One of my recent assignments was as more of a tutor than a teacher. The teacher sent me out with a student that completely didn’t understand the previous day’s lesson. Basically, rounding to the nearest ten and adding. 76+49=80+50=130. That sort of thing. The girl was having a really, really hard time understanding the concept. So I sat with her for a half-hour and got it to the point where she very reliably narrow it down to two options (64 rounds to either 60 or 70) and gets the right answer about 80-90% of the time.

She was quite proud of herself. So was I!

So we went back into the classroom and the teacher asked if she got it. I said, half-jokingly, that she either got it or was very good at faking it.

She burst into tears. “I WAS NOT FAKING IT!”

Oops.

Salmon Kahn Khan, of Khan Academy not-really-fame-YET, thinks that we should switch schoolwork and homework around. James Joyner is skeptical on the basis that it robs kids of even more of their childhood the same way homework does*, assisting only those that have the stable environment that likely will have them doing well anyway.

I’m not entirely sold on Khan’s idea, though I think it’s one that is worth exploring. I think it’s one of those things that would fall into the category of changing how we’re doing things. If you were to go forward with this, I think that you would have to look at either (a) shortening the school day or (b) having workstations where they watch the videos while at school. For instance, splitting half the day into consumption and output. Given how untenable shortening the school day is with parents’ work schedules and the like, I think that you’d have to go with the latter plan.

What the video, Joyner’s post, and the ensuing conversation got me thinking about it is virtual-ed and computers in the classroom. If you’d asked me a year ago what I thought about “computers in the classroom”, I probably would have rolled my eyes. It’s a gimmick. It’s a way for school districts to ask for more money for the latest toys. When I was considering graduate school, I was pushed towards Instructional Technology due to my IT major and education minor. One of the reasons I doubt I would have gone that route is because I was (to say the least) unsure about its core mission.

This is one of the biases that actual fieldwork has brought into question. The different schools in the Redstone district have different ways of doing things. Some utilize computers with a lab, some with computers in the classroom (and maybe a lab, too), and some not-at-all. There are three layers to teaching, as near as I can tell: maintaining control of the classroom, keeping kids’ attention, and then educating them. You can’t get to the second layer without passing the first. You can’t get to the third layer – the ostensible purpose of schooling – without passing the first two. To say the least, it’s hard. At least in K-8.

But one of the things that completely astonished me is that classroom order for even the most unruly class becomes nearly a non-issue once computers enter the equation. The same class that I have inordinate amounts of difficulty keeping focused during a lesson or cooperative exercise are suddenly pounding away at their keyboards with the interactive lesson on the computer. And it really doesn’t matter if the program itself is strictly educational (as in an exercise to identify European nations, not play Where In Europe is Carmen San Diego). Part of it is that they know as soon as they finish, they can move on to the learny-type games** that are more fun. If they get questions wrong, they have to go back over it. As best as I can tell, almost all of the incentives are pointed in the right direction: stay focused (if you’re chatting with a classmate, you won’t finish), get it right (or you’ll have to repeat the lesson), and behave (if you’re messing around on the computer, you get a boring worksheet).

Two schools in particular had great programs set up so that as soon as you finish your regular coursework, you were to go to one of the computers or to the computer lab and complete educational exercises. From a teacher’s standpoint, this is golden. You know why teachers give out busywork? To keep kids busy. There’s nothing worse than having ten minutes left in a class and everyone having finished their work. The schools incentivize their computer time with rewards for the more exercises they finish. Whatever they’re giving out, it seems to work. And it provides incentive for the brighter kids to keep learning more.

Which brings me to what I think is perhaps the best thing about the potential of computerizing education, which is individualized instruction. Web and I have both complained in the past about our frustration that the class moves only as fast as its slowest students. One solution to this is tracking, but even within tracked classes you run into variations of the same problem. Even among kids of similar aptitude, you have some that will figure out this lesson quickly but then struggle with that one and others where the reverse is true. Letting those that pick up quickly on one lesson move on to the next is not only good at keeping them busy (and becoming 30-something bloggers complaining about what school was like two decades ago), but good with keeping their minds going and allowing them to go further than they otherwise would. This takes most of the more controversial aspects of tracking off the table. The kids track themselves. Pretty much the only objection here would have to involve outright admitting that you don’t want the smart kids learning anything if the dumb kids can’t learn it, too. Besides, letting the faster and even middling kids take care of themselves (for the most part) allows more resources to be devoted to the slower ones.

