Last night Chris Lehmann posted about the way that many figures in the education world view teachers more as adversaries than vital resources in the effort to educate our kids. I’ve been mulling over Chris’s post in my head since then, and while I am far from an expert I think there are a number of reasons for this viewpoint. That means there are a lot of things teachers (and others) have to do in order to correct the problem, but maybe a rough To Do list isn’t a bad place to start.
- Familiarity: I’ve noticed that writers in various creative endeavors often say that they get the brunt of criticism from people when something isn’t quite right. There’s a perception that writers have the easy job, that if they screw up it’s more egregious than if a director or an artist or what have you screws up. And they say that part of this is that even if the average person has never framed a shot or played a note, just about everyone has put words to paper. (Maybe not well, but that’s another story.) So there’s no mystery associated with the task. That mystery is a line of defense for other creators – we may know that we don’t like a song or a scene, but we don’t have a sense that we know why it’s wrong or a sense that we can do better. So we might not be as critical. What does this have to do with teachers? Well, we’ve all been students and many of us have been parents. We’ve been part of the classroom process and so we don’t feel like there’s any mystery – even if we’re not familiar with the behind the scenes work (prep, grading, lesson planning) that makes the classroom environment work. So we’re less forgiving of what we see as mistakes. Plus, since we’ve all been in classrooms, the odds are pretty good that we’ve had bad teachers at some point. I’d say I’ve had some bad teachers at every level since elementary school. I’ve had average teachers and excellent teachers too, but just like people will remember the one double play the second baseman screws up instead of the ten he turned successfully, those memories of bad teachers can become magnified and create an unease that teachers don’t know what they’re doing.
- Bad Word of Mouth: When I say that everyone knows a bad a teacher, I’m going to include teachers in that statement. I have had friends, family friends, acquaintances and associates who work in schools. Almost every one of them has had stories about teachers who aren’t up to the job. In fact, in the urban education course I took this past semester for my Master’s, I was assigned a book written by a former teacher at an urban school who warned prospective teachers not to let the bitterness and bad attitudes of experienced teachers get to them. Now, maybe that’s due to differences in styles, maybe it’s due to personal rivalries. But when people hear from people “on the inside� that there are bad teachers who don’t get called to account, that’s going to create a negative image of teachers and the organizations and officials that advocate teachers’ interests.
Filed in Education