Tag Archives: learning

May 9, 2024 · 12:59 am

Teacher-Wise

So, does this title have more than one meaning? Of course it does. This post is about being a teacher and having wisdom. And I know you will immediately think, “You dumb guy! I know teachers who aren’t wise at all! Some teachers are stupid!”

You are especially saying that if you are a student.

You are not wrong, either. Some teachers have no business being teachers. It is especially difficult to find good science and math teachers. After all, those who are good at math and science can make so much more money in the private sector, that they would have to be born to be a teacher… and realize it, to go into teaching. There are very good science and math teachers out there, but many of them are wilting under the weight of a difficult job being made constantly harder by social pressures like truly dumb people who say things like, “You can’t solve our education problem by throwing money at it!” I guarantee no one has ever thrown money at the problem. If teachers were paid what they were worth so that we could retain good, competent teachers, you would see education make an amazing amount of progress in a very short time. What Wall Street firm fails to pay their star players what they are worth? Do bankers and lawyers get punished for doing a good job by asking them to produce more with fewer resources for less pay? Those folks in finance and law always pay the price for the best because that always produces the best result. If you want schools to routinely produce critical thinkers and problem-solvers, why would you complain that we are spending too much money per kid? Of course, there are those with the money and the power (especially in Texas) who really don’t want more students coming out of schools with the ability to think and decide for themselves. Smart people are harder to control and make a profit from. (Out of Control is a book they don’t want you to read.)

So now I have totally proved the point that smart people who are looking out for their own interests should never go into teaching. Still, among the unwashed, unloved, and incompetent that do make the mistake of going into teaching, there is still a great deal of learning and gaining of wisdom going on. After all, if a fool like me can become a good teacher, anybody can do it. You just have to learn a few bits of wisdom the hard way that have very little to do with what we call “common sense”.

As Dr. Tsabary points out in the book I plastered on the front of this post, discipline is not what you think. We all remember that teacher we had that nobody listened to. She was always yelling at us. She made threats. She punished us. And even the good kids in class would shoot spitwads at the back of her head. Why did we not respect and learn from this teacher? Because she never learned these profound truths.

1. Kids are people. They want to be treated with respect and even love. Their ideas matter as much, if not more than the teacher’s ideas. Good teachers will;

a. Get to know every kid in their class as a human being, knowing what they believe in, what they care about, where they come from, and who they think they are.

b. Ask them questions. They will never have an original idea if you do not make them think. They have insights and creativity and strengths as well as weaknesses, bad behavior, and wrong ideas. You have to emphasize the former and minimize the latter.

c. Laughing and talking in the classroom is evidence of learning. Quietly filling out worksheets is evidence of ignorance, and most likely the ignorance of the teacher.

2. Tests don’t matter. This is always true for these reasons;

a. Tests are a comparison, and nothing is gained by comparing kids. Comparing the scores of my bilingual kids in South Texas with upper class rich kids in Chicago and college-bound kids in Tokyo has no value. Their lives are completely different and so are their needs. If we don’t score as well on the tests as the kids in Tokyo, what difference will that make to what time the train arrives in the station in Paris? (Especially if Pierre has chosen the bullet train that goes south at a rate of 200 miles per hour. No trains in Texas go that fast without crashing and blowing up.)

b. If I spend time in class teaching students how to read and making them practice reading critically, they will do just as well as the kids who drilled extensively from specially made State materials preparing for the test on the reading and vocabulary portions. The only way that outcome changes is by cheating and giving them the actual test questions before the test. (I should point out that teachers caught doing this last thing are shot in Texas and buried in a box full of rattlesnakes. Dang old teachers, anyhow!)

I know I started this little post by convincing you that I am not wise, and very probably mentally unbalanced. And now that I have made my arguments, you know for sure. But over time, there is wisdom to be learned from being a teacher. You don’t have to believe me, but it’s true. (I don’t know how many times I used that phrase out loud in a classroom over 31 years, but I am guessing you couldn’t count them on fingers even if you used the hands of every kid I ever had as a student.)