There are two other primary objections to going “too far” with computers in the classroom (by which I mean replacing human instruction with computer instruction). First, it separates kids from one another. Second, it’s all part of an attempt to screw the teachers. Tackling the second one first, even if we expanded virtual schools, I doubt that teaching itself would ever become redundant. I, for one, would always want to make sure that there is the option for kids to be taught by teachers in a traditional classroom environment. Most of the time, parents will want the daycare that comes along with school (and many the socialization). So teacher’s roles might change to more of being a supervisor first and tutor second, but to some extent the education establishment has already decided that this is the case with more focus on adolescent psychology than on subject matter. So this is, in a sense, a completion of that aim.

Beyond that, look… I don’t have any particular animus towards teachers. They educated me, after all, and I work with them day in and day out. Most are great people. It’s not with any great enthusiasm that I would suggest a path that could (eventually) put their current job (or job description) in jeopardy. But if there is a better way of going about it involving computers that either produces better results or saves money… well, welcome to the modern age. As I say, I am skeptical that all teaching opportunities would evaporate, but it could become something that much fewer people do. And schools could become more selective. We always talk about how we want a better group of teachers, right?

On socialization, to say that I think it’s overrated is an understatement. Some days I wonder if K-12 socialization isn’t a net negative, where a lot of us have to spend more time unlearning what we socially learned in K-12 than it would take to simply learn through less intense exposure. But even if I’m wrong about that, there’s no reason that the kids can’t go off to a school and still spend recess, lunch, PE, and so on together. Except for group exercises, socialization detracts from education. When they should be learning, they’re talking. Second, even if what I believe about negative socialization is mostly wrong, there are kids for whom it is right. It doesn’t take but two or three kids to hijack an entire classroom. And sometimes kids with other kids is a bad combination.

A while back I was talking to an instructor at the local school for hardened kids. He was talking about how a lot of the kids just need structure, some get worse, and some he wonders why they ever arrived in the first place. Sometimes, you take the kid out of a particular environment and the problem just disappears. If a parent is worried about negative influences on his or her kid, allowing them to be removed can help and a lab with a computer is a place to move them to. To some it sounds dreadful, though for me it would have been heaven as often as not. My friend Clint got three days of in school suspension once where all he got was the days assignment. Best three days in high school, as far as he was concerned.

Except on the cost front, there aren’t too many people “against” computers in the classroom, though there is a contingent to make absolute sure that we don’t rely too much on them. My concerns could not be further from the opposite. Redstone’s schools have a decent half-way solution on a shoe-string budget, but I think that if we are going to do this, let’s really do it. Or try and see what happens. To me, a worst-case is where we are supplying all of the computers with a laptop – which is costly – and not changing the way that we do things – which is also costly. If it doesn’t work, I will be the first to admit it and change my mind. I’ve already changed my mind once, after all.

* – I am of a mixed mind on this. I hear enough complaints about the enormous amounts of homework that kids get that I think that there must be some truth to it. And I am against homework in general. On the other hand, my limited experience suggests that a whole lot of the homework is self-induced. They have time to work on it in class. They choose not to. As someone that would try to race through the coursework so that I didn’t have homework, I kept wanting to ask “Do you really want to have to do this at home?!” And I did ask and the answer was always yes. They didn’t say so, but the reasoning was obvious: at school, they’re surrounded by peers. At home, they’re not.

** – Like Carmen San Diego. Before you laugh, though, I learned far more about European geography through Spies in Europe than I ever did in school.

Back when I was choosing a major, Business actually had a pretty good rep. Everyone my brothers knew were doing really well with their business degrees, so I figured it had to be a “good major”. Then, when I chose Southern Tech, I went to a school with a really good business program that was particular about who they let in and who they let stay in. So I was kind of surprised when I started reading articles referring to business degrees as something of a joke. Looks like it’s going (or has gone) the way of colleges of education:

That might sound like a kids-these-days lament, but all evidence suggests that student disengagement is at its worst in Mr. Mason’s domain: undergraduate business education.

