Category: teaching

Categories
Education New Jersey teachers teaching

Thirty Years an Educator

Thirty years ago today, I walked into York Preparatory School on New York’s Upper East Side for my first day as a high school history teacher. I had no formal training as a teacher except for my degree in History from Syracuse University. I had been working in advertising for a Madison Avenue firm that no longer exists using the other major I completed at Syracuse, in Telecommunications Management from the Newhouse School of Public Communications. I liked the work, liked the atmosphere, liked the potential for advancement and economic gain.

And yet.

From the time I was about 15 or 16, I had thought about teaching and knew that I could be successful at it, but I didn’t pursue it for all of the logical reasons: low pay, lack of societal respect, and low pay. I loved history, and obviously still do, and had fun taking courses. I went into acting and stand-up comedy, worked in television in New Jersey and advertising in New York. The turn to teaching came, as many great things in life, by happenstance.

I had a friend from college who was a teacher and she told me there was an opening at the private school where she taught, and she also said that you didn’t need a teaching certificate to teach in private schools. I called and was able to schedule an interview. Turns out the headmaster went to graduate school with my father. He was a nice guy. The head of the history department wanted someone with more experience. I figured I had come to the end of the string.

Four months later, a different headmaster called me and said he’d gotten my name from this other headmaster, who happened to be his brother-in-law. It turned out that one of the teachers wasn’t working out and was I interested in teaching? I interviewed. The headmaster was a very nice guy, and so was the department chair. We talked history for an hour. They hired me.

I wore a three piece suit with Allen Edmonds wing tips on the first day. Reported at 8:00, while my first class wasn’t until 11:30. During that crucial three hour stretch, I received my teaching degree from the Ronald P. Klein School of Teacher Preparedness. Ron was a fellow history teacher and over the four years I was at York Prep we became very good friends. They were probably the most productive hours in teacher training I’ve ever spent. He told me to focus on classroom management and to engage the students at every turn. He said to be respectful, but not to smile before January. He said to make students think and write, write, write. It was terrific advice. I still follow it, except maybe for the smiling part.

But the best part was that I loved it, as I thought I would. Loved being with the students studying history. Loved the energy and inquisitiveness that most of the students exhibited. Loved the atmosphere. Loved the schedule. Loved it.

And I still do. Yes, I have written over the years about how teachers aren’t as respected in American society as they need to be, and I don’t see that changing any time soon. And yes, pay increases are not keeping up with the cost of living in New Jersey, and many teachers are actually taking home less pay despite some salary increases because they are paying more for their health and pension benefits.

Oh, and then there is the constant, cyclical adoption of trendy educational ideas that are supposed to guarantee student success in the classroom and in life. Back-to-basic education, Whole Language instruction, Reading in Context, Cooperative Education, Differentiation, Phonics, New Math, Self-Esteem, Learning Clusters, and now Common Core Standards. I’ve missed many, but they’re all fads including the new teacher evaluation system in many of the states. These too will be replaced soon because they don’t do what they promise to do, and that’s to improve both teacher and student performance.

What will guarantee education excellence is to have excellent teachers in the classrooms. So far we’ve done a good job of that, but we need to do more to ensure that the next generation of teachers is more widely respected, paid according to their societal worth and make sure phony politicians have as little to do with what happens in schools as possible.

I consider myself lucky to be able to say that I still enjoy getting up at 5:30am to teach history. Still enjoy being in the classroom interacting with students. Still enjoy the give-and-take of academic discourse. Still enjoy the positive comments I receive about the work I’ve done.

Have a great day, and Happy Thanksgiving.

For more, go to www.facebook.com/WhereDemocracyLives or Twitter @rigrundfest

Categories
Domestic Policies Education News teachers teaching Wisconsin Union Bashing

In Education, Teachers Must Lead the Way

Aside from the December holiday season, the back-to-school late August and early September rush has the most profound effects on the United States. Shopping patterns change, traffic gets worse, and the general tenor of every community shifts to accommodate the children and adults who work in education.