Nerd Class

Skoolgurlz

Back in the 1980’s I was given the gift of teaching the Chapter I program students in English. This was done because Mrs. Soulwhipple was not only a veteran English teacher, but also the superintendent’s wife. She was the one gifted with all the star kids, the A & B students, the ones that would be identified as the proper kids to put into our nascent Gifted and Talented Program. That meant that I would get all the kids that were C, D, & F in most of their classes, the losers, the Special Edwards, the learning disabled, the hyper rocketeers of classroom comedy, and the trouble makers. And I was given this gift because, not only was I not a principal’s or superintendent’s wife, but I actually learned how to do it and became good at it. How did I do that, you might ask? I cheated. I snooped into the Gifted and Talented teacher training, learned how to differentiate instruction for the super-nerd brain, and then used the stolen information to write curriculum and design activities for all my little deadheads (and they didn’t even know who the Grateful Dead were, so that’s obviously not what I meant). I treated the little buggers like they were all GT students. Voila! If you tell a kid they are talented, smart, and worthy of accelerated instruction… the little fools believe it, and that is what they become. Aeroquest ninjas

Even the goofy teacher is capable of believing the opposite of what is obvious and starts treating them like super-nerds because he actually believes it. I soon had kids that couldn’t read, but were proud of their abstract problem-solving skills. I had kids that could enhance the learning of others with their drawing skills, their singing ability, and their sense of what is right and what is wrong. I had them doing things that made them not only better students for me, but in all their classes. And I did not keep the methods to my madness a secret, either. I got so good at coercing other teachers to try new ideas and methods that I got roped into presenting some of the in-service training that all Texas teachers are required by law to do. And unlike so many other boring sessions we all sat through, I presented things I was doing in the actual classroom that other teachers could also use with success. The other teachers tried my activities and sometimes made them work better than I did.

Teacher

Yes, I know this all sounds like bragging. And I guess it probably is. But it worked. My kids kept getting better on the standardized tests and the State tests that Texas education loves so much. And Mrs. Soulwhipple was still the superintendent’s wife, but she did not stay a teacher forever. She eventually went to a new school district with her husband. And guess who they started thinking of when the question of who would be the next teacher for the nerd classes was considered. That’s right, little ol’ Reluctant Rabbit… that goofy man who drew pictures on the board and made kids read like a reading-fiend… me.

So, a new era began in Cotulla. In addition to still getting to teach all the deadheads (because they weren’t going to trust those precious children to anyone else, naturally), I began teaching at least one edition of Mr. B’s famous Nerd Class every school year. We actually assigned long novels and great pieces of literature for the kids to read and discuss and study in depth. Novels like To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee and Across Five Aprils by Irene Hunt were read. We began talking about “big ideas”, “connections to the wider world”, and how “things always change”. We began taking on ideas like making our world better and how to help our community. Kids began to think they were learning things that were important. We did special units on Exploring Our Solar System, The World of Mark Twain, Finding the Titanic, and The Tragedy of Native American History. And we spent as much as a third of the year on each. I am myself cursed with a high IQ and a very disturbing amount of intelligence. I am the deepest living stockpile of useless facts and trivia that most of my students would ever meet in their lifetimes. And even I was challenged by some of the learning we took on. That’s the kind of thing that makes a teaching career fun. It kept me teaching and meeting new students and new challenges long after my health issues made it a little less than sensible to keep going. And if I manage to tell you a few Nerd Class stories in the near future, then at least you stand a chance of knowing a little bit about what-the-heck I am talking about. So be prepared for the worst. I am retired now, and have plenty of time for long-winded stories about being a teacher.

