Teaching – Page 10 – College Ready Writing 1.0

Information vs. Knowledge

My remedial writers often tell me that they love to write for themselves, about themselves; they love to write poetry, journals, short stories, and other forms of writing that expresses how they feel. As soon as they “have” to write for school, they hate it. The problem, then, is not that they can’t write, but they have nothing to write about. The challenge, for me, is to show them first that emotions are not enough and then that what they should be striving for in order to make writing easier is knowledge.

I want to go back to the Platonic dialogue between Socrates and Gorgias on the nature of the sophists. Socrates admits to knowing the answer/conclusion to his line of questioning, but continues to question Gorgias for the benefit of Gorgias and all those listening. What is that benefit? Why not just tell everyone the answer and save us the trouble of listening to/reading the seemingly repetitive and mundane line of questioning?

This is at the heart of the Socratic Method, repeatedly inquiring, asking, refuting, and restating more precisely the same idea until a real conclusion is drawn. It is hard, painstaking work, often leading in directions that you didn’t expect or even like. It is rooted, for me, in a quest for knowledge. I prefer the word to using what Socrates would use (truth, right) because in our postmodern world, those terms have been largely discredited, or at least pushed aside. But at the end of the day, I find myself trying to get my students to understand that they should be inquiring, rather than simply remembering information.

Information is something that we accept on faith. Someone tells us the information and we either accept it or do not, rarely because we did much thinking about it to begin with. Information is easy; we assume someone else has done the hard work for us. And we like easy. I see it already in my three-year-old daughter. “Just tell me, mom,” she begs me when faced with a particular challenge that she knows I can easily solve. I refuse to tell her because I want to her to do the work to figure it out. How many students sit in class, having only half-heartedly done the homework or readings, knowing that the teacher will simply give them the answer, and simply wait for it, write it down, then forget the moment after the exam?

University (or education more generally) is not about the piece of paper you get after jumping through a prescribed number of hoops; it about the next 50+ years of your life. Information is an important part of building knowledge; for example, you need to know the basics of the structure of the US government in order to build a deeper knowledge of how the government works. You also need skills, such as basic literacy (traditional or otherwise), to help acquire both information and knowledge. But at the end of the day, knowledge comes from hard work, work that isn’t always fun in the moment, but deeply satisfying once attained. It also, fortunately or unfortunately depending on your perspective, never ends. If you learn how to acquire knowledge in all its forms while you are in school, then you will be prepared for whatever life happens to throw at you.

I understand that I need to practice what I preach, which is why my students will eventually be designing their own curriculum for a course of their choosing or creation, complete with a justification of content and assignments therein. I will give them some information on different theories or philosophies of education, show them how to do research in order to supplement what we have already read and discussed, but at the end of the day, they need to take what I provided for them and create their own knowledge. They’ll never be at a loss for words again.

It’s Not About How You Feel: Why Feelings just won’t cut it

I got into a discussion on Twitter today about writing, critical thinking, and the new Common Core Standards. I have been wanting to write about this for a while, but wasn’t sure how to approach the topic in a blog post. How do I balance my desire to see real change in how writing is practiced in middle and high schools versus my frustration with the sheer number of students who need to take (or perhaps should be taking) remedial writing at the college level. Because it isn’t just about writing; it’s about what the students write about and how they write about it.

While I’ve been “forced” to adopt a specific textbook, I’m quite pleased with the book and the collection of essays found therein. The book we’re using is Reading the World: Ideas that Matter, edited by Michael Austin. Right now, we’re reading some of the entries on “Rhetoric,” starting with the “Funeral Oration” by Pericles, contrasted with a dialogue by Plato between Socrates and the sophist Gorgias. The “Funeral Oration” is rife with internal contradictions, faulty logic, and just plain propaganda. But it is a powerful piece of rhetoric, aimed squarely at the heart of the Athenians in order to get them to continue to support the war against the Spartans. Plato, on the other hand, has Socrates continually question Gorgias on his understanding of what a sophist does in order to ensure everyone understands the conclusion (sophists are bad because they don’t care about what’s right, only that they win) and how he got to that conclusion. Socrates repeatedly says in the dialogue that he could just simply tell Gorgias and all those listening the answer, but he has the best interests of everyone in mind when he continues the dialogue anyway.

