Teachers in the Corner

by pazooter

Everybody seems to know now; it's the teachers' fault. And it doesn't seem that anything can be done to persuade the public mind to view it otherwise. After all, in the business world it's fairly written in stone: If you want higher quality products, get higher quality, better-skilled workers. It's obvious. To improve our national failing in education we must first and foremost improve the quality and skills of our teachers!

And what do we hear from our teachers about all this? Grumbling!

Oh? Members of the same profession who educated this untamed, unexplored, back-woods country and turned it into a land of innovation and invention, who inspired and trained the scientists who went on to send man to the moon and back, who are responsible for developing the finest, most envied university system in the world, are complaining about becoming better trained?

There are those who would have us believe all this grumbling is simply and only a natural result of teachers suddenly being held accountable. And many people are, in fact, believing just that.

Unfortunately, no one is asking the teachers any more.

One reason for this is, some decades ago during the late 60's through the mid 80's, teachers lost their voice. They lost their voice as the experts in the field of education. Without realizing the full ramifications, that mantle of professional expertise was passed along to the relatively new field of educational psychology. That shift began a big disconnect. Authorities in the field of education no longer came from the ranks of education. Many years, perhaps centuries of wisdom gathered from the learning academies of our Western culture were suddenly made subservient to a branch of mental studies that was experimental at best. One can now become an expert in the field of education, with absolutely no experience as a classroom teacher.

It's fairly obvious that this happened, and happened over a period of only a few years. But the exact how and why of it is obscure. At the time, or even immediately preceding the takeover, there was a concerted campaign against corporeal punishment. The fact of that campaign occurring when it did, seems significant. It was also during this same period when the term, behavioral modification came into popular parlance.

Whether the usurp of authority was conspiratorial or not is interesting speculation, but unimportant for the purposes of this writing. What is of vital importance, however, is that teachers regain their status as experts in their own realm, the classroom.

Author, Omar Garrison makes a poignant statement about education in the mid-1900's in his book, Homegrown Democrat:

“Parents did not supervise their children's schooling then, just as they didn't manage our social lives — "parenting" wasn't a verb and children didn't have "play dates," ... and as for school, Mother looked at the class projects I brought home, and commented on the penmanship, and she looked at the report card when Mrs. Shaver sent it home, but teachers were deferred to back then.”

Perhaps no area within a teacher's domain is as essential as the subject of discipline. All it takes is one disruptive child to sabotage the educational process for an entire classroom of students. This fact has not generally been appreciated by our society, even if teachers are all too familiar with the situation.

Traditionally, teachers have dealt with disruptive behaviors by simply not tolerating them; by making the penalties for disobedience too dreadful for a student to even consider misbehaving. With the integration of educational psychology in our schools, teachers, as well as administrators, became answerable for a student's mental health.

At first glance this may seem completely logical. Teachers do, in fact, affect the mental status of those in their care. But the operative word here is, answerable. And that makes no sense at all. Simply stated, the educational process is not mental therapy. Classroom learning was never meant to be therapeutic (even if it sometimes is), and is not suited to influencing behaviors beyond the simple, and often crude, expediency of preventing the disruption of learning activities.

Unfortunately these “experts” on student behaviors have now become infused into the infrastructure, and their authority carries considerable weight. Their buzzwords and complex theories serve to impress and intimidate the uninitiated.

Blooms Taxonomy, introduced into the education system by a committee led by Educational Psychologist, Benjamin Bloom, has become the template for structuring mental therapy into school curriculum. His basic premise was that learning could be broken down into three “domains.” These domains are, Knowledge, Skills (physical) and Attitude (feelings and emotions). These areas, or domains, were determined to be the goals of the learning process. What was then assumed because of Bloom's research, was that addressing a student's Attitude (and emotions and feelings) should be a primary target of the classroom teacher. This assumption, despite the fact that it has now totally changed the entire landscape and methodology of classroom teaching, was never widely tested nor proven to be beneficial to our educational institutions.

The real difference is in having adulterated the attainment of knowledge and skills as the key focus of the teacher. True, there has always been attention given to, deportment, citizenship, and other like-sounding subjects, some even graded. But these areas were forever secondary to the main subjects. Teachers who set high standards, pushed their students to accomplish more than they believed possible, were demanding and tolerated no nonsense, invariably were rewarded with confident students with can-do attitudes and self-esteem. The bitter irony here is that as soon as teachers became answerable to mental health experts they lost not only their professional standing, they also began to deny their own aptitude as teachers, as the patrons of strength, confidence and hope in our future generations.

The work of Jean Piaget, a developmental psychologist well known for his work studying children and for his Theory of Cognitive Development, has been applied in the field of education with fantastically devastating results. According to Piaget, children do not develop abstract reasoning until the age of around 11 years old. Or at least that is how his theories tend to be interpreted. So dictionary use (words being the primary host of abstraction) in primary and intermediate grades are nominally encouraged but, in truth, mostly ignored.

This gets so bad that many classrooms don't even have available dictionaries. Instead, students are instructed in all kinds of learning strategies. These are often faddish, giving enterprise to book sales by popular Educational Psychologists. But some are mainstay, a favorite being to guess at the meaning of words instead of opening a dictionary and learning the actual definition.

