You think you know what teachers do. Right? Wrong.
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I've always thought that our graduate students should be made to take acting lessons, because there's an element of second-order persuasion you have to do in a classroom that's hard to learn and difficult to describe but that shares some similarity to acting -- or maybe just rhetoric in the very ancient sense.
You can't just purvey information and mumble something about its importance. Ultimately, you're modeling what it means to be an intellectual -- trying to give your students certain habits of mind by showing them how those habits play out in practice.
We also spend an enormous amount of time trying to devise strategies for dealing with students who just don't get it (and you quickly learn -- or better learn -- that this might be the most important part of the job).
I could say more, of course. It's a very subtle set of skills -- more art than science, as they say. It's hard to do it at the college level, and I think it's far, far harder to do it at the elementary level, where the stakes are much higher.
Also, what's with the condescending sneery tone?
The discussions end up being so worthless that I now flag every education related post on HN because it's just not worth the time here.
Is the university system (excepting "third level institutions" apparently) just a scam perpetrated against its students?
I think it's debatable whether great teaching or access to great minds is more important, and probably varies depending on the student and what stage of their education they're in. But either way, for the access to work at all, it has to really be access; receiving a dry lecture on introductory material from a great mind doesn't really give you access to that mind. But sure, the best students will seek out projects that give them real access, and those experiences will probably be incredibly valuable.
There is definitely a huge value in the university system just putting you in the right place to learn surrounded by the right people to learn from, but I hate the disrespect for actual teaching that I sometimes see when people talk about universities.
The other main mental work is, as you said, devising strategies for explaining material to students who don't understand it the first time. It requires patience and self-control (if you betray any sense of frustration, you will lose them) on top of the difficult task of figuring out what their exact misunderstanding is.
And I agree, it's harder to do the more basic the material gets. Explaining advanced systems concepts to computer science juniors was much, much easier than explaining basic programming concepts to people with no prior programming experience. The more knowledge and concepts you have in common with your students, the easier it is to appeal to things you know they already understand - and you have the advantage of being able to use some of your areas jargon.
On the flip side, I've read research that says graduate degrees in education don't improve teaching results for high school. (Graduate degrees in the subject matter do.)
An open question on teaching... Do any liberal arts colleges have formal teaching improvement programs? If they're not trying to research and product Phds, perhaps their approach to the profession is different?
I mention it to people and always hear 'well maybe she is different but I've seen lots of teachers and they just do it for the holiday'. As if everyone is equally dedicated in any profession. As if the guy that sits at his computer 'working' for hours a day is a more efficient or effective worker just because he does more hours. As if outside observers of any industry can really spot who is producing vs who is not.
I honestly hope she will leave teaching. Part of her extreme work schedule is self inflicted (she genuinely values her students and wants to hold them to a high standard, which creates a lot of work for her). However, I can't see anyone doing as much as she does for an entire career.
Sorry, I cant take this seriously. The teachers unions are one of the most politically powerful entities in the US. They can make a candidate, and they can break a candidate. They can pass and tank ballot measures...even ones completely unrelated to their jobs. They can protect drunkards and criminals from getting prosecuted, let alone fired. They are fine forcing their agenda down our throats, but they cant take a little pushback?
But I can still take seriously the notion that people assume they understand something just because they've observed it from the outside.
The agenda of ensuring children have access to life-enhancing educational opportunities?
>They can make a candidate, and they can break a candidate. //
You mean a political candidate? You really think that the combined voice of a group of teachers can do that against the weight of media conglomerates, other unions, rich lobbyists and other political groups? Any examples?
Presumably under your assertion the education system in the USA is the one that the teaching unions have won by political action and the politicos and business people are looking on powerless to influence it?
I'm in the UK, I've known quite a lot of teachers one way or another and observed the actions of teachers union workers and unionised teachers. Here - and limited to my anecdotal data - whilst the union supports the teachers it is supporting them in their primary function as teachers for children. The goal of the union is to enable the teachers to perform as professional teachers rather than merely supporting them as wage earners. Activities of the teachers unions I know of include - as you surmise - the basic functions of support for employees but much of the focus is on sharing best practice, lobbying for the best possible educational system, supporting teachers in other countries and similar.