Welcome to this year’s edition. Some things have changed, and other have stayed the same.

In most polls, a majority of Americans say that they respect their school’s teachers and consider them, aside from parents, to be the most influential voices their children will encounter every day. The problem is that the evaluation systems that most states have set up do not accurately measure how effective the teachers are. Standardized tests have not proven to be reliable and systems that use Value Added measures, such as in California, are notoriously unstable. In addition, most Americans don’t like the tenure system as it is applied to teachers and we’ve had one court weigh in and declare the California system to be unconstitutional. In Wisconsin, Indiana and a host of other states, teachers, and other public employees, have lost significant contract negotiation rights that impact their pay, benefits and work rules. Add all of these up and you get a picture of an education system that wants to change, but is ignoring or minimizing the very people who can affect that change most specifically. Teacher morale is low nationally. That’s not good.

Most Americans also value education and consider education to be the major stepping stone to a better economic, social and democratic life. But the truth is that just below that surface, a roiling debate is under way about how much money schools should spend and on what materials, and what should schools actually teach anyway. This year is no different.

Along with going back to school, September is also when the Annual PDK/Gallup Poll of the Public’s Attitudes Toward the Public Schools, is released. This year is the 46th such poll, and it’s being released in two parts; now and in October.

The most pressing issue in the poll is the reaction to the Common Core Curriculum Standards which is opposed by most of the respondents. A good deal of that opposition is related to the idea that Americans are wary about a national curriculum, especially one that seems to be prescriptive about what teachers can teach, and that local communities will have little say in what their children will learn. The Common Core is also the basis for national tests, which are anathema to many parents and strike most teachers as a waste of good instructional time.

While the standards are new, they are not as dangerous as many people would make them out to be. They do focus more on having students read nonfiction and analyzing in greater depth what they read, but otherwise, they give schools and teachers the leeway to choose reading materials and to tailor instruction to address local concerns. They ask that all students be conversant in research tools and to determine the reliability of sources, an especially important skill in the electronic era.

The mathematics standards are proving to be especially vexing since they ask students to explain their answers in both numbers and words. My experience with younger students is that they have a difficult time explaining how they came to an answer. Some do the calculations in their heads and others are not as articulate with explanations. This has lead to some famous YouTube videos of parents excoriating school board members for turning their child off to school and making homework time a tear-filled exercise in screaming and running away from the table.

As with anything new in education, and there have been many new programs in the thirty years that I’ve been teaching, the Common Core Standards will need some alterations, but in the long run, they will provide a useful map for student progress. The other advantage is that as students move from one town to the other, the standards will remain the same. That hasn’t happened in the United States, and it’s a major step forward.

Another interesting finding from the poll includes the (erroneous) idea that Charter Schools perform better than traditional public schools. The data does not support this. In fact, many charters are performing worse that local public schools.

We’ll have to wait until October for more polling answers on questions relating to teacher evaluation and spending.

I’ve said this before, but it’s worth saying again: The United States succeeds because its teachers succeed in educating generations of children with the resources we have available. Where schools do not have the resources or community support or high levels of social dysfunction, the job becomes that much more difficult. If we can equalize the curriculum, we should be able to equalize the educational opportunities for every child in this country.

And so to my teaching colleagues I say, have a wonderful school year. You do one of the most important paid jobs in this country and you deserve respect and appreciation.

For more, go to www.facebook.com/WhereDemocracyLives or Twitter @rigrundfest

Categories
Education teaching

The High Schoolization Of College

Last week, President Obama made a series of speeches about making higher education affordable, which of course would be a great idea if we really had a socialist system and the government could tell schools what to charge. The problem is that we have a quasi-meritocracy with a bit of market capitalism mixed in, and that’s created the idea that expensive colleges must be good and really expensive colleges must be terrific. Meanwhile, the competitive and not-so-competitive schools that scoop up most American teenagers are considered second-tier and many of the students who attend don’t have the financial wherewithal or the intellectual stamina to stay in them.