Business majors spend less time preparing for class than do students in any other broad field, according to the most recent National Survey of Student Engagement: Nearly half of seniors majoring in business say they spend fewer than 11 hours a week studying outside class. In their new book, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, the sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa report that on a national test of writing and reasoning skills, business majors had the weakest gains during the first two years of college. And when business students take the GMAT, the entry examination for M.B.A. programs, they score lower than do students in every other major.

This is not a small corner of academe. The family of majors under the business umbrella—including finance, accounting, marketing, management and “general business”—accounts for just over 20 percent, or more than 325,000, of all bachelor’s degrees awarded annually in the United States, making it the most popular field of study.

It seems like just about any major that gets a reputation as a pathway to a good or at least decent job, but isn’t inherently difficult or selective, runs the risk of attracting people looking for little more than a pathway to a good or at least decent job. As a subject field, business falls somewhere in between the liberal arts and technical or scientific fields. Unlike, say, engineering, it doesn’t require the black-and-white tough courses. Unlike liberal arts, it does have the potential to be directly applicable as vocational training. I didn’t end up going into the College of Business, but the business courses I did take have proven to be about as helpful as the technical classes I took.

The temptation has to be strong for universities to water everything down because, unlike with some other vocational fields, you can. And there’s really no cap to the number of graduates that can be produced. My brother was warned against engineering because of the lack of jobs available at the time. His particular field of engineering was cyclical and enough others took that advice that by the time he graduated, they were in demand again. But since you can’t point to a specific cycle for business (if the “business” sector is bad, you’re screwed no matter what you major in), there’s nothing to move people towards other avenues of study.

I got called in for two days this week. Oddly, both seemed to involve special education. Today it’s SE PE, tomorrow it’s just plain special education. I was wondering what was up with that. Apparently, the answer is that they’re training for the Special Olympics.

All of which, perhaps inappropriately, reminds me of the The Onion. First, about the Special Olympics itself:

According to the undercover probe, over the years hundreds and possibly thousands of participating athletes have been declared “winners,” despite losing their respective contests, often by wide margins.

“I don’t think there’s anything ‘winning’ or ‘special’ about finishing in eighth or ninth place,” chief investigator Harlan Brundage said. “Do these kids think they’re winners just because they tried? Just because they gave it their all? Well, let me tell you, trying doesn’t make you a winner. Coming in first does.”

An estimated 15,000 athletes participated in the Special Olympics this year, and, according to Special Olympics awards records, every one of them was declared a “winner.”

The second, in conjunction with a post about demographics serving in the armed forces, Clinton Deploys Very Special Forces:

Clinton said the objective of the mission, dubbed Operation Great Job!, is twofold: to keep pressure on Saddam Hussein to permit the return of U.N. weapons inspectors, and to provide America’s very special forces with a positive, rewarding, esteem-building experience.

“With Operation Great Job!, we send the message loud and clear to Saddam Hussein that his open defiance of the United Nations and international law will not be tolerated,” Clinton said. “We also send the equally important message to our own troops that what’s important is not whether you defeat the enemy, but that you try your best and have fun.”

The subject of bullying and distributive punishment has come up a couple times recently here at Hit Coffee. So it figures that I would see it happening on a substitute teaching assignment.

I’ve had two assignments at Clark Elementary, and they were such that the principal now knows who I am. As with being a student, it’s probably not a good thing when the principal knows who you are when you’re a substitute teacher. The first time involved a class that simply wouldn’t sit down and behave and (I’m guessing) a neighboring teacher called the main office to complain. The principal was great. He took a page out of the same playbook my father uses, guilting the kids into submission (“How do you think it reflects on your parents/teacher/me when you behave this way in front of a substitute?”). Clark is located on the most depleted part of town. I had a bad feeling going in what the day was going to consist of. And to date, it’s the only school where I have run into any real problems.