My overriding experience is that teachers are concerned with enabling children's education.
Analogising, it's like the IoP (http://iop.org) is for physicists and supports them in their careers but it does that in order to advance physics, because that is the primary focus of physicists.
He was having trouble with bullies and the school did nothing about it. They pretty much gave up on teaching spelling completely. We found out that our school is a "magnet school" for behaviorally disturbed "special" kids from other districts so kids in the rich school and kids in the poor school where communities complain a lot get to enjoy a safer environment because the rural school gets all the psychotic kids.
I gave up on them when the superintendent gave a "town hall" where he told the mother of a "special" kid that he was a partner in his education and he told me I should just butt out because he was the expert and there's a new paradigm and homework is obsolete and because I don't have a phone number to call to get Albany breathing down his neck.
F the teacher's unions.
Ultimately teachers as a professional class deserve a union. We see in other places and countries that the unions do not serve as an impediment to a quality public education, so we have to ask ourselves what is really going on with current systems and unions that make the situation so shitty (esp. in New York state).
For instance, they opened a charter school in our district which seems to be an honest effort to provide a safe (bullying free) environment for the high school and there have been two people associated with the union who have just been consistently hateful trying to shut it down.
Did you steal this from one of their pamphlets?
Are you implying that teachers unions only agenda is to help students and not self preservation?
Yes, the combined voice of a group of teachers can make a significant difference. Why? Well, they're affiliated with other unions, to start. Further, as most are state employees, their ability to strike impacts public opinion regarding state government.
They've also got a lot of power because they are with your kids 6-7 hours a day.
They understand how political they need to be to keep the status quo, and are (at least in my and everyone else I know's experience) more focused on supporting the existing system for long term members than creating a better system for learning.
People and students respect teachers as a whole, what they do not respect and I bet many in the profession do as well is the inability to remove those who are not good teachers.
It is not a position one walks into without many upon many stories about what your really getting into. My Aunt retired from the trade, her aggravations in order that I remember are, Administrative people(usually political appointees), other teachers, and parents. There were a few others but mostly the tripe coming down from non teachers within the system seemed to be what we heard of.
That and the personal money she spent to have supplies because it was more important to blow money on marble floors than supplied, or having someone's wife/kid/friend in some advisement position that did nothing but occupy space.
Guess what, I can say the same of some other service professions, having a neighbor who does night shifts as a nurse and hearing the horror stories of what she puts up with is enough to let me know some jobs come with extra mental if not physical stress.
I think in the end we are all more than willing to heap accolades on good teachers. Its a system where the kids aren't first that irritates
Because this post makes the claim that all teachers should be looked up to.
My entire family consists of teachers. They know who the bad teachers are. You've got Paulina Pensioner who just shows old VHS tapes as a history cirriculum. Or Carl the Coach that knows, just knows there's only one way to solve this pre-algebra problem.
And some teachers work hard. They bust their ass and bring grading home and lesson plan on the weekends.
But they aren't the problem. There's a bad system that keeps bad teachers in at the expense of the good.
So they design tests and standards as a way to "firewall" these bad teachers in, to turn their poor performance into mediocre performance. And there's a cost, because it removes the creativity and initiative from the good teachers.
I understand that the goal of the author is to criticize common core, but while the conclusion is sound (Core is garbage) the reasoning is not.
And the new standards being developed? One of the main proponents is the Council of Chief State School officers. Many (probably most) came from the teaching profession. Who know what it's like to be a teacher.
The author gives us some feel-good patronization about how teachers have it so hard and we have no right to impose standards upon them. But these standards exist because we can't fire bad teachers.
You like it when there's wide, sweeping cirriculum on the Federal level... when you agree with it.
But what happens if there's enough political pressure (it is a midterm election cycle) to add ID into the cirriculum? Or maybe they look at feel-good math that is just teaching to the test [1]?
And that's the issue. Centralized power is great when you agree with it, but terrible in the wrong hands.
[1] http://www.momdot.com/common-core-is-making-me-stupider/
Onto that article, however:
1. I never use an academic degree as an indicator of intellectual capacity. I find that some people are so objective-driven that they zoom right past the point and straight to rageville when they don't understand something.
