Sorry, Rusty. My foot has occasionally been known to need prying out from fairly deep in my throat. If anyone read what I wrote as meaning "all teachers" or even "most teachers" I am truly sorry. I did say "some teachers" and that is what I meant.
Unfortunately, we often remember (and tell stories about
) the bad experiences of our lives.
Actually, I have 3 sisters-in-law and at least one cousin-in-law who are currently primary school teachers. One is a music teacher. The other 3 are all
very diligent and inventive about coming up with interesting and inventive ways to teach difficult concepts. I have heard all sorts of very interesting stories from them about what they do in their classes. I hope that their students appreciate the great teaching they get from these dedicated professionals.
However, I fear that out of 12 years of the normal obligatory schooling, most students will be faced with more than one teacher who pounds into them the anti-educational concepts that history is just names and dates of battles, etc., that geography is just how many state capitals they can name, that math is just memorizing their times tables, etc.
These are the sorts of "knowledge" that are easily tested on multiple-choice standardized exams and that state boards of education can specify in their curricula. Teachers and schools are frequently evaluated on how well their students do on the standard tests of the most trivial knowledge and virtually never based on any deeper means of determining how well their students understand the interesting concepts of a subject or why the subject is interesting at all.
It's hard for a teacher to overcome the inertia in a bureaucratically imposed curriculum and even harder when most teachers are trained in a similar curriculum themselves. Even high-school teachers are often educated only secondarily (pun intended
) in the subjects that they nominally teach and mostly in "how to keep the class under control." It's even worse for primary school teachers who are rarely educated well enough to see the kinds of connections that really do make their subject matter interesting.
If anyone who knows better than I do wants to dispute what I have said, I will listen quite respectfully, but I am located at a university with one of the "best" teachers' colleges in the country and have heard way too many horror stories from my teacher friends and relatives to feel that the great teaching that I (too rarely) hear about is the norm. Many schools have some great teachers, but nearly all have some really boring teachers too. I'll stand by my earlier diagnosis that when you take some of the teachers who went into teaching because they like kids, but have no other qualifications, and mix in an unhealthy dose of bureaucracy, you have a recipe for boredom.
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Paul Neubauer
prn@bsu.edu