I’ve chosen my language very carefully in describing what the two authors/orators have done in their respective pieces. Pericles emotionally manipulates his listeners in order to get them to fight, die, and do so willingly, if not gladly. He talks about how grand Athens is because it is a democracy and that the elected officials (Pericles included) serve at the will of the people. How is this so, I ask the students, when Pericles can so readily and easily manipulate through pure emotion, the will of that people? Emotions, I tell my students, are a dangerous thing to rely on.

My biggest pet-peeve as a teacher is when I hear or read “I feel” when thoughts or ideas are being expressed. It’s not just my students, watch cable news; analysis is frequently expressed as “feelings” rather than well-thought out ideas born from serious study of events or facts. We have become a society that puts how we feel above all else. The danger, of course, is from the sophists, of leaders like Pericles, who understand how to appeal to the emotional states of people in order to bend them to his (or her) will. “I feel” is officially band from my classroom unless what follows is a legitimate emotion. And even then, it needs to be followed immediately with an analysis of why that feeling is there.

I asked these same students to record all of the ways that they are addressed or engaged primarily on an emotional level throughout the day. The result? 95-99% of what the student is exposed to or they expose themselves to is engaging them on an emotional level: their leisure time, their friends and family, advertisements, media. It’s all there for their entertainment or to make them feel something. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But when does the student take time to think? When are they using their heads? Is this why reading for school represents such a challenge, because it doesn’t look to provoke their emotions, but instead seeks to engage their brains? Is the reason why Plato’s dialogue is such a challenge not in fact because of the content (which is pretty straight forward, at least superficially, lest you philosophers get riled up) but because it is wholly logical and rational in how it presents its arguments?

How a student feels about the dialogue (frustrated, bored, annoyed) has little to do with the article itself and everything to do with how the student is used to being engaged. And while this is a useful teachable moment, it does very little to help the students gain any sort of insight into what the dialogue is actually saying, what the students will eventually have to write about. Feelings are fine, but in my class, they are far, far from enough.

Next up, how do we get what we need in order to be able to write and write well?

Writer’s Block

A shout-out to @DrTimony, who pointed out the obviousness of what this post should be about.

I’ll admit it: I have writer’s block. I am suffering from what so many of my developmental writing students complain to me about: staring at a blank page (ok, computer screen) and having no idea what to say or what to write. My writer’s block stems from everything an undergraduate faces when they stare at a blank screen, deadline looming.

1) Exhaustion. While I am exhausted for completely different reasons than the average undergraduate (teething toddler vs late night Rock Band marathons), the result is still the same. I am so tired, I can’t focus on anything. I can’t read and I can’t write; I can barely type coherently. My eyes want to close, rather than stare at a screen; my brain wants to tune out, instead on concentrating on forming a coherent narrative, let alone come up with an engaging subject for a post. I’m so tired, I couldn’t even see the obvious subject staring me in the face for this post. Usually when students are sitting down to try and write, they are absolutely knocked out from life: part-time jobs, social life, studying for other classes. A tired brain does not do its best work. I know. And now, you know, too, because this post…Meh.

2) Distractions. My mind not only can’t focus because it’s worn down, but also because I have a thousand other things going on in there: the teething toddler, my husband who is away, the classes and lectures I need prepare for, the guest posts for other sites I need/want to do, the academic research I want to be doing, if the bills have all been paid, dinner, etc, etc, etc. How many students find themselves needing to write a paper for one class while thinking about everything but? You can do everything in your power to remove as many external distractions as possible (nice, quiet, isolated study space), but at the end of the day, the worst distractions are the ones you carry with you wherever you go.

