Teaching is for artists

 Teaching is for “artists”?

 

There is a great shortage of teachers.  That is not news.   School systems are looking everywhere for people who are willing to be teachers.  Some states are recruiting retired military folks. (Here’s looking at you Florida.) Will these ex-military people make good teachers?   Some very well might.  And the truth is that there are a certain number of traditionally trained individuals who do not make good teachers and in spite of the shortage should not be in a classroom.

Teaching is both an art and a science.   The science part of teaching can be taught to someone relatively easily.  There are specific ways to structure a lesson so that most of the children will achieve the objective.  There are a limited number of methodologies to teach reading and math so that learning those will be enough for most teachers.  Many of the new “research based methods” are simply variation on a theme and not really all that new.  Good teacher educators can teach the science of teaching and reasonably intelligent adults can learn that science.

That brings us to the art of teaching.  Some people might disagree but it is the art that cannot be taught.  The art of teaching is instinctive.  It’s knowing when to push a student to do more and when to stand back and know that what you are seeing is all you are going to get today.  It is knowing which parents are your allies and will join you in the highest expectations for their children and which parents will be the excuse makers and not your partners.   The artist teachers know which kids to kid with and which to be strictly serious. It’s an instinct.   It’s a way to connect with children on a very basic level- human being to human being.  It is laughing with a student who has just said something that might not be exactly appropriate for a student to say in school, but boy was that funny.  It is demonstrating your respect for the child and for his/her background that may well be different from yours.  It is respecting each other’s values even if they are not the same as yours.  It is earning a child’s respect for you rather than demanding that respect because of your position of authority.  

It is being an artist in the classroom.   You may not have all the latest and greatest methods down pat, but if you are the teacher who has the art of teaching, you are the one the kids will remember and tell their kids about.  Teaching is for artists, even if they are retired military

You can't read that

 You can’t read that

 

In a Virginia school district, parents will receive an email telling them every time their child checks out a book.  In a Florida school district, educators have been ordered to remove any books that mention racism, sexism, gender identity or oppression of any kind.   In Pennsylvania, a lay citizen panel will need to sign off on the list of books or other materials that school librarians may order.   In the past two years, six states have moved to limit what kids will be allowed to read and to remove those decisions from professional librarians or educators.  Five more states are considering such legislation this year.

Why are people so afraid and what do we have to lose besides our right to read and think?

Librarians go to school and are educated in the appropriate selection of books for different aged students.  If we do not trust them to do their jobs what will be the consequence.

Are we naïve enough to think that by forbidding kids to read about sex or gender identity they will stop thinking about these topics?  The reality is that when we forbid students from reading material that has been professionally vetted, they will simply move to other sources of information that have not been vetted and may be truly inappropriate. And those unvetted sources will have even more appeal since we all know that what is forbidden becomes immediately desired.  It wasn’t all that long ago when kids learned about sex through prurient novels.  Now they will go to prurient websites.  Is that really what we want?

Some families will tell you that they would certainly not consider book burning- after all authoritarian governments do that.  But books do not need to be burned to be destroyed.  If we go back to the era when all of the children in books had blond hair and peach skin, where does that leave the well over half of our population of kids that do not have these characteristics?  The same is true of LBGTQ kids.  They exist in our schools.  What are we saying to them if they do not exist in our reading material.   You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture, just don’t let people read about it.  Then those people and that culture ceases to be seen and to feel real.  Is this what we want for our children?  Do we really want to create more children who feel alienated from society?

Thinking and reading go hand in hand.  We need to think before we read and to think even harder after we read.

We may take the freedom to read for granted but then again, we took breathing for granted until the doc came with the ventilator.  

What would you thing?

 What would you think?

 

What would you think of a special ed teacher who repeatedly shoved a first grader on the autism spectrum into a trash can, telling him that since he “acted like trash”, he “would be treated like trash”.  She also pushed him to the floor and covered his nose and mouth.  This behavior was reported to school administration, but nothing was done.

The following year, the same teacher forced him to stand all day and poured grease on him.  This behavior was also reported to school administration and nothing was done.  This boy was not the only child this teacher abused.

This little boy was sent to a private therapist by his parents because of the trauma he suffered.  The private therapist reported the abuse to the police, there was a federal trial and the teacher pleaded guilty to assault of an individual with a disability.

The boy’s parents subsequently filed a federal lawsuit against the school administration saying that their son was still suffering psychologically from the experience and that the school administration knowing what was going on had a responsibility to intervene.

The school board on behalf of itself and its administrators argued they were not liable because they had qualified immunity.   The judge ruled in favor of the school board.  He said, “the mere allegation that such disheartening (emphasis added) things occurred at their school does not show that the school officials intended them to happen.”   The boy’s parents had argued through their attorney that malice can be inferred by the officials’ “knowledge of the abuse, failure to investigate, and reckless indifference to the abuse.”

