[sill: Re: [Tutor] help ;-)]

[Sheila King]

This is my final post in this thread on the Tutor Mailing list. I
apologize in advance, for an off-topic post. For those who would like to
continue in this discussion, either email or the newsgroup
k12.chat.teacher would be appropriate venues. If interested, Read on!

On Thu, 18 Oct 2001 07:46:56 -0400, Andrei Kulakov <sill@optonline.net>
wrote about Re: [sill: Re: [Tutor] help ;-)]:

:On Wed, Oct 17, 2001 at 05:49:08PM -0700, Sheila King wrote:
:> On Wed, 17 Oct 2001 13:30:36 -0400, Andrei Kulakov <sill@optonline.net>
:> wrote about [sill: Re: [Tutor] help ;-)]:
:> 
:> :Third mistake is that teacher
:> :is the figure of authority. All of these come from the sad obsession with
:> :control that schools everywhere demonstrate - they would rather have some
:> :students learn a little and be correctly rated than have them learn a
:> :*lot* while their progress remains a mistery to the insitution. School is
:> :not the place for learning, it's the place for schooling and disciplining.
:> 
:> Andrei,
:> 
:> I agree with most of your post. In fact, some of the "mistakes" that you
:> list are the reasons why I am no longer teaching high school. I'm still
:> teaching, though, currently at the college level.
:> 
:> I do take exception, however, to the passage I've quoted above. In fact,
:> most of the fine teachers that I worked with in my 18 years as a high
:> school teacher do not fit the description that you have posted above,
:> and *I* certainly don't. Perhaps it is true for many, but it is
:> certainly not true for all, and I don't even think it is true for most.
:
:But note, I didn't even say the word "teacher"!

Uh, please examine the quote above again. The word "teacher" is most
definitely in the quote from your message.

...<snipped>...
:The problem lies with the system, not with the teachers. That said, most
:teachers in HS are horrible, and only very few are trying to do something
:real. I'm not sure which is worse, watching a drone reading from a
:textbook or watching a great teacher trying to do his job as well as
:possible and failing miserably.

Sorry about the misunderstanding. It was not clear to me from your post,
that you meant the "teacher as authority figure" being the problem. I
will agree that it is easier to do the job, if the students see you as a
partner to help them learn.

For example, I taught AP Calculus for 8 or 9 years. (I'm not sure if you
are familiar with the College Board's Advanced Placement program?
http://www.collegeboard.org/ap/) What was nice about this: I was like my
students' coach, to help them prepare for passing the AP exam at the end
of the year. Having students take an exam prepared by an agency outside
of the school system, a quality, difficult exam, with real benefits to
passing, puts a whole new light on the teacher/student relationship. For
those students who really want to pass the exam, they are much more
willing to put up with difficult requirements from the teacher, if the
teacher can cast it in the light of "stuff that is necessary in order to
help you prepare for this exam".

As for "a great teacher trying to do his job and failing miserably", you
curiously omit from your post another possibility:
A great teacher trying to do his job and having a reasonable amount of
success. Or even a fairly large amount of success.

I had a great deal of success in my many years as a teacher. If I had
not, I certainly wouldn't have continued doing it for as long as I did.
You seem to see the whole system as a complete and abysmal failure. I'm
not sure what has affected you to see the system in this way, and I
would agree that the system is broken and has many, many problems, but
it does have successes too, many of them every year. Telling good
teachers in the system that they are part of the problem because they
are propping the system up and enabling it to continue...I don't think
this is worthwhile, effective or considerate to those doing the job. I
realize this is your opinion, that it is in line with Mr. John Taylor
Gatto's, and that you have a right to express it. But, I disagree that
it will do any good, and it certainly won't help those good teachers who
hear it, IMHO. 

:On this point, I agree with John Gotti (I hope I got his name right, all
:google comes up with is the mobster.. symptom of the disease, eh?). Being
:a good teacher is, in my opinion, counter-productive - you help keep up
:the system that is inherently hopeless. The guy pretty much gave up and
:started from a scratch in a private school somewhere in Ohio..

As mentioned above, his name is John Taylor Gatto. I have his book
_Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling_ right
here. The back cover of the book says (in part):
"In his 26 years of teaching, John Taylor Gatto has found that
independent study, community service, large doses of solitude, and a
thousand different apprenticeships with adults of all walks of life are
the keys to helping children break the thrall of our conforming society.
For the sake of our children and our communities, John Taylor Gatto
urges all of us to get schools out of the way and find ways to re-engage
children and families in actively controlling our culture, economy, and
society."