My School-Teacher Soapbox

It has been more than a semester now that I have not been a teacher. I am missing it mightily. I even miss the yelling and screaming, the name-calling and the crazy-eyed threats against life and limb. And that’s just me. I miss what the kids always did too. This was driven home to me as I tried to move my middle child from one school to another. We were hoping to get a bit of a break on his placement. He is a gifted child with a penchant for bizarre and long-lasting obsessions. He has a talent for building huge, monumental structures in Minecraft. He is very computer-nerd and history-wonk. (Yes, I know those are not pure predicate adjectives, but I am a retired English teacher and just don’t care any more.) I was hoping they could overlook his burnout/blowout eighth-grade brain meltdown from the previous year and give him the chance to be a ninth grader for at least half a year. No. Arbitrary rules must be obeyed. (That isn’t even how she said it. More like, arbitrary rules MUST be obeyed). That meant of course that he has to continue to repeat the mindless indoctrination of year number 9, (eight numbered grades plus K), (And Pre-K, come to think of it.) Make that year number 10. No high school yet, though he is more than mature enough, intelligent enough, motivated enough, and sweet-natured enough. We are not loving and forgiving people. We are strict and by-the-book people! Forgive me, Lord. I am writing my own book. (In more ways than one.)

This is what we are doing wrong in Education;

1. We are putting people in boxes. (Little people. Kids mostly. We are calling those boxes things like ADHD, Special Education, trouble-maker, learning disabled, emotionally disturbed, disobedient, truant, and “in need of alternative education”… here meaning kid-prison.)

2. We are sealing those boxes with heavy-duty red tape. (Read special or remedial classes as waste-baskets for keeping the rabble and the riff-raff out of the good teachers’ hair.)

3. We are routinely handing those boxes to the box-bangers and package manglers. (The semi-incompetent teachers who have discipline problems because in teacher college nobody tells you what to do with the kid who sits in the corner and sings to himself instead of paying attention, or the girl who gets out of her seat every time the teacher turns his back to go flitting around the room like a bumble bee going flower to flower (except that it is a more hormonal attraction and goes boy to boy); or the competent teacher like me who incurs the principal’s disfavor for having classes that always make noise and are given such classes in boxes as a punishment because that kind of principal is too limited in intelligence to understand that those kinds of boxes are not really a punishment if you merely take a moment to examine the treasures they contain.)

4. We keep the boxes air-tight so that no oxygen or light gets in. (To suffocate learners under piles of worksheets and endless drill and practice is murder. We are killing the precious learners with boring stuff and teaching them to be zombies who all act alike and hate learning because their brains are rotted masses of goo.)

This is what we must do instead;

1. Open the boxes up again and thoroughly mix the contents. (The rich suburban parents will resent the heck out of having their precious honors student sitting in class next to the poor black kid from the projects, but studies show that both kinds of learners do better when they are mixed together.)

2. Notice, we don’t need two any more, because learners are already distributed to different and diverse boxes based on what they individually need and want to learn about and have talent for. Groups should be more like the Shakespeare-loving group or the talkative-socializing group or the Tinker-toy builders group or the vampire-literature-writing group and less like groups of kids all the same color or all the same culture or all the same age.

3. All the teachers need to be trained to handle all the possible… no, make that probable problems that may come up in the classroom. Every classroom needs a proven veteran teacher and an enthusiastic young apprentice teacher. Neither one should have to face the evil hordes alone. And most important of all, any teacher who doesn’t love working with kids (and doesn’t love the kids in a way that will not lead to a prison term) needs be utilized in some way other than as a classroom teacher.

4. Every classroom is a laboratory and every teacher is a creative and daring mad-scientist-type intent on trying new things and only re-doing things that really work well. Forget this nonsense about standard curriculum goals and common core curriculum. Those are only buzz words for suffocating learners and being too lazy to think on your feet in the middle of the every-day classroom battle in the on-going War on Ignorance.

Now you see… I have all the answers and I know everything. The only mystery is… why don’t more people listen to me?

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