Because of the boy’s limited communication ability, it was two years before, another school and a private therapist that the whole story became known.   Even after the teacher pleaded guilty to assault on a person with a disability, the school board continued to defend and employ her.   

“Public officials can be negligent, public officials can be recklessly indifferent” said the school board’s representative.  “This is what public immunity is for”

Perhaps Mark Twain said it best, “In the first place God made idiots.  This was for practice.  Then he made school boards.”

Ain't Got no Respect

 Ain’t Got no Respect- Flor-ida-dum

 

In the good old days, teachers were not well paid; but they did get a lot of respect.  If you were a teacher or had teachers in your family, you were proud of what you had achieved.   Of course it was also true that for a woman there were essentially three professional choices- the other two being nurse or secretary.

If a kid got in trouble in school, he sometimes didn’t tell his parents for fear he would only get in more trouble at home.

Fast forward to “modern times”.   Teachers are receiving a decent salary for the work they do.  Salaries are even on the rise.  Women are able to move up the administrative ranks to become administrators and even superintendents.  That is pretty much the good news.

Today. If a child gets into trouble the parents are as likely to call a lawyer as they are to call the school to apologize.  Kids aren’t afraid to let their families know they “done wrong” because they expect the parent will work to get them out of any consequences.

Educators are trained to do their jobs which include researching and writing appropriate curriculum.  Not so in Flor-ida-dum and other states where curriculum is written by politicians and has been weaponized to secure next year’s election.  

Families are encouraged to report teachers who stray from the party line and allow students to discuss issues of concern to the students.  The whole reporting system is reminiscent of Joe McCarthy and his House Unamerican Activities committee when Americans were encouraged to report Communists in our midst during the big RED scare.  

Pacing guides, not children’s learning, determine when a teacher should move on to the next topic in the curriculum.

Now the ultimate of disrespect for teachers, the Governor of Flor-ida-dum is recruiting retired military to come and teach in Flor-ida-dum schools.   People who have served in wartime but have NO training or education on how to teach children.  Well at least they are familiar with using a weapon, another Flor-ida-dum idea, arm teachers to prevent school violence.  

Certainly is confusing why someone would not want to teach in Flor-ida-dum?  As a teacher you will be spied upon and reported if you are suspected of not following the party line, you can’t decide the curriculum, nor how to pace what you are teaching AND your government leader thinks so little of your professional skill set that he is bringing in retired military to take your place.

Rodney Dangerfield isn’t the only one with no respect, maybe it’s time to bring back the good old days.

Where oh where have all the teachers gone

 Where oh where have all the teachers gone?

 

School systems throughout Maryland are at a loss as to why so many teachers are leaving the field.  This summer saw the greatest number of teachers leaving in recent history.  So, the big question is way?

The easy, let’s not think about it too deeply, answer is that teachers need to be paid more money.    Let’s get real.  For the amount of education, days worked in a year, and benefits received, teachers are very well compensated.  The days of teachers earning $35,000 a year are very long gone and many first year teachers earn about 35% more than that at the start of their careers.    The average teacher in Maryland earns roughly $67,000.  They work about 190 days.   If you work 5 days a week for 50 weeks that is 255 days a year a great deal more than teachers work.   In the days of lower pay, the excuse was given that teachers needed to work summers to make up for the low salaries.  Not anymore and many school systems pay year round. 

Doesn’t take much investigating to determine that salary is not the issue as much as the easy solution folks would like us to believe. 

This summer a full 40% of the people leaving teaching left voluntarily.  They just didn’t like the job enough anymore.   These were people who had contracts for the upcoming school year, contracts that included hefty raises.  Another 25% left teaching but went to other education related employment.  Only 20% left because they had retired.  And perhaps most importantly, only 6% were terminated for bad performance.

There are several more significant reasons teachers are leaving.  First and foremost are the job demands that leave little time for REAL TEACHING.   There is strong pressure to limit suspensions for bad behavior.  Kids know that.  So there are full out fights in schools, serious bullying, not to mention weapons and drug deals.  Teachers are not law enforcement.  They do not want to carry weapons and they don’t want to be part of police state.  They want administrative support in quelling the bad behavior so they can TEACH.  But administrators are scored on how few students they suspend so suspensions are only happening in the very worst situation.  Generally badly behaved kids are transferred to other schools, not dissimilar from the "dance of the lemons" for bad teachers.

The demand for high stakes testing keeps growing.   Somehow or other someone got the notion that good test scores are the reflection of good teaching.   Good test scores are primarily the result of some kids being great test takers who know how to game the test.

If the two former reasons don’t convince you, there are pacing guides.  A teacher is supposed to be a professional educator.  He/she is supposed to be able to gauge when learning is or is not occurring and to make instructional adjustments.   Pacing guides do not allow those adjustments.   Name the date and the guide tells the teacher what he/she is teaching, student progress be damned.

If we want professional teachers paying them like other professions won’t do the trick.  We need to treat them like other professionals and that includes giving the best teachers the opportunity to earn the best money.