Clearly Mr. Gatto has many good ideas. However, his idea that all good
teachers should leave the school system, because the system needs to
collapse is one I'm not sure I can agree with. I do think that
ultimately some school systems (selected school districts around the
country) are going to collapse. I do know of schools nearby where little
learning goes on, and teachers teach to classes with high absentee rates
and dumb down the material just to get by and say they've gotten through
something. I think this isn't universal, though. In the cases I know of,
it is poor, urban schools that have this problem. The school district
where I live and my children attend is in an affluent,
upper-middle-class, professional neighborhood. They are excellent
schools with pretty good teachers and my children seem to learn a lot
there.

...<snipped>...
:> I really think that identifying the teachers themselves as one of the
:> "mistakes" of the whole educational system, is unkind, uncharitable, and
:> not on-target. Please re-think that part of your post.
:
:Oh I went back now and I think you're referring to me saying that a
:teacher is a figure of authority. It's a fact, not my judgement. He tells
:you what to study, when to study, gives you a hallway pass if he deems it
:necessary, and so on. The system corrupts the teacher just as badly as the
:student.

That is the part I was referring to. While the teacher is in control in
most classrooms, it certainly doesn't have to be that way. Anyhow, I
don't see anything wrong with a designated body of knowledge that should
be acquired.

What would be better, though, in my opinion is this:

Schools do not issue grades. Instead there is an independent
"certification board", with tests that you must pass in order to earn a
certification. Schools would be independent of the certification
process. They would simply teach you the stuff you needed in order to
pass whatever certification(s) you were interested in earning. (Sort of
like law school prepares you for passing the Bar Exam, although I'd
expect the schools in my scenario to match their curriculum and
activities more closely to the certification exam content than law
school tends to match the Bar Exam?)

In this way, the only reason for being in the school, would be because
you wanted to prepare for something by an outside agency. Well, it's a
thought, anyway.

I will say this about schooling:
I love learning. And I actually like being a student, even in a school
system situation. I know some people hate it. But it never bothered me.
I have many friends and family whom it has bothered, though. And I
sympathize with them. And for those people for whom the school system
does not work, I think we need to find another solution. Because many of
them WANT to learn, but the system doesn't work for them.

In any case, within the last year or two, I've become more interested,
personally, in web design and programming. This past year I started
learning Python. I was really enjoying the stuff I was learning. (Doing
it via online resources, books and the Python community, as most here on
this list do.)

My job as a teacher tired me. It required a lot of my physical, mental
and emotional resources in addition to great gobs of my personal time.
And I could see that I was exerting a lot of my resources trying to get
people who didn't want to learn math to learn math. And ending up having
less time and energy for me to do the learning that *I* was interested
in. I finally got tired of it. I didn't want to be the one trying to
force these kids to learn stuff they didn't want to learn at the expense
of my not being able to learn things *I* wanted to learn. So I
completely appreciate everything about the compulsory schooling and
forcing kids to learn. I'm familiar with SummerHill and Sudbury Valley
and schools of that type. And in an ideal world, that would be best. I
just don't see how the public system could really go to that. Dunno.

...<snipped>...
 
:> Today I was telling my Math 105 students, how they need to think what
:> everything *means*. Note (I told them) that I do NOT simply say, "For
:> this type of problem, apply this technique, ...for this other type,
:> apply this technique..." In MY class, I go into a great deal of
:> motivation, try to demonstrate relationships, and give reasons why stuff
:> behaves as it does. I tell the students, that they need to try to wrap
:> their brains around these ideas so that when they encounter unfamiliar
:> problems, they will be able to reason them out and think for themselves.
:> I'm very big on problem solving.
:
:That's the right direction, but just not enough. It's sort of like walking
:into a pen with slaves and telling them "keep working, but think free
:thoughts, about mountain climbing, dewy forests and such".

I really think that your analogy is faulty. The students in my Math 105
class have a variety of reasons for being there (remember, it is a
college class). For some of them, it may just be a general ed course and
the last math class they have to take. Just passing will be good enough
for them, and they don't really care if they learn and retain the
material at all. They just need to get a passing grade, however one
might manage that. Others in the class think they are going to be
engineers. Considering what they have ahead of them, they'd darn well
better WANT to learn the stuff I'm teaching them, or else they'd better
choose a different career path. For those who couldn't care less about
the content of my course, what I am doing above is like a noisy wind
blowing past them and they don't hear any meaning in it. For those who
WANT to learn what I am teaching them, what I am saying is good advice,
a coaching strategy that may help them down the line with other courses
as well.

I really encourage anyone who is seriously interested in continuing a
discussion along these lines, to visit the newsgroup k12.chat.teacher.
This type of stuff comes up there often, and there are many intelligent,
dedicated teachers there (and also non-teachers who vary from trolls to
interested friends of educators), who would be willing to discuss this
type of stuff yet one more time.

--
Sheila King
http://www.thinkspot.net/sheila/
http://www.k12groups.org/