This program [a PBS reports episode] reports on the pressure that S. Korean students are under in school. I don’t think we want to totally emulate their system, but I have to laugh when public officials rant about teachers and teacher tenure. In their view the solution is to get rid of the bad teachers. Sure there are bad teachers, but the bad teachers are not the problem. They are the tip of the problem. Our culture needs a total attitude [change].
I responded by writing about what is actually necessary to change the results that come out of the American education system. An interesting exchange followed. I thought I would share it here. Here are my thoughts:
No joke! The kids I teach when I work at universities are often, sadly, pitiful at most any basic academic skills, but their ineptitude is only outdone by their sheer arrogance and pride in what they believe to be their intelligence. I've had some substandard teachers in the past, but I got myself to learn the material despite their lack of ability to communicate the information.
Working as an actor and teacher over the last few years has taught me a lot of what makes a strong teacher and student, and what defines the strongest relationship between the two.
The problems I can identify in substandard teachers doesn't usually lay in a lack of knowledge of the subject matter, but in HOW they communicate (or are incapable of communicating) a thought, or series of thoughts. Ours is a society that shirks the responsibility of what once was a necessity for every student to learn throughout all levels of education.
Rhetoric.
Many of our teachers are unskilled in this, and so, many students never learn this...and this trend has been devolving for many generations, aided along by the rise of video, digital, and other technologies that take a lot of focus off of communicating clearly, effectively, and persuasively with the spoken word.
What this does to teachers who don't possess a natural "gift of gab," or "a common touch" that can jump from appealing to aristocratically minded types, to the more working class, is that it shuts them off from their students in total. The teacher becomes locked in simply repeating facts that have little to do with appealing to the imaginative and emotional lives of their students. I firmly believe that to educate a student one must teach them the information at hand, but, above that, one must show them learning will help their own self-esteem, their own sense of collaboration/cooperation with their immediate peers and communities, which will, in turn, help them build a healthy sense of themselves.
Language, SPOKEN language, and how to use it in any subject or endeavor, is the ultimate teacher of this.
However, this is an ideal that cannot always be reached. That is why on the other side with the student, a simple, yet very difficult lesson, must be taught, again and again, from a very young age, and that is the value of Humility. This humility must not just be taught as a subservience to a teacher, or authority figure, but as a reverence to the material at hand, and a respect to the person attempting to transmit, or SHARE, this information with the student.
It's in this exchange between teacher (skilled and open communicator) and student (reverential and respectful listener) that has the potential to create a loving, caring, nurturing environment for both to communicate and listen to lessons and questions. Above all, it creates Love...as holistic and stupid as that sounds, that is what is essential. To be clear, I'm not talking about romantic love, or an environment that doesn't challenge the student (or the teacher) but a love that is built between two mutual respects...for teaching and learning, and learning and teaching.
To bring it to it's base elements I guess what I'm saying is clear is:
Respect
Humility
Clarity (through Rhetorical practice)
Love
Thoughts?
H offered up the following as a response:
“Above all, it creates Love...as holistic and stupid as that sounds, that is what is essential.“
Mark, thanks for this quote. Yes, we all know we have ineffective, and even “bad” teachers, and that needs to be corrected, but our real problem is our attitude towards learning, as I think you spoke about. Effective teachers love their subject area. They think it is extremely exciting and important. When they exhibit that love and interest, most students pick up on that. Also, IMHO the learning process is about a relationship between teacher and student. We often do not develop that relationship. In defense of teachers, it deflates their enthusiasm when they are repeatedly bombarded with indifference and lethargic behavior. As in most aspects of our lives, it’s our attitudes.
What is the answer? I don’t know but I bet it is not to constantly rant about “bad” teachers, attacking tenure (I don’t think we need it, but we do need some type of due process. Once you get a teaching job, getting fired is a death sentence for your teach career, unlike other occupations.) begrudging teacher salaries, reducing pension, and health care. We do not get the top 10% of college graduates wanting to teach now, how will these actions get us closer to that goal?
OK, I’m just ranting now, and taking away from your very insightful response.
I offered up the following as a response to that:
I didn't think you were ranting at all.
I have been thinking about this conversation for a few days now (clearly) and am thinking about even more since some of my old friends have been posting mini-rants of their own about the fact that the documentary WAITING FOR SUPERMAN was snubbed by the Academy Awards and wasn't nominated for Best Documentary. I haven't seen the film, but in reading about it I've learned that the film heavily scapegoats teachers unions, promotes charter schools, and touts there are fairly simple solutions to all of the complex problems facing the American educational system.
One article I came across (http://www.thegrio.com/rev
"For every complex problem there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong."
Ultimately, even the thoughts I offered up aren't meant to be a simple solution. They are meant to be part of a guiding list of principals that teachers, students, and administrators can take as thoughts as to how to re-engage the balancing act that has to constantly keep happening in any school, or local, state, or federal educational system.
