No One Needs Teachers Anymore (2024)
preslav.me
preslav.me
Have you ever been, say, on a date, or visiting a relative, and they ask you what your job as a computer programmer is like? How could you possibly explain it to them? I've had jobs which were so technically complicated my boss didn't know what I was doing for a living.
When learning how to teach, you find out very quickly that no matter how intellectual your former job was, you don't know jack about teaching. Once, I watched my mentor teach a lesson, and afterwords every student in the class could easily do the homework. I taught the next class, and NONE of the students could do the homework ;-) They were kind in their feedback, but I had left them so confused that they didn't even know where to begin.
Teaching is a craft, which, like computer programming, takes years to learn, and a lifetime to hone to perfection.
If all you do is scroll through feeds, which have algorithms which carefully serve up to you articles like this one--articles which stroke your ego into thinking that you are one of the smart ones and the only reason you are not living your dream life is that you are mired down by stupid people and stupid institutions, well...you are not qualified to weigh in on whether we need teachers or not. Or anything else for that matter.
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Let me point out another fallacy the author is making: he says that we should "listen to the market" because it is telling us that we need less teachers. But the "market" for teachers is nothing at all like the market for butter. Salaries are not set by supply and demand, they are set by politicians and policy makers, and how much the local citizenry is willing to pay in property taxes. Salaries for teachers bear absolutely no relationship to the amount of value they create. It is ludicrous to think that "the market" is telling us that we don't need teachers.
Please, don't get me wrong - the right role model is becoming increasingly more important than ever, especially, now that everyone is essentially talkign to a piece of software that conjures up words statistically.
What you gave as an example is illustrating this better than anything else - anyone could just spit out the course material, and students may still not get a word of what has been said. And then, there are others, like a late professor of mine, who would just ramble on the most seemingly random things in class, and would still make people show up, share their opion, defend their theses, and show that they've grasped the subject matter.
Yes, teaching is a skill - but one that no longer has to do with reciting over the course material.
// Yes, teaching is a skill - but one that no longer has to do with reciting over the course material. //
..it never had anything whatsoever to do with just reciting over the course material.
...
I don't disagree because your article lacked plausibility to the general public, or that it was rhetorically ineffective, or anything like that. Like I said, I would have wholeheartedly gone along with your article before I started teaching. I might even have wholeheartedly gone along with it if I had only taught at, say, community college, teaching adults.
Just like I was full of good advice on how to have great marriage before I got married. We disagree because we've had different experiences.
// but believe it or not, I have also taught people. //
No doubt you have a store of experiences which nobody else has had, and have seen points of view we have not. Please write about those, something you are actually more than an expert on, something which nobody else could say. This "we don't need traditional education" schtick is old and stale. Don't forget Peter Thiel actually ran an experiment over 10 years ago, paying kids $100,000 to not go to college. Give us something new and fresh.