The second incident occurred last week. Just as with the first class, I was told ahead of time that this class was going to be a handful. But the day actually started out pretty well. Devin, one of the ones identified by the teacher as a potential problem, was left out of computer lab so he and I got some alone time and actually sort of bonded a little bit (he’s originally from Estacado). Then recess happened. During recess, the kids more-or-less line up to shoot baskets. At some point, a kid named Carey got hit on the head with a basketball. I saw it out of the corner of my eye, but it didn’t stick out to me. He was under the basket. It came down from an arc and so didn’t look intentional to me. It wasn’t the first time it had happened on that recess alone.

At the end of recess, another kid, whose name I didn’t know, was really strung up about something. I didn’t really know what. I cannot recall the exact circumstances, but to get him to chill out required my physically restraining him and telling him to go back to class. So I get back to class and as I am getting things settled down, I am informed that Carey is really hurt. “What happened?” “Cregg hit him with a basketball.” I had to take care of a couple other things and then I went to talk to Carey. “What happened?” “Cregg hit me with a basketball.” Oookay. So I look on my seating chart to see if this “Cregg” kid is in my class. He is, but his desk is empty. For about a minute I try to figure out what to do.

The rules specify that under no circumstances are you supposed to leave your class unattended, but as near as I could tell that was more of a guideline than a rule. So I went to go next door to talk to the other sixth grade teacher to let him know that I have a kid missing and another kid hurt. Apparently, while I was trying to figure out what was going on, Devin slipped out of the class and got into a fight with the kid I had to restrain after recess, whose name I discovered was Cregg. Devin had apparently went to confront Cregg about what he did and they got into it. Cregg was frantic because his sweatshirt was missing. So I met the principal for the second time when he was called in.

About ten minutes later, he pulled Carey out of the classroom. They were gone for a majority of the remainder of the day.

The principal walked them back to the classroom and had each one of the three apologize to me and say that it wouldn’t happen again. Not knowing all of the details (only the above), I wasn’t sure what the kids were apologizing for, exactly. Except Devin, I guess. Was Carey apologizing for getting hit on the head with a ball? Was Cregg apologizing for being possibly-wrongly-accused of doing it on purpose? So I didn’t know what they were apologizing for and I don’t know that they did, either. I just knew that all three were apparently in a good deal of trouble and it was possible that the entire class was going to miss out on the field trip at the end of the week.

All of this brought back a lot of memories of how things worked. We don’t know who did what, so you’re all in trouble (even those, possibly, with the misfortune of being in the wrong 6th grade class).

Most agitatingly, Devin, who had been great up until all of that happened, was a real pain in the arse for the rest of the day. A lot of kids were upset with him over possibly losing the field trip and then being one of the kids responsible for them not being able to watch a movie later in the day. He got antagonistic right back and then at some point when I was helping a kid with the math assignment slipped out of the class temporarily. Carey, who hadn’t really been a problem (and whom I had not been warned about being so) was fine. Cregg refused to participate in anything for the next hour or two.

At some point in the afternoon, I got an assist from the special ed teacher in an adjoining room who helped me get the kids to quiet down*. When the day was over, I apologized for the noise throughout the day. To which she said, “Oh, no, they’re never this good when they have a sub. You did great.”

So maybe I haven’t entirely burned my bridge at Clark. Then again, it’s not exactly high on the list of places I would like to substitute again really soon. Also not high on the list is Redstone Middle School, which I’ve also been called back to more than once. It’s probably not a coincidence that these are the schools that have the most urgent need.

Last week Web wrote about a case of a bully fighting back and getting punished for it. This brings up a subject that I’ve written about in the past. I thought I had written a post about it, but if so I can’t find it.

It was the policy of my school system that anybody participating in a fight, regardless of who started it and who “won” it, was to receive equal punishment. The policy in the Redstone school district seems to be similar, though it does appear to leave more discretion in the hands of the administration.

When I was in the 6th grade, I was the target of a 7th grader. In the ebb and flow of growth spurts, I was not at my largest at this point. I was bigger than this kid, but he was taller. He was relentless in the psychological taunts. At one point, I said something relatively meager in response and the next thing I knew I was Target #1. It wasn’t long before I was goaded into what would have been a fight. In the hallway outside the PE room, he and I were lined up and it was obvious what was going to happen.