2. A simple Google search on front-end estimation would have helped this mom realize that the example given on the sheet is incorrect. I will concede that an effective teacher would have realized that the example given is incorrect and would have corrected it.
(In front end estimation, you round the leftmost digit, so the example should actually be 400 + 300, not 300 + 200). IMHO 700 is actually a decent estimate for 645, so I don't think there's a problem with the math itself. It's not really feel-good math, but I think some people take for granted that estimation is not an innate ability.
Now, it becomes another discussion altogether when the teacher is so horrible that they refuse to accept that the example is wrong. But, I don't think I've seen evidence of that, so I won't accuse anyone of anything.
EDIT: I just read some of the comments in that article, and it looks like some districts teach front-end estimation with truncation rather than rounding, in which case 300 + 200 = 500 would be correct.
Here are a few more things to note: the parents here assume that estimation and rounding are the same thing. That in itself isn't true.
More importantly, though, look at the goal of the estimation -- to see if the actual answer, 645, is reasonable. That's not the same thing as asking if 500 is a reasonable estimate of 645. I think the point of this exercise is for kids to say "ok, if I add these two numbers together, I expect to get a 3-digit number somewhere in the ballpark of 500." That is to say: if I add 354 and 291, I shouldn't expect to get 20000 or 7 or 81 or 9750. It's just a simple way of checking your work using a quick, easy method that you can do in your head. Again, I find the value in this -- adding "common sense" to the curriculum is definitely something I can get behind, but I understand that parents who aren't used to "common sense on paper" will struggle.
No system is going to perfect the way teaching works, and it's obvious why when you look at the teachers themselves. They have wildly varying educational background, cultural background, social skills. Different motivations. Different methods. Of course some schools are better than others, because a variety of factors based on region and executive management changes the way students and teachers are sourced, to say nothing of prescribed curriculum and funded school resources.
So when people talk about schools, or teachers, or education in general in the USA like it's one big blob, I know it's a huge crock of shit. It's highly variable all over the country and even within the same local region.
The one thing that is fairly consistent, though, is the passion of the teachers. Most of them teach because they really want to teach. But there are myriad roadblocks to providing kids a good education - and that's in the cases where kids are open to actually learning. But I shouldn't address the elephant in the room of how the culture of parents who don't give a shit about their kids affects their education... then we couldn't blame an amorphous faceless blob of an organization.
Pedantic? Maybe. But to me this is a really childish way to make a point that could be better stated in a way that doesn't instantly, baselessly denigrate the reader, particularly when you're writing for a publication that banks on its credibility and reputation.
It seems like we have enough teachers at the wages we currently pay. Teachers are willing to go into the profession despite the low wages, probably because they want a satisfying job with good benefits. If we didn't have enough teachers...we'd have to raise wages. Supply and demand.
Maybe we'd get better teachers if we paid more?
It would also be a good introduction to the rationale behind secret ballots, and when it is actually appropriate to lie.
Still, I think there's several key differences:
1. Every school student would be rating their teachers, rather than just those that loved a professor, had an axe to grind, or were encouraged to by an entertaining personality.
2. The context would be "closed", with each teacher relative to their school, rather than open cross-institution competition with a front page of featured "rockstar" professors that make the rest seem inadequate.
3. The high schools officially sanctioning ratings with real results would give kids the feeling that they really do have a stake in the process, rather than simply being its victims.
4. High school is a more structured environment where the process details matter a lot more. So a teacher eg giving out an incomplete homework problem is actually a valid indictment rather than the stressed out nitpicking of a culture shocked freshman.
5. In college, there's a certain level of appreciation for the material that everyone should have but doesn't necessarily, causing them to get frustrated at a professor with a dry personality. Whereas with high school, the idea is that everybody should be learning a cursory understanding of all subjects.
