Before I came to realize that my future resided in the classroom, I took two education classes in my senior year of college. I’d already completed most mandated courses and taken more than the required units of English. So to help fill out two remaining semesters, I joined some fellow English majors in their educational theory and adolescent psychology classes. They wanted to teach. I wanted a break from courses with multiple outside readings and research papers.
At the same time I took a job as a teacher (one class at noon) at a local Catholic parish high school. I’d worked my way through college at a variety of part-time and summer jobs, and the $25 a week the principal offered was on a par with my usual school-year employment. What could be easier than standing in front of high school seniors and letting them bask in the glow of my newly-acquired literary sophistication? They’d be duly impressed, and I’d be spared any heavy lifting. Besides, I was taking two education classes – easy peasy.
What I immediately discovered, however, was twofold: 1. I was not Socrates dispensing wisdom to knowledge-hungry acolytes, and 2. I had found a career. I knew in my bones that the disappointment and embarrassment I felt at the end of that first class paled in contrast to the possibilities the process offered. The prospect of someone with knowledge to offer standing in front of younger people in need of that knowledge intrigued me. Transferring that information looked simple enough from then outside, but all my initial assumptions about how to accomplish it were naive and ineffective.
After graduation I began a teaching career which spanned four decades, every year of which I learned more about the profession. At the beginning I still believed that education classes and teacher conferences imparted vital information. That’s what everyone in charge said. As a consequence, for the first five years or so I felt less than qualified to teach. All the buzz words and theories bandied about at in-services seemed erudite and scholarly enough, but I couldn’t find any real application to the day-to-day reality of my classes. I nodded and tried to appear as impressed as those around me, while I waited for a teacher-fraud swat team to kick in my classroom door and arrest me for impersonating an educator.
What I gradually learned to be the truth, though, was that all the “expert” speakers, how-to teach textbooks and additional education classes mandated by the state for permanent certification were window dressing. Teachers are born not made. A retired teacher friend, one whose worth can be measured by the only criterion that really counts – the respect and success of his students – once told a student teacher a startling truth. “If you’re looking for someone to tell you how to teach,” he said, “don’t ask me because I don’t know.” Those who can do teach, relying on instinct, intuition and a trial-and-error approach that works. It can’t be defined or taught, it simply is.
If you’re not suited for the job, you’re either going to choose another career or, as is too often the case, learn to game the system and rob students of a meaningful learning experience. The required courses, paperwork and red tape involved in primary and secondary teaching today are not only without merit, they also take away significant time from good teachers – time they need to research, to prepare and correct, as well as to devise real strategies for the classroom. It also erodes time for taking meaningful, class-content graduate courses.
If you are among the willfully misplaced in the teaching profession, however, a regulatory labyrinth of paperwork and red tape can provide you with credentialed cover for a bad career choice. Make sure that your State Department of Education Internet courses are up to date, submit state standards-laden lesson plans to your administrators on time, and stay awake during mind-numbing in-services, and no one, except perhaps your students, will question your authority.
If we discount the current model of teacher preparation, how can we make sure that students receive a proper education? There is a plethora of idealistic, bright and innovative college graduates who could energize the system by working within the existing infrastructure. Do you think that Bill Gates, Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg would have needed “certification” to infuse classes with the same success as their corporations? For that matter, how many older individuals would, except for the requirements, like to change careers and enrich the educational system with their experience and acquired wisdom? Provide such people a rigorous orientation program and assign them to a year-long apprenticeship with a veteran educator-mentor . If they fail to connect and grow as professionals, cut them loose after a probationary period.
Wash-outs might have been bright and innovative, but they would lack the disposition needed for education. That disposition is not a one-size-fits-all temperament. I’ve been blessed with a number of excellent teachers during my schooling, and none of them shared the exact same characteristics. Mrs. Murphy in first grade was a second mother; Sister Mercia in high school made me afraid to fail; and Dr. Rizzo in grad school enlisted me as a partner in literary investigation. What they did share, however, was a voluminous understanding of their material, a fervent desire to share it with others, a deep reservoir of patience, and a wry sense of humor. While they’d never hang out together in some theoretical time warp or tell the same type of jokes, each understood (and let their students know through their presentations) that the world is full of unmitigated absurdity.