It was then that red flags started going up in my mind. I realized that, at the core, I couldn’t do this. It wasn’t that I was afraid of getting beaten up. I had no idea who would win. If anything, I was more confident that I could win at the time than I am in retrospect. My main concern was getting in trouble. Getting in trouble with the school, but more importantly getting in trouble with my parents. The notion of the adverse effect it would have on my future was, while not central because what sixth grader is really thinking about such things, nonetheless on the borders of my consciousness.

And that’s the effect of these policies. For good and for ill. Here we had one kid that had no real future to speak of, and you had me. You had one kid whose parents probably didn’t care all that much, and you had parents like mine who would have freaked out. You had one kid for whom suspension is a three-day vacation, and you had me to whom suspension was unthinkable. And, of course, he had friends willing to throw in and I didn’t. In the end, regardless of courage and who would win, he held all the cards. And he knew it.

And it’s this that makes the policy so grossly unfair. It gives one party all of the leverage. Worse than that, it gives the wrong party all the leverage. It places all of the responsibility of avoiding a fight on the kid that is (a) not the instigator and (b) the one more inclined to follow rules.

Yet while the policy was grossly unfair, it had a certain effectiveness. Because I knew that I couldn’t get into a fight, I walked away and paid the social price for it. And I walked on friggin’ eggshells never to be put in that situation again. I took body gloves*. I took depantsing. I took stolen caps, stolen pencils, and all manner of other torment. While that absolutely, positively sucked for me, no fights occurred. Without that policy, they would have. And while it is completely unfair to do so, placing the burden on the more responsible party is effective insofar as the responsible party can be more relied on to defuse the fight. To walk away. To be a coward. What I discovered was that there was almost always a way to avoid a full-on fight, so long as you checked your self-respect at the door. Of course, it also lead me to things which the district would not approve of.

And from the administration’s standpoint, what’s the alternative? Most fights occur outside eyesight, so you take one kid who says “he hit me” and the other saying “no, I didn’t” or “he tried to hit me, first!” and what do you do? Common sense may tell you that Kid A is a generally good kid with good marks and good conduct scores while Kid B is always in trouble, but do you punish kids based on supposition? In my first substitute teaching assignment, I had a first grade class with a particular troublemaker. When the main teacher was there and I was observing and waiting to take over, I saw a couple of occasions where the troublemaker hadn’t actually done anything wrong but was blamed anyway because… well… he was a troublemaker. I felt sorry for the kid right up until I took the reins and discovered exactly why teachers were targeting him.

Back on the first hand, the policy excuses administration/teacher response considerably. They don’t need to stop fights because they don’t have to worry about the fallout. The punishments are send down from on high. No need to figure out the circumstances. No need to figure out who started it and who wasn’t able to walk away. So all of those things that lead up to fights, like verbal taunting, one-off assaults, and so on can be simply ignored or merely tut-tutted. In PE, the body gloves occurred in full view of the coach, who would simply tell the kid to cut it out (which they wouldn’t) and commence. And in a perverse way, you were thankful for this, because the alternative was that the coach would punish the entire class with pushups or laps. And when that happened, who do you think the more powerful within the class targeted? The big kid whom nobody wanted to cross) or the kid who had the temerity to say “ouch”?

And so it becomes a bureaucratic thing. It allows teachers to ignore that which can be ignored. And it absolves them of any involvement (except meting out standardized punishment) of that which cannot be ignored. But it does manage to cut down on the actual number of fights, on the whole. If you’re willing to overlook everything else.

This is where a whole lot of Casey’s support comes from, I think. Having been in the situation that I describe above. I had a pretty good friend in high school, Sam, who became our Casey. One of the more notorious bullies assaulted him (discovering later that his arm was broken in the process). Sam retaliated with a pencil jab near the eye. The bully wore an eyepatch for a couple months after while Sam had to wear a cast for a while. Both were suspended for three days and made complete physical recoveries (though the bully stopped being much of a bully after that). When my friend’s parents objected to his punishment, they actually used the fact that Sam didn’t know that his arm had been broken when he retaliated, and that he didn’t know that the pencil wouldn’t kill the bully (a fairer point).

