (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/12/opinion/12collins.html?_r=1&ref=gailcollins).  She describes how in Texas, the demand for a “certified” teacher in every class spawned a whole industry of various paths to certification.  Some of those paths take as little as a month.  (Now you see why I put “certified” in quotes, because that term, like any other edu-buzzword, is basically meaningless).

A month?

Does an airline pilot learn to fly in a month?  Does a SCUBA instructor take new divers down to the depths of the deep ocean after a month of training?  Does a police officer get his own car and head out on patrol after a month at the academy?  Does a dentist start grinding on teeth after a month in dentist school?
Then who, why, how and where in the world did anyone ever get the bombastically stupid idea that a teacher can “learn” how to teach well in just one month?

Collins quotes one purveyor of these “alternative” paths to certification denouncing the idea of requiring teachers to practice teaching in front of real classes–student teaching, in other words.  So, internships are a bad idea now.  Apprenticeship?  That’s bunk.  You should just know how to teach.  This guy’s rationale was that a teacher shouldn’t practice teaching with real students because the students “aren’t practice learning.”

So, if we’re to take this nut seriously (which I don’t), we’re now to believe that you can’t learn how to do something by practicing doing it.  His solution?  Go on field trips with students, and watch a bunch of videos.  Then, throw you in front of a class of your own.

Nothing is That Simple
Which brings me back to my opening account.  I needed my education program.  I needed the practice-teaching this guy denigrates.  I needed the time.  It took me months to get used to being in front of a class and delivering a lesson.  To learn all the various kinds of problems that arise.  Teaching is like juggling.  You’ve got students of all different backgrounds and learning styles and personalities.  You have their parents.  Then you have other teachers, the principal, the standards, and the expectations of a community.  You also need to know your subject, right?  And you have to handle all these fronts, and more, at the same time while staying polite, self-controlled, and focused on the most important priority–student learning.

Am I complaining?  Not at all.  This is the job.  This is what we sign up for.  This is what you have to be able to do.

And no one–no one!–can learn to do it well in a month.  With no practice and no mentorship.

Sorry.  But that’s impossible.

Who Ya Gonna Call?
And this has far greater implications that the little Texas looney tune.  When people like Arne Duncan high up in the federal government talk about the need to replace so many thousands of teachers, who of course are the sole reason for all these “failing” schools, if there is such a thing, few ever ask the following question:

Where you gonna get all the new teachers?

Knowing how hard it is to learn to do this job well, and knowing how, even with all that preparation, a large percentage of teachers quit within the first five years, where do Duncan and his ilk expect to find all these thousands of great new teachers every year?

Does he really believe there are enclaves full of people waiting to raise their hands to become teachers, if only there were more job openings?  We have openings at my school that go unfilled the entire school year!

Where are all these “qualified” teachers going to come from?

Are they lurking in the ivy-encrusted halls of Harvard and Yale, just dying to go work in schools but unwilling to because of the supposedly bad pay?  If money alone is the cause of someone not wanting to be a teacher, maybe they wouldn’t be a good one anyway.  Is that possible?  Why do so many leave within five years?  You think if we were paid more this number would decrease?  And just because someone goes to Harvard, does that mean they’ll be a better teacher than someone going to, say, Oregon State?

These are difficult questions, for sure, but how a person answers them reveals a lot about their presuppositions about education.  Being a good teacher has very little to do with what college you attend, or how subject smart you are.  Remember all those balls we have to juggle?  That requires a set of skills far beyond simple subject knowledge.  Subject knowledge is the easy part.  I had that down from my bachelors degree, before I even set foot in front of the intimidating class of eight fellow future teachers.

See, but the public obsesses over subject knowledge.  They think this is all there is to teaching.  They think someone who’s really good at math would be a good math teacher.  That’s why they probably think a four-week certification program might be possible.

It’s not.

And even if it were–where, I ask again, will you find the thousands and thousands of teachers you will need to replace all the terrible ones you think need to be fired?

You can’t just manufacture a hundred thousand great new teachers in five years.  Where are they going to come from?