Just days ago, in fact, I listened in on one teacher instructing her 6th-grade students on, “figuring out the meaning of a word by using the context” and gave them the example how, in their sample paragraph the word, belligerent (she then re-read the sentence) obviously meant, stubborn (it doesn't).

Rather than working to overcome student inertia to find a dictionary and make clear the concepts of words, a great deal of effort is applied in teaching students inference, how they should think with words — words with which they have inadequate, wrong, incomplete or just plain no meanings.

The Theory of Multiple Intelligences, actually a collection of pet theories by psychologist, Howard Gardner is yet another zeitgeist of modern education. Despite the fact that effective teachers have worked with students on a personal basis, to a greater or lesser degree, since the dawn of the profession, Gardner took this several steps further and broke down these personal differences into what he calls, intelligences.

His conclusion was along the lines of, because people chew differently, they should all eat different foods from different troughs. Among other problems that's arisen from Gardner's theories, it has served to divide teachers according to their own pet teaching theories. Practical implementations have mostly inspired much debate and book sales. Apart from being complicated and wide open to opinionated interpretations, the real danger inherent in the Theory of Multiple Intelligences is that it tends to be used as an excuse for individual student failings in certain areas, mainly in Language Arts and Math, and therefore lowers the level of expectancy necessary in order to maintain educational excellence.

To be sure, there also remains the matter of poor teaching. Bad teachers, like sloppy workers and ineffective managers will always show up for work and need to be dealt with accordingly. But at this point, the issue is not even a case of a few bad teachers spoiling it for everyone else. Recently, the status of our nation's teachers slipped yet another rung. Teachers have become the cause célèbre for political haymaking by being cast in the completely undesirable role of scapegoat. As our educational problems become more and more known, American voters are demanding a change. And our politicians are only too happy to oblige them by serving up teacher's heads on a silver platter.

There are no simple answers nor easy solutions. At stake is not only the reputation and well-being of the teaching profession, but the overall quality and effectiveness of American education, and all that depends upon it.

Working towards making teachers more highly qualified means, at this time, ensuring they are well trained in these very practices that are derailing the everyday processes of student learning. This is a certain recipe for more of the same, if not a worsening of conditions.

Teachers, it would seem, have this one glaring fault: They are so giving, have such high ideals, are so willing to assume that the future rests upon their shoulders and are so ready to take on the responsibility of others, that they will, in order to accomplish all that is expected of them, tend absorb the duties pressed upon them, even when doing so is to their own disadvantage.

It was a seriously bad mistake for schools to enter into the mental health business. It was a seriously bad mistake for teachers to give up their voice, because now, especially now, they need to be heard more than ever.

Righting Rote

by pazooter

Rote learning has acquired a bad name in the United States. But is learning by rote, the process whereby students are made to memorize without consideration for comprehension, the baby that got thrown out with the bathwater?

Historically, it's the Chinese who perfected the talent for rote learning. The master would give the statement to be learned and the entire class, in unison, would chant back the exact statement. Again and again and again until they had it memorized. Over the centuries it generally served them well. The downside was that, while Chinese students became highly knowledgeable and skilled in their cultural arts and professions, creative thinking was not, with some important exceptions, a common forte.

It appears that in the United States, rote learning went the way of knuckle-whacks and butt-whumpings. Well-financed experts (i.e., not teachers) determined that comprehension was lacking and targeted most forms of force-fed education in favor of kinder, gentler teaching methodologies that vied for children's attention and sought to nourish experiences of cognitive learning.

Now, decades later, the results have been tabulated. And the professionals who introduced and subscribed our educational evolution are not at all quick to mention America's position in international standings of educational excellence -- except where they can sell new solutions. It is a ponderous fact that the industry that we now expect to bail us out of the downward spiral of educational standards is the very same industry that created the mess in the first place.

What we got right about education is that comprehension is of higher importance and value than rote learning. But the two ideologies have never been diametrically opposed to each other. They are both needful ingredients in the holistic learning process.

Too often I have seen middle school students grappling with algebra and higher math concepts. Upon investigation it is quickly borne out that the point where they are stalled and stumbling is not knowing their multiplication tables or not knowing them well enough. The multiplication tables require straight memorization. They are usually taught at the intermediate level in elementary schools. But as the practice of rote drilling is considered boring and outmoded it often gets short shrift.

Does this mean that once students get their times tables down cold they now understand algebra and higher math concepts? No, of course not. They still need to tackle the comprehension of terminology as well as the syntax of the language of mathematics itself. But at least now they can arrive at the task of studying the theory instead of stumbling all over themselves grappling with the deepest mysteries of seven times eight.

And perhaps surprisingly, rote drilling can also be widely used in teaching theory. When students in my Science classes are reading the textbook aloud to the class they know to pause at every newly-introduced scientific term. We then drill the definition exactly as given in the glossary, over and over until they get it. I will usually start the drill by saying the term followed by the definition and then having the entire class repeat it. Loudly, just like the Chinese. Usually after six to ten times or so, they start to get it. We often follow it up with examples and then repeat a few more reiterations. Sometimes it is also necessary to drill the definition of a term found in the original definition. One might think students find this type of activity grueling, if not at least boring. Far from it. My experience is that students love drilling definitions. It's time intensive..., but not really, because they get and can then move on with their learning. It also instills an appreciation of the exactness of technical terms. And the results show up well in subsequent testing.