6. In college, there's a huge variation in the level of courses. One specific professor I had for a seminar where it was basically his PhD research group and me, an undergrad who'd just started on a simultaneous master's. I learned a lot in that class, and really appreciated him. I then ended up in a grad-level "intro" course with him (which I knew was an utter waste going in, but it was the only thing that fit my schedule). Most of the students were rote-memorization paying-for-credential types, but his style certainly did them no favors either, and I can definitely see my recollection echoed in a few of his current reviews. I'd say that he's still a teaching asset, but not for intro lectures where most students aren't already committed to the subject.
Really, there just needs to be some extrinsic motivation/reward for teachers that are truly making a difference versus simply clock-punching, and that's not more top-down testing edicts that further shackle them. And sure, the immediate reaction shouldn't be to fire the lowest-reviewed, but neither should we pretend that they deserve similar compensation to the exceptional ones.
That's not to say that the people running schools and school districts don't want better teachers or to fire bad ones, but they (whether appointed or elected) aren't losing their jobs when that doesn't happen. And schools and districts aren't dissolved when that doesn't happen. Worst case scenario, they get rescued by the court system, which would be considered a bailout if it happened to a bank.
Just not very many good ones.
If you treat teaching as a lowest-bidder-wins "supply and demand" field, you may get passionate teachers who don't mind the pay, teachers who don't need to earn more for whatever reasons, probably some teachers who do find the benefits attractive, and all sorts of other people. But distilling this all to "people do it, so the wages are fine" misses just about all of the central points.
Consider that teaching isn't working in a bookstore or packing shipments for Amazon. It's not just a lot of work; it's a vitally important role in our world's future. I for one would not call "supply and demand" at the lowest possible rate a good way to treat such a profession.
Teaching (in US/Canada at least) requires at least a bachelor's degree and some specific teaching training. It's reasonable to think people aren't forced into it due to inexperience/low skill the same way fast food workers are. They must have some reason for choosing to be teachers - and you're right, I was making an assumption based on the people I know personally, which may not extend to the whole population. But for whatever reason, lots and lots of people, armed with the knowledge of what the wage is, are choosing to be teachers. Indeed, in some areas in my province we have a glut of teachers applying for a few openings.
>>>it's a vitally important role in our world's future. I for one would not call "supply and demand" at the lowest possible rate a good way to treat such a profession.
What is the appropriate way to decide pay? We have a spectrum of possible wages we could set, from the lowest amount possible to ensure enough adequate teachers to the highest amount we could possibly afford (assuming teachers are public employees, this is related to how much we're willing to pay in taxes). Where should we land on that scale and why?
Others say we need to raise wages because our teachers aren't good enough and we need higher pay to attract better teachers.
It's kind of an interesting example of how two groups with basically opposite viewpoints can end up supporting the same policies.
You think you know what factory workers do. Right? Wrong.
You think you know what farmers do. Right? Wrong.
You think you know what oil rig operators do. Right? Wrong.
You think you know what coffee shop owners do. Right? Wrong.
You think you know what lawn care specialists do. Right? Wrong.
You don't know what it's like owning a coffee shop.
I guess that makes "math teacher" the most misunderstood of all :)
But practically every day I hear some grand opinion of teaching from people who haven't taught a class, ever.
or we've been trained for 8 hours a day for 10 years by factory workers?
we've been working for oil rig operators for 8 hours a day for 10 years?
this looks a little like a straw man fallacy to me. go speak to someone who has worked in the oil field for years. oil field is a thing that has actually changed little over the years. you don't think they have a fair share of criticism and improvements to suggest?
coffee shop owners are probably the most dynamic of the bunch in your example. definitely much more dynamic than the teaching industry.
although we're actually in the process of a teaching revolution. a few top tier university are completely switching their study methodologies.
...or they could have just asked students 10 years ago, and asked them whether it makes sense to just read slides for them during the lecture. guess how many would have said yes.
This strikes me as a variant on the You don't know what's like! meme... as a rule of thumb, you should never say that to anybody. You have no idea what they've been through. Everyone you pass on the street has a story, and no matter how bad you think yours is, you've got no guarantee that they don't have one worse than you.
What this essay describes is not specially "teaching", it's life.
There is a very pertinent and legitimate point made in the article that -teaching- is not a respected industry.
It's not exactly a new comment!
What would be different if teaching were considered an industry? Would it be better?