* – Body gloving is where, when someone is shirtless, you slap them across the back with fingers spread and an open palm. It leaves a hand-shaped mark. And hurts like hell. Needless to say, in any shirts/skins game, I cringed whenever I was put on the skins team.

When I was in high school, my favorite (in the sense that I kind of liked him and was indifferent to or detested the others) was Mr Holt. Holt was a retired chemical engineer who struck it big with his employer’s IPO and decided that he wanted to teach.

His opening lecture had us take a simple sort of test. We were supposed to follow the instructions on a worksheet. The first of which was “Read all of the instructions first.” The last of which was “Disregard all instructions but the first.”

Nobody did that, of course. And so when instruction number two said “raise your hand,” most of the class did. Same for stand up for three seconds then sit down. One by one, we began to notice fewer people doing these odd little things. We went back to the first instruction, followed it, then saw the last instructions. Towards the middle of the document the commands became verbal “Say ‘This room is hot.'” By the end, you were to be saying things like “I cannot follow instructions precisely.” Only a couple got that far. Most had, by simple way of noticing what their peers were not doing, figured it out.

As someone that never got “in” to science, it was one of the most instructive lessons ever. Partially the social aspect of it. You noticed what others weren’t doing and then tried to figure out why. But mostly, it was a good lesson on understanding the importance of following instructions. Kind of important for a chemistry class. Kind of important for life.

On the other hand, going through the training manual for my (hopefully) coming job, it’s apparently a lesson I forgot. It said, quite clearly, “Do not do anything that is not specified in the instructions, no matter how obvious it may seem.”

Oops.

Over on youtube, there’s a video from a school in Australia, of a kid who fights back against a bully. A website covers it here in a lot of depth. The Daily Mail covers it as well… including what I find outrageous, that the stupid idiots in charge of the school suspended both Casey and the bully for four days.

Why does this piss me off? Because the bully is clearly trying to start a fight. Casey doesn’t throw the first punch… or even the first several. The bully has two of his friends there to “back him up.” Even after the one bully is taken care of, the others are there trying to step in and pull Casey into another fight.

And if you listen to the audio and read some of the other coverage, you find out that the attack was brought on by the fact that Casey had tried to report the ongoing bullying to school officials. They were attacking him specifically to try to make him shut up and not report their behavior. A subtitled version (rechecked) makes it clear:

When I was younger, I went through situations precisely like this. Cornered “out of sight” of the teachers (who didn’t WANT to be involved because it meant paperwork and potential lawsuits for them no matter which kid “won”), then physically attacked. There was no video to show what happened to me. After defending myself against a worthless shit of an F-level student who didn’t care if he went in and out of detention on a revolving door schedule, I found myself in a 3-day suspension from our fuckwit of a vice principal who believed “there’s no such thing as a bully” and who demanded my parents see about “counseling” me for being in a fight rather than “walking away” (where the FUCK was I supposed to get to, being cornered by 3 kids?) or “calling for help” (which I had done, but no teacher responded until I was already physically attacked). I failed a test based on in-class handouts in science class because I wasn’t given the study materials by the science teacher, who said “students who miss class don’t get the handouts so there” (despite the fact that if you were out sick, he’d have it prepared for you when you got back).

I applaud Casey. I agree wholeheartedly with this comic. It takes a lot to stand up to a group of bullies, especially when it’s 3 on 1.

Oh, and to Tina Gale, the crocodile-tear-spewing mother of the bully who got what he deserved: I am sorry you inflicted your genes on the next generation by spawning that reprehensible bully. Now grow the hell up and change the way you’re raising your brat.

My time has been monopolized lately by school. I don’t just mean the substitute teaching gig, but also various debates about education going on over at The League and elsewhere. I don’t generally go on to rants about education policy because (a) this isn’t a policy blog and (b) it’s one of those subjects where people share neither opinions nor the same set of facts (and, since education is something that everybody has some experience in if only as a student, everyone knows that what they think is factual in nature). But there are exceptions to every rule.