That last point is essential, especially for students in high school and beyond. Beginning in adolescence students gradually begin to shift their attention to the bigger picture. They begin to ask about and seek answers to the purpose of their own existence in a larger world. What they encounter at this stage in their lives is not a logical, coherent and rational universe, however. Their resultant healthy skepticism and cynicism is often aimed at their elders, whom they assume are totally responsible for their newly-discovered failings of humanity.
When teachers subtly and obliquely acknowledge the incongruities and absurdities that have always been part of the human condition, they can generate credibility with students. For English teachers, a class discussion of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels is a good example. His satirical dissection of greedy politicians, unprincipled lawyers, unethical scientists and narcissistic celebrities resonates sharply with contemporary society. Current events classes taking up the unfathomable issue of American foreign aid to China is another example, as would be a discussion in biology class of the physiology of the Platypus Duck. When students see their teachers as kindred – albeit older – spirits who have experienced the same awakenings, they are more apt to listen to someone who values education as a means to understand and cope with such bewildering examples of contemporary life.
Nevertheless, prevailing pedagogic literature continues to advance the notion that one can be taught to teach. This belief has resulted in a bloated state and federal educational bureaucracy whose regulatory strictures inexorably follow state and federal funding. Faceless bureaucratic “experts,” most of whom have never taught, continually promulgate and expand rules, requirements and regulations which, while theoretically beneficial, do little but ensure their continued employment.
Perhaps the reason for this belief lies in the perception that anyone is a potential teacher. After all, while not many of us have been present in a surgical suite during neurosurgery, or in a courtroom during a high-stakes case involving millions of dollars, we’ve all had years of experience sitting in classrooms. What’s not to get? The teacher is merely an information-provider, right? Coupled with that attitude is the epiphany experienced by many college juniors. If they lack the requisite GPA or financial wherewithal to pursue law school, med school or an MBA, there’s always teaching. The fact that a critically important profession has become a career of last resort speaks volumes of disappointment and mediocrity.
With teachers bogged down in a blizzard of paperwork, another problem has surfaced. Scandals involving complicity of teachers and administrators in fraudulent standardized assessment testing, and hired surrogates taking SAT tests point to a deepening disorder. Even with “recentering” (grading on a curve), national SAT scores continue to decline. A government-erected bulwark of regulatory requirements and procedures has not staunched the breaches in educational achievement. Instead, it has created a climate of academic desperation and dishonesty. While cultural and societal problems certainly tear at the fabric of the educational process, the institution does itself no favors in lowering standards or cheating in order to chase after state and federal dollars in a vicious cycle of more regulations with more strings attached.
If our educational system is to foster the values and ideals of Western civilization and to keep pace in science and technology, we must honestly reassess such dismally ineffective educational policies as “Outcome-Based Education,” bilingual education (remember when your college foreign language professor told you that “immersion” was the surest and most effective way to learn another language?), “No Child Left behind,” “Race to the Top,” and “Common Core.” Instead, we must allow individuals with the desire, ability and temperament the latitude to use their knowledge and innovation to stimulate and inspire students, unfettered by time-consuming, costly and counter-productive requirements.
Think of the best teachers you’ve experienced in your life. What made them special? Was it the manner in which they crossed their administrative “t’s” and dotted their bureaucratic “i’s,” or was it something wonderfully personal and unique? Now think of your worst experiences in the classroom – the teachers reminiscent of Ben Stein in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.” I’ll bet their lesson plans got their share of gold stars and their personnel files overflowed with the requisite institutional paperwork. It would be difficult to reverse direction of an enterprise so vast and comprehensive. Left unattended, however, the future looks unsustainable and bleak.
Jim Lynch, of Fleetwood, is a retired English teacher.