How is that even remotely true? We are the victims of the system. We experience firsthand what they do or believe they do.
This is like saying you think you know what the TSA is doing. Right? Wrong. Of course we do, we're the ones being screened.
what we don't know is the logic and culture behind the decisions we see, but that doesn't take any right away to criticize it.
having been an overachiever in school, and early university, it's been a constant struggle. "oh but school is not actually made for people like you" you say. yeah, i know. how is that not a problem?
edit: don't get me wrong, i've had a few really good teachers. but they've been rather few. and no, i'm not just counting the teachers i liked as good.
Her complaints about office politics were what really surprised me. Even though I know every bureaucracy is universally crushing (well, maybe I grok better now after watching The Wire), it just seems that being a great, passionate teacher, supersedes any kind of office bullshit...such as the way principal communicates with you. But then again, if you can't get along with the person who runs the place, and you're put in a shitty classroom and have to share a teacher's officespace with 3 other novices...how could that not affect your teaching performance and job satisfaction?
One memory I still have from high school was one afternoon when I had to stay after school to give a presentation to the teachers on their regular Thursday-school-wide meeting. The meeting was in the cafeteria...and you know how lunch tables reflect a sort of social-hierarchy among kids? It was no different for the teachers...and even more surprising, the social lines seemed to fall along with how I, as a student, expected them to (attractive young teachers sat with the other young teachers; cool popular teachers could sit anywhere they want; the weird chemistry teacher sat in the corner). I mean, it's one thing to have perceptions as a kid, but I knew I was a petty kid...so it was a surprise to see that things were not much different in the adult world.
You cannot grok something just by watching it.
I know something about teaching by reading peer-reviewed studies which give evidence for better teaching methods, but are almost never adopted because the teaching systems and/or teachers are extremely conservative apparently all around the world.
In fact, I'd trust studies over teachers any day.
> All of you former students: you did not design
> curricula, plan lessons, attend faculty meetings,
> assess papers, design rubrics, create exams, prepare
> report cards, and monitor attendance. You did
> not tutor students, review rough drafts, and create
> study questions. You did not assign homework. You
> did not write daily lesson objectives on the
> white board. You did not write poems of the week
> on the white board. You did not write homework on
> the white board. You did not learn to write
> legibly on the white board while simultaneously
> making sure that none of your students threw a
> chair out a window.
1. Routine things that could be orders of magnitude more efficient (or even fully automated) given enough resources. In most cases, the resources needed would be fairly modest compared to the aggregate amount of effort teachers everywhere spend on them. Writing and grading elementary-level math tests, for example, shouldn't take any time at all given the right software.
2. Routine things that couldn't be automated well but could easily be done by some sort of entry-level assistant. Babysitting and discipline tasks don't require college degrees.
It strikes me that the economics of education are structured in a way that there is marginal impetus to improve efficiencies in the day-to-day work of teachers.
Yes, certain things COULD be automated... at considerable expense to student achievement. One big thing they have found - remove the personal feedback and connection to students --> lose the motivation of students. If a teacher (the same teacher) isn't interacting with a student consistently at nearly every step of the learning process, the feedback doesn't stick and the student loses motivation.
It would be interesting to looking to the basic research behind the feedback-achievement connection and stereotype threat to start.
Hope that helps you address some of the problems with the automate/delegate solutions so often thrown at teachers.
I seriously doubt that letting teachers automatically grade arithmetic tests will hurt student achievement. The fact is that many teachers do that sort of thing at home in what should be considered overtime hours. I would like to hear how automatic grading causes student achievement to suffer.
Likewise, I'm skeptical that it should be solely educators' responsibility to make sure chairs are not being thrown out windows. Letting teachers focus on educating and not babysitting seems like a good thing.
Speaking with friends who have become professors they are often jealous of this because they were never given any kind of 'teaching' classes. Their under grad wasn't in education and their teaching experience was trial by fire teaching assistant jobs of handling undergrad college courses.
All that said, I grow tired of the arguments and articles of 'don't speak unless you've walked a thousand miles' which I felt as I read this article. Not all knowledge and understanding must derive from doing something to have a valid opinion. We need to treat teachers better and find better pay structures but I've found no harsher critics of teachers and our schools than the teachers I went to college with as they filter into the systems and find tired and broken systems in which they get no voice until they have 'tenure'.