Unfortunately, a major barrier to implementing rote learning is a lack of barriers; specifically, the absence of physical walls or insubstantial or so-called curtained walls in our school buildings. In my home district we are cursed with what's called "Kelly schools," buildings with no or few windows, having a central hall and ancillary pods, each containing four open classrooms. The county is busily building more of these open-type classrooms as of this writing. Too bad, because rote learning can be noisy.

Many positive things can be said concerning the virtues of having quiet in the classroom, as any new or veteran teacher will tell you. But the importance of quietness is too often over-valued and overstressed. The real test of a successful learning environment is, are all students actively engaged in the process of learning? That does not necessarily translate as, quiet. And in the case of drilling by rote, it means the exact opposite of quiet. So one enthusiastically-engaged class activity can be, in an open or podular system, another class's distraction. It is a sizable mistake where quiet activity takes precedence over engaged activity. The solution is having sound-absorbing walls and teachers more tolerant to the full experience of engaged learning.

So while rote learning may have gone down the drain, it wasn't the main thing. The baby somehow survived; it's just that nobody bothered to give it a proper bath.

by pazooter

The author is an educator currently working as a substitute teacher in Florida.

Experts Say You Should Read This

It doesn't matter much which news source you listen to, they're all addicted to the, “Experts say....” gimmick. “Security experts say malicious hackers have....” (CNN) “...what some experts say is a growing fear....” (FOX) And on and on ad nauseam.

Undoubtedly they have well-explained reasons for doing this. One excuse is that much of their audience does not particularly care to be bothered by such details as sourcing. Much of their audience prefers to believe that the news personalities they read or listen to are themselves the experts who say....

The corporate news industry is very aware of this. “The most trusted name in news” is a CNN slogan often repeated. To their credit, they don't falsely advertise that they can actually be trusted to report honest facts. Instead they, like all other major news networks, have invested accountant-scrutinized monies into promoting their talking heads as celebrities. And they've hired the best stage designers, graphic artists, and pshrinks to design and adorn their newscast projections with a stunning contemporary pizzazz that intimidates the viewer into a submissive state of acceptance.

None of this goes against the practice of becoming an expert in something. Expert is expected. Expert is what one fervently strives for after graduating university or when beginning any profession. Being an expert means having become good at what one does.

An expert is also someone who is knowledgeable in some area. Which assumes, rightly or wrongly, said expert has considerable experience in observing the results (evidence) of this knowledge. The tendency is also to believe that an expert has achieved a level of capability (skillful how-to) so as to substantiate conclusions made and publicized. So what's the rift?

The reality of it all. It has, in fact, been the experts who've delivered to our society such atrocities as blood-letting, opium-laden elixirs, mercury-based medicines, transorbital lobotomy, Vioxx and asbestos shingles.

The problem evolves from, among other things, the “result-lag” of products. For example, an expert aviation engineer would be expected to design airplanes that didn't fall out of the sky. But rarely does the final product of an expert garner real observation from the end user. The aviation engineer, for instance, may have only spent half of several years actually designing his plane, and the rest of his time ego-blathering to his fans and financiers. Furthermore, even if the plane is eventually built, its faults may not show up immediately. And when the plane does fall out of the sky? There are yet years of study and investigation to find out what went wrong. More ominously, there are plenty of associates and underlings that can be blamed and promotional campaigns to spread the seeds of doubt and muddy the whole affair to such a point that the only consequence for the faulty expert is that he gets a big promotion because of so much publicity

The product lag of skilled workers is usually more instantaneous. A plumber fixes the pipes; turns the water back on; and either it leaks or it doesn't. This observable fact tends to keep the plumber honest. On the far end of the product lag would be our forensic experts. Nearly all high-end (read, “expensive”) court battles involve expert witnesses for both sides. Each opposing side makes a believable case for their client, because they are professional experts. Their facts are spun to represent their client's needs. Their end product, however, remains illusive. Because they are the experts we are supposed to simply believe. But, contrary facts can never both be true.

You head a big oil company and want to discredit growing evidence of global warming? No problem. Dangle the golden carrot and without fail, a few “scientists” will come running, willing to support any viewpoint you choose. And a few “experts” repeating the same message, especially given access to big media, is all that it takes to spread the doubt.

It's a complicated world. We no longer trek down to the shoemaker who so expertly made our father's shoes. No, we look instead for the branding swish or some such logo  shoes made by nameless people in nameless factories in unknown cities in far-away countries we'd rather not think about.

There is no magic bullet for a society that's lost trust in itself, where moral standards are too often trumped by an opportunity for a quick buck and meaningful reform is defined by a lobbyist's gift.

But when outfits which purport to deliver real news tell us what experts say without also telling us which experts, by name, they are thumbing their noses at our apathy.