Here's the second-to-last paragraph:
Indeed, the biggest insult to the intelligence of American teachers is the idea that their intelligence doesn’t matter. “The teaching of A, B, C, and the multiplication table has no quality of sacredness in it,” Horace Mann said in 1839. Instead of focusing on students’ mental skills, Mann urged, teachers should promote “good-will towards men” and “reverence to God.” Teachers need to be good, more than they need to be smart; their job is to nurture souls, not minds. So Garret Keizer’s first supervisor worried that he might have too many grades of A on his college transcript to succeed as a high school teacher, and Elizabeth Green concludes her otherwise skeptical book with the much-heard platitude that teachers need to “love” their students.Garret Keizer is the author of "Getting Schooled: The Reeducation of an American Teacher," and Elizabeth Green is the author of "Building a Better Teacher: How Teaching Works (and How to Teach It to Everyone)."
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14 comments:
Anthony's statement doesn't make any logical sense. I do not see that at all.
That doesn't mean whatever people believed back then about women or education was correct. They might have been wrong ... but she's definitely wrong.
The teachers should love their students? In high school, for example, when even loving parents have had enough of the hormonal maniacs? We need good teachers, not saints.
In any event, loving is a long series of actions, not just a feeling and certainly not words. The best way to be a loving teacher is to be a effective one.
The problem is that teaching is a fall-back after College Students have fallen out of other majors that are more rigorous. So you end up with an Elementary Ed major who knows very little about anything but the latest trends in Education theory -- ideas that are forever changing as new Education PhDs are minted, PhDs that test lamebrain ideas/theories with the use of bad statistics to show they "work"
And Unions demand that this is the way so that Education PhDs who are wedded to the idea that Unions Are Awesome can have a job at a University (where they are likely Union members).
Not that I'm cynical or anything.
...and let me add to my cynicism:
How else can what would have been a College Dropout finagle themselves into a career that will provide for them a pretty decent living -- on the back of taxpayers who can't help but notice how lousy some teachers are, but those teachers can't be pushed out because they've been around forever and the Union Loves Their Dues!
(Back to grading)
Zimmerman's article is ridiculous. He seems to feel:
1. the purpose of school is to create good NYU students: intellectually curious, able to read and think about academic writing.
2. we know how to create teachers who will create students like this.
Number two is so false, no matter how many references to Finland and Japan are made. The "we now know how to make great teachers" is like "technology is now going to transform education." Zimmerman righteously relates how the latter has been said for decades--but never actually works out.
Number one is also impossible for most young people. More basically, should that be THE goal of all schools, even if it were possible?
"Why Is American Teaching So Bad?"
It's not.
Indeed, the biggest insult to the intelligence of American teachers is the idea that their intelligence doesn’t matter.
Above a fairly low threshold,
it doesn't matter.
This is really weird to me.... I went to a small rural school where most of the teachers ...and all the elementary teachers...were women. This was in the fifties and sixties, and the teachers were of a generation when women didn't have opportunities. The result was we got women who had grown up on farms, went to normal schools for a teaching degree, and were really good. In fact, they were superb, the result of there being no other opportunities, the smartest women often chose teaching. That's not the case now, when you automatically assume most teachers aren't that bright. Before Ann puts on Wisconsin badger football cleats to jump up and down on my head, I'm not saying that's right. It simply is how it worked, and we should figure out a way to draw smart people into teaching. The way teaching is now structured you draw in time servers, who want benefits and a pension, and who complain about burnout. Tim
Dumb teachers really are a problem. My bright kids are at a charter school (Great Hearts) where all their teachers are at least as smart as they are and the curriculum is substantial and rigorous. The one year they spent in the public schools here -- in an "A" rated district, in "A" rated schools -- they were bored and frustrated. Their teachers routinely said stupid things that I'd have to help them un-learn and the curriculum lacked both depth and rigor.
I do think it's possible to learn how to teach better, but not without deep content knowledge. You can't effectively teach a subject (past early elementary) without understanding it yourself. But even if you understand it, that doesn't mean you know how to teach it. Now in my 5th year of teaching the same curriculum, I know where my students are most likely to get confused and so I can help clarify those areas right from the start. I know which things they need to practice repeatedly, and which concepts they just "get" because, you know, they're alive and at least somewhat conscious.
There's really good work going on in teacher education right now. I was very skeptical about NGSS, next generation science standards, sort of "common core" for science. It takes a completely different approach to science education which, if it can be effectively implemented, will be fantastic, but that's a really big "if", and it depends on educating teachers so they can do it.
I'm hopeful.
Wow, a huge straw man full of straw. I guess it was never profitable to speak plainly or directly in the political domain.
My comment would mirror tim Wright and Jane.
We attended a large high school and there were about 9 teachers in the math dept. at least 2 had PhD - one a man and the other a woman. All were excellent mathematicians, and we got an excellent education. My wife was math teacher. We graduated from college in 1960, and there were not too many other roads for women to take at that time. But, as I started my career, I could see, with the advent of computer programming, and other advances that there were other occupations in which women would be allowed to excel.
So, not as many of the 'brainy' women are teaching, and I consider this to be a loss to the school system.
This may be too cynical, but I feel that many elementary kids don't learn math as they should because the elementary education teachers do not like math, and do not teach it from a level of really understanding it.
Enough of a rant.
The four biggest problems in education today are:
1) Unreasonable expectations. For some reason the "college for all" idea not only dominates education, it is nearly indisputable. (meaning you are not allowed to dispute it) At my school, the lowest evel course offering besides Special Education core classes, is College Prep. There are no General Education classes. So the Senior kid who is taking two periods of auto shop, (or the one already accepted into the military as an enlisted man, etc) and already has his job lined up, still has to take "College Prep" English, Government and Economics if he wants to graduate. Not only is this unfair to these kids, it inevitable dumbs down the "College Prep" classes.
2) The almost complete lack of Vocational Education programs. I am extremely proud that my school has programs for Auto Shop, Masonry and Nursing. We need plumbers, electricians, handymen, computer techs (the ones who do the upkeep and repair don't need college)....and these can be very high paying jobs.
3) The destruction of families. The disappearance of the stay at home Mom, and even marriage, has seriously impacted parental involvement in their children's education.
4) Federal control. Abolish the Department of Education and return education to the states where it belongs.
Why would Susan B. Anthony say such a thing? I concede freely that women might have superior insight into the important issues, such as fashion, while believing that men have superior insight into such trivialities as theology. So I would read fashion magazines edited by women, and attend sermons delivered by men.
Men who choose to teach -- or choose to do nearly any other ordinary profession -- don't have any more brains than a woman. Why would they? Didn't Anthony believe the average woman had the same brains as the average man? Weird.
Ah yes, the real reason the Catholuc Church doesn't want to touch women priests. It's a hard enough sell as it is.
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