I don't know that this article is so much about "not speaking bad about teachers", but about having compassion for teachers and talking about education with a little more humility for the institution that helped produce you. I would say this article is more of the "teachers don't write articles about how to __________ better, so don't let _______________ers tell teachers how to teach better" variety.
And I totally agree that most young teachers are completely overwhelmed by the ridiculous systems in which they are forced to teach. My only hope is that some of these young, inspiring teachers remain in the profession long enough to change the broken system (which might take a LONG time!). The unions are broken; for the most part, teachers are not.
How many people who want to ban fracking actually understand fracking or precisely what the real risks are? How many people want to ban nuclear energy and don't understand any of the actual risks of modern nuclear power plants?
Politics suck for anyone that isn't a politician. Each industry must learn how to deal with that aspect. Writing an appeal to emotion on the Washington Post is not going to sway anyone. It just resonates with people already on their side and sounds like whining to people that aren't.
She makes it sound like anybody can hit up law school and come out making almost $200k. The vast majority of law graduates do not land jobs like that. The vast majority also have nearly crippling debt. The vast majority of the firms paying $160k+ are also in hyper expensive metro areas, whereas teachers can live comfortable lives in very rural towns (if they want to).
So I'm wrong that I think that I know what teachers do?
Do teachers teach you how to write intelligible headlines?
The obligatory disclosure here is to note that I am a classroom teacher by occupation. Over the years, I have been a teacher of Chinese to native speakers of English, a teacher of English to native speakers of Chinese (and other languages), and most recently a teacher of advanced elementary mathematics ("prealgebra" mathematics for third-, fourth-, and fifth-graders) for a nonprofit organization in my town. My HN user profile describes a bit more of my background.
Yep, classroom teaching is hard, no doubt about it. It has emotional rewards that some people value highly enough that it is a sought-after occupation, not a labor-shortage occupation, and that has the most to do with teacher compensation. Classroom teaching by teachers in private practice (like me) can also be poorly compensated (relative to the difficulty of doing the job well) because most clients have already paid for "free" lessons at the local public schools through their taxes, and will only pay out of pocket for a private lesson if it is truly superior in some way. "In modern times [as contrasted with ancient times] the diligence of public teachers is more or less corrupted by the circumstances which render them more or less independent of their success and reputation in their particular professions. Their salaries, too, put the private teacher, who would pretend to come into competition with them, in the same state with a merchant who attempts to trade without a bounty in competition with those who trade with a considerable one. . . . The privileges of graduation, besides, are in many countries . . . obtained only by attending the lectures of the public teachers. . . . The endowment of schools and colleges have, in this manner, not only corrupted the diligence of public teachers, but have rendered it almost impossible to have any good private ones." -- Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Book V, Part 3, Article II (1776)
A couple of the comments posted here before I arrived in the thread mention the particular skills that a teacher needs to have to teach a class effectively. There is much interesting research on this coming from the charter school movement, with some of the best how-to research coming from the Teach Like a Champion[3] project. I love learning about new ways to be a more effective teacher. Besides actual teacher skills, another grave problem in United States school is extremely poor teaching materials[4] and I devote hundreds of hours to curriculum planning and seeking out the best available textbooks[5] for the subjects I teach.
A good teacher is worth a lot.[6] We would not go far wrong by saying that a good teacher is literally worth his or her weight in gold. But the tricky issue in school administration is distinguishing effective from ineffective teachers. To ensure that school leaders have incentives to find and reward the best teachers, we need to make sure that learners (or the adult guardians of minor learners) have the power to shop, the power to refuse the services of an ineffective teacher and to seek out the services of an effective teacher. Teachers will gain both more pay and more respect if learners gain power to shop.
[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4728123
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3327847
[3] http://teachlikeachampion.com/
[4] http://open.salon.com/blog/annie_keeghan/2012/02/17/afraid_o...
[5] http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/Store/viewitem.php?item=p...
[6] http://hanushek.stanford.edu/publications/valuing-teachers-h...