A number of folks think that one of the solutions to improving education is “raising teacher standards.*” I have lately begun to wonder the degree to which teacher quality actually matters outside the extremes, but I’m going to let that go for now. Let’s say that it does. The notion that we should raise teacher standards sounds like a no-brainer. Who doesn’t want raised standards? All other things being equal, who doesn’t want teachers that are more qualified rather than less qualified?

The problem comes in when we talk about what we mean by increased standards. And I have to confess, when I hear about calls for raising teacher standards, I inwardly cringe. Because what I figure they mean, more often than not, is a more rigorous certification process requiring an MA in education rather than a BA and to cut back on alternative forms of certification. In other words, take the walls we have now and just build them higher.

I think this view is flawed for a couple of reasons. First and foremost, it assumes that the current barriers are effective. I think that most of the people here know about the reputation that Colleges of Education have in terms of recruiting the worst students at any given university. Now, maybe we could change this if we paid teachers more or whatnot, but I’m not sure how much that would actually drive people into CoE’s. By and large, I actually think that the vocational nature of it is one of the things that keeps a lot of the smarter kids out. Get a degree in education and there’s mainly one thing you can do with it. An often stressful and thankless position at that. But even more than that, it’s a job that you will have no idea if you’re well-suited for until you’ve spent 4 or 5 years and $40k or $50k training for it. And if it turns out that you don’t like doing it, what then?

If you get a degree in computers, you will get a decent idea of whether it’s something you want to do or not well before you graduate. You will be given assignments that will look at least somewhat like future work. Learning how to program and programming are not nearly as different as learning how to teach and actually teaching. Further, if you have an IT degree, there are a lot of things within the field you can do with it. If you don’t like doing one thing, you can try to transition into another. If you’re a teacher, the primary part of the job (standing and directing a class of 20-40 kids) is going to be relatively similar from one place to the next. If it turns out that it was nothing like you had envisioned… again, what then? Even something as specialized as aeronautical engineering, which my brother and father both have degrees in, provide some flexibility (both stopped actually engineering by the time they were 35). The more you specialize teaching, the more you isolate would-be teachers from other career options.

And – this is important – the more you attract people who just want to make a living. People who say to themselves, “Well, I guess I’ll teach.” A lot of people go into teaching because they have a passion for it. A lot of others go into it because it’s perceived to be a relatively safe career choice**. This leaves out a lot of smart and thoughtful people who think that they might want to teach, and might be good at it, but don’t want to bet their entire future on it because they want to get more from their job than a paycheck and no better options. By far, the worst teachers I had growing up were ones that weren’t dumb, but were obviously in the wrong field. A couple that flat-out didn’t like kids (anymore). These are people that needed to move on to something else. But with that education degree, what precisely could they move on to.

Of course, I also look at this from the other side. From the outside looking in. If my experiences substituting are any indication, I think that teaching is something that I would enjoy. Despite having taken the coursework a minor in education, I would have to go back to school for three full years before I could be certified (to teach the subject in which I already have a degree). In the state of Arapaho, I would have to re-take a portion of the classes I’ve already taken because I took “Honors Political Science” rather than “Government in Education”. My father looked into teaching math after he retired. He figured that since he had a degree in engineering and a master’s degree in accounting and economics, that he might be able to do it. The local community college thought so, but the school district said he would need to go back to school for two years.

In Dad’s case, we’re talking about Delosa, which actually has looser standards than many other states. You could, for instance, go with alternative certification. In that case, you start teaching right away (though you still have to go back to school at night). Unless a certified teacher applies for your job, in which case, even if you’ve spent the last year taking night classes, as “emergency personnel” you’re out of the job.

There is a strong counterargument to all of this. Namely, that teachers need not only know their subject, but ought to know a thing or two about educating young people, too. I am sympathetic to this line of argument, but not too sympathetic. While having the educational background helps, I think that a lot of teaching ability is temperamental and innate. Either you’ve got it or you don’t. Going back to school may help you get better at it, but it neither assures competence nor is required for competence. Given the lack of formal training, I think it would be entirely reasonable to give non-certified personnel less in the way of job protections than the average teacher gets. Not so little protection that they are out of the job the minute someone certified applies for it, but serving at the pleasure of the principal.

