Secret Teacher

[sabotabby]

(Via hano.)

This one hit home.

Schools are full of middle-management types. They like to take "learning walks" around the school and "quality control". They sit at the back of my class and want to know if the students have been told their "learning objectives" and if they are sat in a "seating plan". They believe that learning simply cannot take place if the students haven't been told what to do and where to sit. What you might consider real work: comprehension, creative writing, silent reading or a class questioning the teacher about the topic being studied is considered hopelessly old-fashioned and slightly abusive by my superiors. Instead they like almost anything involving power-points, scissors and glue. All work for students needs to be scaffolded. That means be done for them. The very notion of giving a student a task they might fail is considered child abuse. Every task must be completable within about ten minutes.

See, the thing is, every few years, someone up in the bureaucracy gets paid to make an incredible breakthrough in pedagogical methods, which involves shifting some jargon around and forcing everyone to incorporate it. If you play along, you are a progressive educator. If you don't, you're a reactionary, old-fashioned, stick-in-the-mud who won't evolve. What the bureaucrats don't seem to understand is the very skills we're supposed to teach children—critical thinking, creativity, logic—are not necessarily newfangled things, and they can't necessarily be scaffolded. It's not that every new development is bollocks. But most are. And the time it takes to differentiate learning that doesn't need to be differentiated is robbed from somewhere. I'm sure there are still teachers out there relying on rote learning, but probably not most. It's often the creative, young, energetic teachers who get sucked into the timewasters. The actual stick-in-the-muds remain stick-in-the-muds regardless of what jargon is in fashion.

I'd add "standardization" to this list of the ways we're failing our students, as well as neoliberal "reforms" that have cut the number of EAs, child psychologists, and other useful non-teacher professionals and downloaded their duties onto classroom teachers.

Comments

[ltmurnau.livejournal.com]

Too true.
The K-12 system out here is due for another such "breakthrough".
See if you can figure it out; I certainly can't..
http://www.bcedplan.ca/
I'm just gald my son is graduating high school in a month.

[symbioid.livejournal.com]

Standardization is a bastard. Our "No Child Left Behind" is such a travesty in the US. Metrics becomes the be all and end all and it then becomes gamed.

One thing that I really wish I knew growing up was what I apparently was supposed to learn in science class, but never really grokked, and that was "how to think scientifically". I was a fundie creationist, so I'm sure that held me back, but I also was critical and trying to think of the big questions. I argued with the science teachers about evolution (yeah, I thought Duane Gish was some sort of knowledgeable person who spoke truth, I guess)... My sophomore year I was basically being taught the same shit as freshman year, just in a different format. (YEAR 1: poke this toothpick into a ball of clay with a marble inside, and try to measure the marble, open it and see if you were right -- YEAR 2: take this Popsicle stick and poke it into these holes in the top of the shoebox and see if you can figure out what size of box is glued to the bottom of the box.)

They were *trying* to teach us the whole scientific method, but I never felt it was a specifically cohesive message.

When I drew cow-urine as a joke in the evaporation cycle, I should have gotten bonus points for it, because it's true, not a mention to my mother that "I wasn't taken it seriously"...

Probably one of the greatest contributions from science that I received in school was when one kid asked our science teach if he believed in reincarnation and he said "if by reincarnation you mean my matter gets consumed by a worm which gets eaten by a bird as fuel, then yes... but not a soul in a new body"

Anyways... Not sure with where I'm going. I have a long history of education that never taught me HOW to learn, but WHAT to learn. I never grokked that I was supposed to be learning HOW to learn. I did end up figuring it out on my own, but I think so much of what held me back was that the pedagogy was so flawed. Maybe it wasn't. Maybe it worked for most kids. I had plenty of friends who went into the actual next level of science class instead of the remedial re-runs I had to go through.

Such a shame.

[ginny-t.livejournal.com]

How 'bout using scissors and glue to take all the suck out of the PowerPoint slides and make them suck less? *innocent*

[pofflewomp.livejournal.com]

The problem of this teacher only seeing each class for 50 minutes a week so not being able to get to know pupils individually seems like a big issue, too, to me. Obviously the "learning objectives" and other management-speaky shit are a HUGE problem, but even without those - wah, only having a theoretical 100 seconds for each student is ridiculous.