Real Questions Worth Answering
So, in the continuing quest to help the public understand the truth about education, I hope this sheds some light on the topic of teacher quality, and how difficult that problem is.

I’m not attempting to solve it here, but I am trying to make it clear that this is not a job you can learn by watching videos.  And it’s not a job with people beating down doors to start working it.

If you want to improve education, you’re only going to get so far by trying to improve the teachers.  You’ll get a lot farther if you’ll start asking the much more uncomfortable questions.  Such as:

Why do teachers burn out within five years?  What really causes that?  Maybe we should interview teachers like this, and find out what led to their departures.  I bet the public, and people like Arne Duncan, would be shocked at some of the answers.  It would rock their worldviews.

Why are so many students so unprepared for school?  Even at kindergarten, I’ve been told, a teacher can already tell which students are unlikely to graduate high school.  Even at kindergarten!  When I heard that, I understood it, and realized once again that the problem with education lies not with the teacher.

Why do the people running the education bureaucracies continue to fixate on teachers?  And if they were right about this problem, why don’t their solutions ever work?  For instance, why don’t the curricula they throw at us work as well as they tell us it should?  Why do students continue to struggle?

Why aren’t teachers ever involved in the solutions to school problems?  It is so rare that we get asked–and if we are, that our answers are taken as the most informed ones–about how to address the various problems that arise.  This applies to curriculum, scheduling, course sequencing, student behavior and discipline, what to teach, what not to teach, and on and on.  So much is dictated to us by people who have never taught, and then we get blamed when it doesn’t work.

So, consider some of these questions.  Because if you keep digging down far enough, maybe you’ll find that underground civilization filled with prospective teachers who’ve been honing their craft for millennia down with the spiders, earthworms, and the ever-shifting mantle.

If not, you might want to look somewhere else for answers.  Because there is no hidden supply of expert teachers waiting at the end of the rainbow.  Most of the best teachers are already known.  And you know what they’re doing?

They’re teaching.

 

I NEED a C! (part 4)

(We now conclude the exploration into the student mindset that declares “I Need a C! with three weeks left in the semester)

Immediately, Sir
But this still is not enough.  Self-esteem gives students a false sense of accomplishment.  The lack of awareness about the meaning of work and the purpose of school and life can leave students clueless about why we do what we do.  But that doesn’t explain how this could happen on such a massive scale.  What’s different today, compared to previous decades?

I argue that the third influence that produces the delusional achiever has arisen because of the direction of our culture.

Today, students have no sense of the value of time.  Technologically, things are changing so fast that the difference between now and 2000 is greater than the changes that took place between 1950 and 2000.  The onset of the internet was only the beginning.  Really, it’s that combined with the inundation of cell phones, iEverythings, and all the other forms of technology that rise and fall according to the whims of the fickle (myspace? five years ago it was king, now it’s already an anachronism).

Try explaining to a student what life was like before the internet.  Before cell phones and texting.  That we actually had to call somewhere to get directions.  That we had to actually wait a few hours before hearing about something good or bad happening to a friend or family member.

We encounter this all the time in class.  It’s absolutely infuriating.  Some kid is texting, and the teacher asks them to give up the phone.  “But, it was important.”

Students today have no sense of what ‘important’ actually means.  They think ‘important’ is when my mom gets here to pick me up.

When I was a kid (and no, I’m not that old…), I had to wait after school to be picked up by my mom.  She got there when she got there.  And I somehow survived it all without a cell phone for her to text me exactly where she was, why she was late, and about when she expected to be there. I just had to wait.  Without knowing the reason.  The horror!  The horror!

Not only has technology sped things up, but it has lowered the quality of just about everything other than itself.  Sure, we can start a world war with an iPhone, but have you looked at the state of the film industry these days?  When I was a kid (again, not so long ago…trust me), going to movies was a big deal.  We looked forward to great movies, and appreciated them.  When I was in high school, nShawshank Redemption came out.  And I loved it.  So did a bunch of other people my age.  Today, if a movie like this comes out at all (which is much more rare), who goes to see it?  The 30-and-up crowd.  And this doesn’t just apply to inspirational dramas.  I ask my students at the start of the year what movie they liked over the summer.  Many haven’t seen any.  Some mention the worst Hollywood has served up.  The ability to appreciate a great film has diminished.

