Rambling, incoherent

Ted Sizer wrote: "We rarely underestimate the difficulties of learning. Having had to learn, we know that it is a complicated and unpredictable business," (Horace's Compromise, p. 2).

In today's climate, I disagree. I believe the wide majority, those that have never taught, regularly discount any challenge related to learning.

You're in sixth grade and you can't add fractions with unlike denominators with 80% accuracy? There's something wrong with your teacher. Or maybe you. You're lazy, kid. Get with it.

As every punishment must fit its crime, so too must every reform correspond to a particular failing of the system. Witness the rise of the "no excuses" mantra. Want to outlaw excuses? Someone must have been making a whole damn lot of them.

Can anyone who has never taught fractions really have an opinion? Should we really be listening to them at all? I'm not trying to be divisive, I really want to know. Should Bill Gates really be a powerful voice on education? Something tells me learning fractions was never that hard for him.

Is learning hard? Teaching? What does it even mean to learn? Have you ever learned? How do you know? How could you prove it to someone? Is there more than one way to prove it? Who or what caused your learning? How do you know? Do any of these questions even matter? To whom?

Until we, and I mean everyone, really wrestle with these ideas I see little hope for progress. Hold up a great school. Let's take a look. What's that, you say? The students have learned a lot? According to whom or what source? What did they learn? Did your school teach it to them? How do you know?

Popular assumptions undergird the debate. We are quick to applaud a school with high test scores. This is unquestionably a place where much learning has taken place; thus it deserves our attention. Left unwondered: are high scores really evidence of learning? What in fact, causes high scores on this particular exam? Do we know that the school played a role in causing the high scores?

Those few that ask these questions find a small audience and risk the label of contrarian.

Teaching Is What Matters

I've recently picked up Horace's Compromise by the late Ted Sizer. I'll try to post as I go through it. So much of this book rings true to me (though some parts need updating for the 21st century) I have a feeling there will be more to write, but the first thought is with respect to teaching.

From the introduction: "Curiously most of us, lay people and educators alike, tend to underrate teaching...We can play at learning, without retaining much save the temporary pleasure of the play, and we can act the teacher, strutting expectable stuff in front of blackboards. Real learning and real teaching require more." This is obviously still true. Few of those with a mainstream voice on education policy are willing to examine the details of what great teaching entails. Certainly for the policy wonks, actual teaching is a radioactive substance best left to those slovenly masses who actually have to handle it on a daily basis. They would much rather focus on the important stuff: parsing the intricacies of school governance models or arguing endlessly about national standards.

Last April, the New York Times ran a piece about out-of-work professionals turning to teaching amid the recession. Pam Grossman, ed professor at Stanford, made some insightful statements. She wrote (bold is mine):

Because all of us have spent thousands of hours in classroom observing teachers, we may underestimate the skill required to engage a group of children or adolescents and ensure that they are learning. Much of the teaching we do in everyday life, as parents or employers, involves telling or tutoring. As parents, we help children with math homework, test them on their vocabulary words, answer their questions. But teaching is much more than telling, and teachers have to know more than right answers.

My impression is that most reformers working from without, who have little or no experience teaching, likely misunderstand fully any and all problems with our educational system, since they likely misunderstand fully any and all aspects of teaching. If teaching is a sort of knowledge transfer then logically any problem must lie with its agents; the teller or the telling is flawed.

Let me ask: Bill Gates, when you consider a high school with low math scores, do you shake your head and and wonder how teachers could not give accurate lectures on the quadratic formula? Do you wish that teachers would write equations more clearly on the blackboard? That they had more mathematical knowledge? That there were more and neater examples on paper?

Anyone with classroom experience will know that in many cases, it doesn't matter how clear your message is to the kids; it takes more and varied approaches. It takes student action and engagement with the content; it takes relevance to student lives (and I'm not talking about putting homework on an iPhone). It takes myriad other techniques, tasks, and ideas.

If teachers are going to shape the future of education, then we need to do a better job of convincing the public of what it really means to be a good teacher. Which means teachers' unions doing a better job of highlighting their star teachers and what they do. Which means media coverage that is more than a feeble-minded dichotomy between syrupy sweet Hollywood martyr-pics and "serious" articles and op-eds decrying the corruption and entitlement among teachers.

Maybe we need David Simon to make an HBO series about real schools.