You can read over the last few paragraphs and say “So we should lower teacher standards?!” Which is why my teeth grit when I hear that we should be raising them. I don’t think we should lower standards at all. I don’t think that requiring that they have a degree in the subject they teach, rather than in education, is a step down.

I am not one of those people arguing that should abolish colleges of education. If nothing else, I think that they would be required for primary school where learning about human development is probably more important than having a degree in a specific subject. I also see use for them in coordinating certification as I would do it, which is to allow people to major in something else but get a minor in education and maybe even another in human development in order to get certified.

I am not unsympathetic to the notion that we want teaching to be viewed as a profession rather than a job, and it would seem that specialized degrees would be an extension of that. However, given the peculiarities of the job, I’m not sure it works in this case. I think that there is more to be gained by allowing people to view it as a professional option rather than to committing to it at 18 or having huge barriers erected to prevent them from trying it later.

-{NOTE: Education, teaching, and teachers have been getting a lot of press lately. This post is not about Wisconsin or teacher’s unions. Let’s also avoid comments derogatory of teachers more generally. Despite what the statistics say about CoE, a lot of very intelligent and capable people become teachers.}-

* – At this point, you may be thinking, “No, the solution to improving education is X.” If you write about it on your blog, I will link to it. But as I mentioned, education is something that everyone has experience in and everyone is cocksure that they have the solution for. I am no different. But I’m limiting my comments to teacher standards and certifications, so I ask that you do the same.

** – By which I mean that there is generally a steady – though sometimes unimpressive depending on your point of view – paycheck involved. There’s usually (at the moment) a good pension plan. And there is the perception that there is a teacher shortage and so finding a job won’t be difficult. That last part isn’t exactly true, but it is the perception.

In Illinois, somebody goofed:

Our local news has recently been covering the story of a substitute school teacher who showed a fourth grade classroom a movie about slavery. The movie, “The Middle Passage,” belonged to the fourth grade classroom’s regular teacher, and the teacher left a note asking the sub to show it while she was out. The movie, not previously screened by any school administrator, was marked, “adult content, violence and nudity,” and depicted the appalling sea voyage of slaves on a trading vessel from Africa. The storyline included suicide, rape, and throwing dead bodies to the sharks.

It’s fair to say that when parents caught wind of the movie, all hell broke loose. The school district’s co-superintendents apologized for the movie, quickly put new media policies in place, and fired the substitute teacher.

I guess I am beginning to think of myself as a “substitute teacher”, because my immediate response was… wait, fired the substitute?! They just did what they were told! Granted, if I were in that situation, there is a good chance that I would stop it and go talk to somebody. But there’s not exactly a protocol for that since you can be fired for leaving the kids alone and I might be too stunned to figure out a way around that (presumably sending a kid to get somebody from the office over there). Maybe that district, unlike Redstone, has training that deals with the issue of depictions of rape on a teacher-approved movie.

Which is the other part. The real culpability here lies with the teachers that assigned the movie. It turned out that there was more than one. Two substitutes showed the movie to their respective classes. A third non-sub started it but stopped it when they realized that it was inappropriate. Anyhow, substitute teachers assume that the regular teachers know what they’re doing. We have to. So if anyone should be fired, it shouldn’t be the person getting $80 a day a couple days a week. It should be the person who decided that this movie was okay without watching it, despite the warning label and despite the fact that it’s HBO. Of course, unless you were a prostitute, there are rules in place to make firing a teacher difficult. Easier to fire the schlub.

Well, apparently they reconsidered and the sub was allowed back into the classroom. I haven’t read anything about whether the teachers were disciplined in any way. And to be honest, I wouldn’t exactly be outraged if they weren’t. Errors in judgment happen. Putting together a district policy is probably the right answer to this. But if they’re not going to fire the teacher, they sure shouldn’t fire the person doing what the teacher told them to. So they got that much right.