Same with music.  Musical quality is almost based solely on emotion these days.  Move me, inspire me, relate to me.  And whatever you do, don’t bore me.  The ability to appreciate the nuances of different types of music is lost on students raised on the electronic shouting that passes for song these days.

Movies need to be loud, quick, immediate.  Something needs to happen!  Otherwise it’s boring.  We don’t have time for introspection, or character.  With Youtube, you have people who know nothing about making movies releasing their little time-wasters, and much of the young generation is more interested in that than actual stories with real characters and interesting conflicts and problems to be overcome.

I could go on about this for a long time.  But what’s the point?  What does this have to do with our subject?  It’s pretty simple, actually.

Learning.  Takes.  Time.

The education reformers can force all the colorful new curriculums down our retching throats they want, but they can’t escape the universal axiom that anything worth learning takes time.

No one becomes a musical genius in one day.  No one masters free-throw shooting in an hour.  No one learns to make a presentation the first time they do it.  And no one–no one–learns to read the first time the pick up a book.

So a student used to having their food packaged (who has patience to cook?), their entertainment spoon-fed at the touch of a button (and again, at far lower quality than a feature film…remember those little mini-TVs back in the 80′s?  Those tiny screens…how silly.  How silly indeed…), and their senses stimulated at their whims on the internet is going to struggle mightily when faced with the prospect of learning something that takes months to master.

Why is math so hard for so many students?  Because mastery of this subject takes years.  Years!  In fact, most math teachers despise the new curriculums that get forced on them these days.  Why?  One reason is because these curriculums try to turn every single topic into a path of discovery.  I’m all for inquiry and inductive teaching–I use it all the time.  But there are certain things that can’t be ‘discovered’ so easily.

It took Kepler years, decades really, to determine the planetary orbits were actually ellipses and not the assumed circles.  It took Galileo years, decades really, to amass sufficient evidence to counter the popular notion that the Earth was at the center of the universe.  What about Einstein?  Or Pythagorus?  Or Thoreau for that matter?  Or any of the great writers, poets, economists, inventors, or theologians?  How long did it take these people to discover the things they did?

And we expect our students to do it in a structured 20-minute lesson?

Really?

Learning.  Takes.  Time.

There is no escaping this.  And time requires commitment, determination, curiosity, and most of all, the proper perspective.  It takes a right sense of priorities.  Learning this is more important than texting my friends every ten seconds.  So I’ll spend some time each day getting my work done.  I’ll use my class time, because I understand that’s what it’s for.  I understand the balance between work and play.

The delusional achiever, on the other hand, isn’t even aware that there’s a difference.  They don’t see it as work and play.  They see it as school and life.  They have lost sense of the demands of life in the face of a coddling culture that caters to their current whims.  In other words, they live in a world that favors immaturity and works very hard to imprison them there.

Imagine a generation speckled with people living in perpetual immaturity, totally oblivious to the demands of adulthood that have been with us for centuries.  People who think they are old enough to have sexual relationships but are afraid to look for a job and move out of the house.

A Way Out?
So how do we address this cultural diagnosis?

Sad to say, I’m of the opinion we may already be past the point of no return.  On a massive scale, can this tide be stemmed, when our feelings can be tickled so quickly at touch of a button and the click of a mouse?  Who’s going to stand in the way?  Can even the most dedicated parent stand against this tide?  Even at the risk of seeming “irrelevant” or “out of touch?”

Who wants to commit to hours, days, and weeks of work for something with an intangible, far-away benefit such as education, when I can arouse my feelings in ten seconds with my cell phone?  And I can do it a hundred times a day.

This is different from the “when I was a kid” lectures we received about the 30′s and 40′s (or 50′s and 60′s even).  We have passed the point, in my estimation, where technological advancement has ceased to improve the world as much as it harms it.  That separates this generation from all the others.  Before, the challenges were first human, and then material.