I'm sympathetic about what teachers at the high school level and below just to get jobs, or preserve them. I'm even more sympathetic about them when a documentary like WAITING FOR SUPERMAN comes along and offers a slick set of solutions that may work for one community, but not, by any stretch of the imagination, one country in total. I think the problem, the trap that people fall into when thinking about how to "fix schools" is the same one I realized I fell into when thinking about it.
Everyone wants to start with the product. How do we know kids are college ready? How do we get better test scores out of them? And many other questions of this sort are asked, but they are focused on the end of the line.
The focus should be on the other end of the problem, i.e. the process of learning/teaching, and, even before that, and going back to my first set of comments, how we prepare both students and teachers for engaging each other TODAY. Yes, this isn't what a government policy maker would want to hear, but it's where the conversation about education ultimately has to start, where the process has to start, so that the product at the end of it all validates that process of education/learning.
What is troubling for me in any article I read, or conversation I have about education is that a lot of solutions I hear these days start to sound like schematic outlines for how a factory assembly line should work. Come up with one system. Put it in place. One size fits all. Essentially, one comes up with a system that works for all to pump out the right product. If that's the case, then we have to start taking into account the modern assembly line's dictum of "planned obsolescence." The product has a limited life, and eventually parts of the product have to be replaced and evolve into other parts. However, when one has one "one-size-fits-all" assembly line design for all one bit of unplanned obsolescence tends to happen, and that is the obsolescence of the system in total.
Take a look at General Motors and the large lumbering dinosaur that it became. It was too big, too diverse, too complex to turn itself around quickly. It's system collapsed and needed outside help to be saved. Essentially, that's what we did with policies like "No Child Left Behind." We tried to create a product-oriented assembly line that fit the whole country.
What happened? Creativity in education stagnated. Schools closed. Teachers were blamed. Students lost out. And the list of consequences goes on, and on...
We need a durable system of education, and that is defined as a system that has a complete local connection between educator and student, and the ability of both to evolve and adapt to the demands and needs of each other ultimately.
That only comes about through diverse solutions for different communities. Scapegoating exclusively teachers won't solve this problem. Offering up a new blanket national system won't eradicate it. It takes constant adjustment and evolution.
I have been thinking about this conversation for a few days now (clearly) and am thinking about even more since some of my old friends have been posting mini-rants of their own about the fact that the documentary WAITING FOR SUPERMAN was snubbed by the Academy Awards and wasn't nominated for Best Documentary. I haven't seen the film, but in reading about it I've learned that the film heavily scapegoats teachers unions, promotes charter schools, and touts there are fairly simple solutions to all of the complex problems facing the American educational system.
One article I came across (http://www.thegrio.com/rev
"For every complex problem there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong."
Ultimately, even the thoughts I offered up aren't meant to be a simple solution. They are meant to be part of a guiding list of principals that teachers, students, and administrators can take as thoughts as to how to re-engage the balancing act that has to constantly keep happening in any school, or local, state, or federal educational system.
I'm sympathetic about what teachers at the high school level and below just to get jobs, or preserve them. I'm even more sympathetic about them when a documentary like WAITING FOR SUPERMAN comes along and offers a slick set of solutions that may work for one community, but not, by any stretch of the imagination, one country in total. I think the problem, the trap that people fall into when thinking about how to "fix schools" is the same one I realized I fell into when thinking about it.
Everyone wants to start with the product. How do we know kids are college ready? How do we get better test scores out of them? And many other questions of this sort are asked, but they are focused on the end of the line.
The focus should be on the other end of the problem, i.e. the process of learning/teaching, and, even before that, and going back to my first set of comments, how we prepare both students and teachers for engaging each other TODAY. Yes, this isn't what a government policy maker would want to hear, but it's where the conversation about education ultimately has to start, where the process has to start, so that the product at the end of it all validates that process of education/learning.
What is troubling for me in any article I read, or conversation I have about education is that a lot of solutions I hear these days start to sound like schematic outlines for how a factory assembly line should work. Come up with one system. Put it in place. One size fits all. Essentially, one comes up with a system that works for all to pump out the right product. If that's the case, then we have to start taking into account the modern assembly line's dictum of "planned obsolescence." The product has a limited life, and eventually parts of the product have to be replaced and evolve into other parts. However, when one has one "one-size-fits-all" assembly line design for all one bit of unplanned obsolescence tends to happen, and that is the obsolescence of the system in total.
Take a look at General Motors and the large lumbering dinosaur that it became. It was too big, too diverse, too complex to turn itself around quickly. It's system collapsed and needed outside help to be saved. Essentially, that's what we did with policies like "No Child Left Behind." We tried to create a product-oriented assembly line that fit the whole country.
What happened? Creativity in education stagnated. Schools closed. Teachers were blamed. Students lost out. And the list of consequences goes on, and on...
We need a durable system of education, and that is defined as a system that has a complete local connection between educator and student, and the ability of both to evolve and adapt to the demands and needs of each other ultimately.
That only comes about through diverse solutions for different communities. Scapegoating exclusively teachers won't solve this problem. Offering up a new blanket national system won't eradicate it. It takes constant adjustment and evolution.
