03.07.10
On Teaching
In today’s New York Times Sunday magazine, from an article on what makes good teachers, a remarkable technique is cited:
In Cold Call, No. 22, stolen from Harvard Business School, which Lemov attended, the students don’t raise their hands — the teacher picks the one who will answer the question. Lemov’s favorite variety has the teacher ask the question first, and then say the student’s name, forcing every single student to do the work of figuring out an answer.
All the techniques are meant to be adaptable by anyone. To illustrate cold-calling in Boston, he showed clips of four very different teachers: Mr. Rector, whose seventh graders stand up next to their chairs as he paces among them, lobbing increasingly difficult geometry problems; Ms. Lofthus, who leans back in a chair, supercasual, and smiles warmly when she surprises one second grader by calling on him twice in a row …
Taken from the Harvard Business School, huh?
DD can’t recall being in public school in Pine Grove, PA, in the Sixties and Seventies where teachers didn’t randomly call on kids.
The New York Times Magazine is for upper middle class snobs.
From my perspective it publishes a certain flavor of pap.
And one can always count on a reinvention of the obvious.
For example, I grew up surrounded by teachers, like many Americans. My mother was a teacher at Pine Grove Area Middle School. It was the only job she ever held.
She was a reading instructor. And she hated reading.
I never saw her read a book in her free time at home, ever. She never read for pleasure. Not once — in my memory.
If you read this blog for even 20 seconds, you know DD is a reader.
When I went off to grad school in the late Seventies, my mother took books I’d accumulated over the years but could not take with me, purloining them for her class at Pine Grove Area High School.
Not liking reading, she had no books of her own. To make herself look real, she had to take my clothes.
Was my mother a reading teacher? I have no idea. I had her as my fifth grade teacher for almost a full year in Pine Grove Elementary. It’s a given that a kid ought not to have one of his parents as teacher considering the temptation to always embarrass the child as some manner of good, bad or indifferent example. I can’t recall a single uplifting thing about the experience. However, it was only fifth grade and I knew how to read.
My mom is used here, not only out of spite, but as fairly average proof of the obvious — that teaching schools often turn out those who may not be the best or who frequently don’t even particularly care about the subject they’ve chosen to be certified in. And I am certain a good portion of people my age could still point out public school teachers –ticket-punchers — who mystified because of the obvious dislike or disinterest which they held for the subjects they were earning their money on.
My mother was certified to teach reading by Millersville State Teachers College.
MSTC was a school that required liberal arts and ed students to take three units of music composition.
You’ll recall DD is a rocker and a guitar player, forced to hear his mom’s feeble efforts at composing some fragment of a tune for the course, after being told numerous times that playing the electric guitar or Iggy & the Stooges’ Raw Power too loud was Satan’s work. The class’s instructor issued a pitch pipe to every student.
If you need a pitch pipe, you’re beyond help, tone deaf.
Learning this rubbish had nothing to do with being a teacher. It was just someone’s idea on how education majors needed to be made to jump through various hoops to get their licenses validated.
When I eventually came back from Lehigh University with a Ph.D. in chemistry and before going off to do postdoctoral work at the PSU School of Medicine, I subbed at Pine Grove Area to earn money. This was a mistake.
I started as a chemistry instructor in the high school from which I graduated. This worked under the assumption, now shown to be stupid by US life, that people trained to be expert in something for over half a decade are actually well-trained experts:
I was the most highly qualified instructor Pine Grove ever had. I was quickly pulled off this, the rationale being that I was likely to destroy the reputation and credibility of the high school chem teacher who I was standing in for in front of his students.
The man had been one of Pine Grove Area’s shop teachers.
That made sense.
Don’t overexpose the kids to the Ph.D. in chemistry because it would make the shop teacher’s work harder. Y’know, just in case the young people might harbor an interest in science or something.
So I was then set to teaching algebra at the middle school.
Pine Grove’s schools did have many good teachers. Many of those I could mention are now dead. They ran the gamut from those who had tyrannical discipline — good “classroom management skills” — to those who had no discipline at all.
There was not a common set of features as to what determined a ‘good teacher’ among them. It was governed by circumstance and serendipity, plus a pool that generally was of much higher quality, in terms of raw education, than what is ‘average’ in the country now. Odds were good then that you’d get regularly better than an average cut of person.
And, of course, every classroom wasn’t a pail full of fail, needing daily heroic interventions to be rescued, coming in.
I give “Doug Lemov” — the person who’s techniques and methods are featured in the New York Times magazine — five years or less before he’s thrown to the devil and the merciless statistics of the FUBAR American system.
DD was directed into science by Pine Grove Area High School teachers from wide curricula. This must still happen but one only sees it as a sort of man-bites-dog story in today’s news. It is a great disservice to a US system of education less and less can remember.
Between then and now the country changed radically for the worse.
Among the many unintended consequences: The destruction of public schooling, to be replaced by a never-ending string of ‘problem-solvers’ haplessly trying to regain what never needed losing.
God bless my old teachers at PGAHS. I was rather lucky, it seems. Spanning hard science to athletics to high math, they were teachers I didn’t always like but who I always believed in, people who inspired the young through collegial wisdom and basic human decency.