Of course, this is not going to change any time soon because the Republicans in Congress won’t approve anything Obama wants and there isn’t enough money for the federal Government to get more involved in college financing. What’s really needed is a radical restructuring of higher education where all truly gifted students can attend schools that will challenge them and all other students who want to go to college can find affordable financing to do so. College is still a great investment, but the division between the have and have-nots is beginning to mirror larger society, which will in turn solidify the status quo.

But the president didn’t stop there. He is also proposing a rating system to rank colleges and universities by…wait for it…quantitative data that will separate schools by how much money their graduates make and how successful the schools are at making their students employable, cost and the advanced degrees graduates earn.

Let’s see…where have I heard of a system that attempts to use quantifiable data like, for example, test scores, to rank school and educators. Oh yeah; the public K-12 schools. It’s a terrible idea for them and it’s a terrible idea for colleges.

The reason it’s so bad is that the president’s proposal, and the philosophy behind it, succumbs to the erroneous idea that the purpose of attending college is to find a job. If you accept that, then measuring college’s performance by how many employable graduates it turns out makes sense. But that’s not the purpose of college and it’s a mistake to believe that it is.

A university education is an exercise in academic exploration, of ideas, of research, of trying to find truth and beauty and a sense of who you are. It is available so that a young person can have access to people who have studied a topic or subject so thoroughly that they have something nuanced to say about it and can analyze it at a deep level. It’s there so you can take a course in something that you want to learn about, rather than what you think you have to learn. It’s an exploration. It’s difficult. Unsettling. Motivating.

But it’s not job training. There’s no such thing as a readily employable English, Philosophy, Communications or Media Ecology major. You need to apply your knowledge. And to be considered an educated person, you really do need to know about more than just finance or accounting or marine biology, though they might get you a high paying job down the road. I’ll concede that an engineering or acting student has employable knowledge and skills, but even they will need to learn a great deal on the job. So when the president wants to tie all of this data to how successful a college is, I see that as bunk. What a job pays is in many ways out of a graduate’s hands. Many people would like an advanced degree but can’t afford the money, time or both.

And what of students who don’t belong in college? The default attitude now is that everyone should go, but that’s also bunk. We’ve dismantled the system we used to have that recognized that some jobs do not require a college education. We’ve even begun this in high school, where many districts have stopped offering actual job training classes because they don’t feed the everyone-goes-to-college beast. Then when the students who would benefit from those programs find that college isn’t for them and they have no discernible job skills, society suffers.

The president should find other means to boost education and job skills without turning universities into glorified high schools, where students ad parents have unreasonable expectations of what they’re paying for.

For more, go to www.facebook.com/WhereDemocracyLives and on Twitter @rigrundfest

Categories
Osama bin Laden teaching Tid Bits

Osama bin Laden Applies For Teaching Job in India

On his registration form for one of the new teaching positions in India, the candidate who called himself Osama Bin Laden said his father’s name was Bill Clinton.

He was one of hundreds of bizarre false names given by chancers apparently hoping to secure jobs in schools in Uttar Pradesh, in northern India.

Perhaps the so-called ‘Abcdefgh’ thought he would stand a better chance of teaching children English when he told India’s Ministry of Education that his father’s name was Xyz. Or maybe bow-wielding Hindu deity Jai Sri Ram thought he needed a break from heavenly duties to help boost the state’s religious education results.

There was even one aspirant who gave his name as Farji, which translates as ‘fake’. His father’s name was given as Farji Singh. And unsurprisingly, all these applicants had spotless academic records to boot, with 100 per cent marks in all exams.

When dead terrorist ‘Osama bin Laden’ applied for a teaching post at an Indian primary school last year, citing Bill Clinton as his father, it did not take long for teachers to unravel his masquerade.

But rather than dismiss the applications out of hand, the state’s basic education department allotted them all registration numbers and and even issued letters for counselling on their ‘fake’ addresses.

Such aspirants, shortlisted in the first list of candidates for the primary teachers’ job, have made the state’s basic education department’s recruitment drive a laughing stock.

Exit mobile version