But today, we first must battle the device before we can access the humanity of the student.  And unless the student wants something great of their own humanity, and understands how to get it, our efforts will at best produce adults who go to college so they can work at Walmart.

 

I NEED a C! (part 3)

(Continuing the series, we now examine three primary sources of the student perspective I’ve labeled “delusional achievers”–students who exhibit a disconnect between success and the work required to achieve it. The first two are in this post, the final one will be in part 4)

Is it Self-Esteem?
Many people have pilloried the self-esteem mania in our culture.  We want our kids to feel good about themselves.  One of the few substantive insights in Waiting for Superman was the part where we learned the American students thought they were doing better than they actually were. This was the only area where they ranked at the top of the world–feelings.

Unfortunately, feelings don’t earn a paycheck.

I’ve heard similar results from other sources.  One study reported that American students thought they had done really well on a math test, but in fact hadn’t done any better than students in other countries.

I would say the self-esteem movement is a primary culprit in the creation of the delusional achiever.  Students have been conditioned to believe they are great, excellent, smart, and have done a great job, even when the work sucks.  It’s too discouraging to criticize, of course, so we can only give praise.  This assumes criticism is the only alternative to praise.

Exhortation, however, is the preferred third option, where acceptance meets motivation.  Yes, you have done well, says the exhorter, but what about trying this?  No, you didn’t quite get it, but think about it this way.  Do some more practice.  What would happen if you did this? Where can you look to learn more about that?  Exhortation keeps self-esteem in its place.

But it has to be more than just self-esteem.  I know this because some of my SINOs did not grow up in this country, and therefore were not subjected to the self-esteem propaganda.  Yet some of them exhibit the same traits I’ve described.

It’s Your Job
Thus, I find that a second cause of the delusional achiever is disengaged parents.  Not disengaged from their children, necessarily, but disengaged from the educational process.  There are people who drop their children off and think it’s the school’s job to do education.  It’s all on the teacher, the principal, and the system.  They do not fulfill their own vital role of inculcating a practical awareness of the need for continual learning in their children.  They do not explain to their kids how success happens (they may not know), or teach them the value of hard work.

They also may inadvertently de-value certain aspects of school.  For example, in our culture, it’s acceptable in a lot of homes to be bad at math.  To not be able to read is almost universally unacceptable.  But lots of people can’t do math.  “Oh well, I just don’t get it.”  This of course is bunk.  Anyone can do math.  It just takes some people more work than others.  But in a home where the value of work is fostered from an early age, that student will do the work.  I’ve had students work really hard for a C in math, and others hardly work at all and earn a B because they just get it and can ace all the tests.  But who is “learning” more?  And who will benefit from their efforts five years from now?  (Hint: It’s not the lazy one)

The absence of these traits in the home can produce children who do things because their teachers say to do them, but don’t internalize anything.  They have no framework in which to process the purpose of school.  For them, there is a dichotomy between real life and school life.  When I come to school, I have to have books, do notes, act responsible (when I feel like it), and fill out worksheets.  When I go home, I get to eat, play video games, hang out with friends, or waste time on the internet (more on that in the series finale).

But none of it has a purpose.  There’s no sense of why we’re doing all this.  It’s just what we have to do.  There’s a lack of independent reasoning.  Of initiative, of curiosity.  And I don’t think there’s an easy solution to this.  And I hope this doesn’t sound like another ‘blame the parents’ rant.  I’m not casting blame, just conveying a perspective that does not maximize educational opportunities, and that a lot of people have in a measure.  After all, if the parent grew up thinking this way, ignorant of the true value and purpose and process of education, why would their children be any different?

(Tune in to part 4 soon for the 3rd cause of the delusional achiever–technology’s downside)

 

Updated About Author

I have updated and expanded my personal page.

Formerly called “About the Author,” I have re-titled it “Author Bio and Purpose,” and I go into greater detail about why I’m writing this blog, and my qualifications for doing so.

It’s at the top of the page.