One of my little obsessions is with the practice of teaching. While I’m nominally an engineer, whose job it is to essentially make machines work, I’m a pretty good teacher in a small scale environment (e.g. explaining some new technology to a small group of colleagues) and I think I’m good at constructively engaging and maintaining the attention of the average child. And while I do recognize the critical role of teachers in our society, and the dire need for scientifically and mathematically literate teachers, I don’t think I’m the right person to do that.
But that doesn’t stop me from being fascinated by the topic. Here are a few recent things that I found engaging.
The Principal Story ran on PBS last year and focuses on two school principals who are trying to educate in an environment where everyone expects failure. They are not afraid to scrutinize teacher performance or even fire teachers, but there remains a lot of dysfunction there in the teaching corps, even within the principal himself/herself. They put a withering amount of energy into their efforts, with some impact on their personal lives. And at the end is a coda where Arne Duncan is interviewed about questions raised, and not just softball questions either.
The Street Stops Here is a documentary about St. Anthony’s, a parochial (Catholic) school in Jersey City, New Jersey. Known nationwide for producing great basketball players, the school has a perennial struggle to find the money to keep the doors open and keep educating some of the most deserving kids of the New York metro area. While the doc is structured around the basketball program and the high-strung coach Bob Hurley (yeah, father of Bobby), there’s a lot of insight into the world that these kids are coming from and trying to escape.
Whatever It Takes (via Independent Lens) is a similar story on a smaller scale. Edward Tom quit his burgeoning business career to take on the job of principal at a new public school in the South Bronx, one of the worst neighborhoods in the US, and follows him and his faculty and his students as they struggle through the first year of the school’s operation.
A March 2010 feature article in the NYT magazine really drew this into focus for me personally. My central problem with the career of teaching is that I don’t think I could maintain control of the classroom, or even control of myself when faced with various classroom order challenges. Brute intelligence is no match for a room full of choatic teenagers. The NYT article talks at length about the efforts of Doug Lemov, an education researcher with an organization call Uncommon Schools, who has gone around the country observing successful teachers. He’s trying to distill exactly what the techniques are that make the difference between a good teacher and a bad one.
The result,so far, is his book Teach Like A Champion, which proscribes 49 techniques that a teacher can use to maintain control in a classroom and effectively deliver new knowledge. Techniques like “No Opt Out”, which deals with the bored shrug of a student by asking another student for the answer and then doubling back to the original student for the same answer. Repeatedly, until he answers (basically repeating the answer he just heard from another student), thus showing him that he’s not going to avoid get picked simply by doing a crappy job.
The book even comes with a DVD containing short video clips of actual teachers employing these techniques in their classrooms. It is an inspiring sight to watch these teachers maintain a tight grip on their classroom, but do so in a positive way that doesn’t let the inevitable classroom disruption derail the day’s lesson.
It’s quite sobering to see the amount of energy and discipline that goes into running a classroom this way. And I can see that there are probably critics who will call these techniques rigid to the point of cartoonishness. I mean, school uniforms is one thing, but these teachers have the students standing at attention and responding in unison to barked-out commands.
And the teacher unions. Teachers know more about these issues than anyone, but then you have these ludicrous situations that result from a horribly distorted system, such as rubber rooms. I think there are valid criticisms on both sides of the debate, but it’s hard to separate when there’s so much shouting and posturing going on. I do still have faith that Obama and Duncan will at least make some progress in pushing this mess in the right direction.
I really don’t think I want to be a teacher, but the subject does fascinate me.