[etni] You think you know what teachers do. Right? Wrong.
- From: Margie Cohen-Jackel <margiecj@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: Etni <etni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Margie -JackelCohen <margiecj@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 1 Mar 2014 09:42:31 +0200
You think you know what teachers do. Right? Wrong.
- BY VALERIE
STRAUSS<http://www.washingtonpost.com/valerie-strauss/2011/03/07/ABZrToO_page.html>
-
<Valerie.Strauss@xxxxxxxxxxxx?subject=Reader%20feedback%20for%20%27You%20think%20you%20know%20what%20teachers%20do.%20Right?%20Wrong.%27>
- February 22 at 11:30 am
[image: (freepik.com)]
(freepik.com)
You went to school so you think you know what teachers do, right? You are
wrong. Here's a piece explaining all of this from Sarah Blaine, a mom,
former teacher and full-time practicing attorney in New Jersey who writes
at
herparentingthecore<http://parentingthecore.wordpress.com/2014/02/18/the-teachers/>
blog,
where this first appeared.
By Sarah Blaine
We all know what teachers do, right? After all, we were all students. Each
one of us, each product of public education, we each sat through class
after class for thirteen years. We encountered dozens of teachers. We had
our kindergarten teachers and our first grade teachers and our fifth grade
teachers and our gym teachers and our art teachers and our music teachers.
We had our science teachers and our social studies teachers and our English
teachers and our math teachers. If we were lucky, we might even have had
our Latin teachers or our Spanish teachers or our physics teachers or our
psychology teachers. Heck, I even had a seventh grade "Communications
Skills" teacher. We had our guidance counselors and our principals and some
of us had our special education teachers and our study hall monitors.
So we know teachers. We get teachers. We know what happens in classrooms,
and we know what teachers do. We know which teachers are effective, we know
which teachers left lasting impressions, we know which teachers changed our
lives, and we know which teachers sucked.
We know. We know which teachers changed lives for the better. We know which
teachers changed lives for the worse.
Teaching as a profession has no mystery. It has no mystique. It has no
respect.
We were students, and therefore we know teachers. We denigrate teachers. We
criticize teachers. We can do better than teachers. After all: We do. They
teach.
We are wrong.
We need to honor teachers. We need to respect teachers. We need to listen
to teachers. We need to stop reducing teachers to arbitrary measurements of
student growth on so-called objective exams.
Most of all, we need to stop thinking that we know anything about teaching
merely by virtue of having once been students.
We don't know.
I spent a little over a year earning a master of arts in teaching degree.
Then I spent two years teaching English Language Arts in a rural public
high school. And I learned that my 13 years as a public school student, my
4 years as a college student at a highly selective college, and even a
great deal of my year as a master's degree student in the education school
of a flagship public university hadn't taught me how to manage a classroom,
how to reach students, how to inspire a love of learning, how to teach.
Eighteen years as a student (and a year of preschool before that), and I
didn't know anything about teaching. Only years of practicing my skills and
honing my skills would have rendered me a true professional. An expert.
Someone who knows about the business of inspiring children. Of reaching
students. Of making a difference. Of teaching.
I didn't stay. I copped out. I left. I went home to suburban New Jersey,
and a year later I enrolled in law school.
I passed the bar. I began to practice law at a prestigious large law firm.
Three years as a law student had no more prepared me for the practice of
law than 18 years of experience as a student had previously prepared me to
teach. But even in my first year as a practicing attorney, I earned five
times what a first-year teacher made in the district where I'd taught.
I worked hard in my first year of practicing law. But I didn't work five
times harder than I'd worked in my first year of teaching. In fact, I
didn't work any harder. Maybe I worked a little less.
But I continued to practice. I continued to learn. Nine years after my law
school graduation, I think I have some idea of how to litigate a case. But
I am not a perfect lawyer. There is still more I could learn, more I could
do, better legal instincts I could develop over time. I could hone my
strategic sense. I could do better, be better. Learn more law. Learn more
procedure. But law is a practice, law is a profession. Lawyers are expected
to evolve over the course of their careers. Lawyers are given more
responsibility as they earn it.
New teachers take on full responsibility the day they set foot in their
first classrooms.
The people I encounter out in the world now respect me as a lawyer, as a
professional, in part because the vast majority of them have absolutely no
idea what I really do.
All of you former students who are not teachers and not lawyers, you have
no more idea of what it is to teach than you do of what it is to practice
law.
All of you former students: you did not design curricula, plan lessons,
attend faculty meetings, assess papers, design rubrics, create exams,
prepare report cards, and monitor attendance. You did not tutor students,
review rough drafts, and create study questions. You did not assign
homework. You did not write daily lesson objectives on the white board. You
did not write poems of the week on the white board. You did not write
homework on the white board. You did not learn to write legibly on the
white board while simultaneously making sure that none of your students
threw a chair out a window.
You did not design lessons that succeeded. You did not design lessons that
failed.
You did not learn to keep your students quiet during lock down drills.
You did not learn that your 15-year-old students were pregnant from their
answers to vocabulary quizzes. You did not learn how to teach functionally
illiterate high school students to appreciate Shakespeare. You did not
design lessons to teach students close reading skills by starting with the
lyrics to pop songs. You did not miserably fail your honors level students
at least in part because you had no books to give them. You did not
struggle to teach your students how to develop a thesis for their essays,
and bask in the joy of having taught a successful lesson, of having gotten
through to them, even for five minutes. You did not struggle with trying to
make SAT-level vocabulary relevant to students who did not have a single
college in their county. You did not laugh -- because you so desperately
wanted to cry -- when you read some of the absurdities on their final exams.
You did not struggle to reach students who proudly announced that they only
came to school so that their mom's food stamps didn't get reduced.
You did not spend all of New Years' Day crying five years after you'd left
the classroom because you reviewed The New York Times' graphic of soldiers
killed in Iraq and Afghanistan and learned that one of your very favorite
students had been killed in Iraq two years before. And you didn't know.
Because you copped out and left. So you cried, helplessly, and the next day
you returned to the practice of law.
You did not. And you don't know. You observed. Maybe you learned. But you
didn't teach.
The problem with teaching as a profession is that every single adult
citizen of this country thinks that they know what teachers do. And they
don't. So they prescribe solutions, and they develop public policy, and
they editorialize, and they politicize. And they don't listen to those who
do know. Those who could teach. The teachers.
--
Margie Cohen-Jackel
M.S.S.A, MAJEd.
S. Ben-Zion St. 40
Rehovot 7647218 ISRAEL
972-77-9330695 home
972-522-937800 mobile
blog: http://margiecj.blogspot.co.il
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- » [etni] You think you know what teachers do. Right? Wrong. - Margie Cohen-Jackel