3) The Missing Muse. Inspiration, oh, inspiration, where for art thou, inspiration? See, I’m so uninspired right now, I’m relying on tired (and poorly used) clichés. Inspiration can come in so many forms, but when it doesn’t come, it’s really, really, depressing. Especially when a deadline is looming large. When it comes to writing, though, inspiration for me comes days or weeks before I start writing. I mull over ideas/possible blog posts and begin to work them out in my head. I start noticing connections in my lectures, my readings, and in what I stumble across online. The germ of the idea (to borrow the expression from one of my high school English teachers) begins to take root. Preparation comes before inspiration (or some other eye-rollingly cheesy expression), but when the two above issues run you over, really, the muse takes a holiday.

Lord, forgive me for this post; I’m barely aware of what I’m doing.

So, what do you do? Make sure that you don’t end up in a situation where you are exhausted, distracted, and uninspired. If you can’t write, read. If you can’t read, sleep. If you can’t sleep, blow off some steam in a healthy way, and then try again. But what if there’s just no time? The paper is due tomorrow (or sooner) and nothing is working?

Just write. Write about anything that is even remotely related to the topic of your paper. Write and write and write. Don’t worry about what you write, just write. Write it out by hand, then type it up. Take frequent, short breaks. Find a friend who is a better writer than you are and get them to read your paper, applying brutal honesty. While they are doing that, either catch a nap or read on your topic. Go back and rewrite. And then learn your lesson for the next time.

For me, I’m going to publish this blog post and move on. I could have just trashed this post, but hey, not every piece of writing is fantastic, and sometimes you have to live with just good enough. Maybe when I’m more well-rested and less distracted, I’ll come back and rewrite this post, if only to prove another point I am constantly making to my students: you can (and should) always work to make your writing better. Until then, I’m going to bed.

How Do You Describe Your Course?

For me, as an instructor, the challenge isn’t teaching the remedial writing courses; the challenge is teaching the more advanced required writing course. While we are told when we teach remedial writing that we can do or use what we want, as long as the kids can write at a college level by the end of it, the more advanced writing courses are a part of the student’s general education requirement, and thus have a laundry list of boxes to check (common textbook, common assignments, common readings, etc). And the students, having already made it through Freshman Writing, don’t really see the point of doing yet another writing course.

I was really excited, however, when I saw that one of the units in the textbook was on “Education.” The current debate surrounding education reform, my personal interest in the role and purpose higher education, the fact the these students have chosen to attend university and typically come from underperforming, rural high schools, I thought this course would be an opportunity for the students to really think critically about their (continuing) education and the education they would want their children to receive. Couple that with a few weeks spent on really talking about rhetoric and rhetorical devices, I thought that this course would be a slam dunk with the students.

I was very, very wrong.

As I was introducing the students to concepts we were going to be talking about in the class, I saw their eyes glaze over the moment I mentioned that we were going to look at education. You could feel the energy and enthusiasm in the room drain away. And once it was gone, I couldn’t find a way to get it back. Nothing I said about education, its implications for them as students and future parents got their attention again. I sort of got a reaction when I mentioned that concept of unschooling, but other than that, nothing. I could see the wheels turning in their heads, trying to figure out how to manipulate their schedules in order to change out of my class.

I was extremely discouraged. How can I get students to enjoy remedial writing, but I can’t get them excited about education, a subject that has touched and shaped all of their lives in a really important way? And then I realized that I had forgotten one of the important lessons I teach my students: words matter. Sounds simplistic, I know, but we forget (and students take for granted) that we can say the same thing in many, many different ways. The meaning itself hasn’t changed, but how we interpret and receive that meaning can vary a great deal.

So I set about rebranding my course. How can I get my students excited about studying and thinking more critically about rhetoric and education? Once I came up with my answer, I had a wonderful epiphany: why don’t I have my students come up with their own rebranding for our course? It would help give them a sense of ownership (the latter half of course will be entirely driven by their own interests in education) and be a preliminary exercise in the power of words, or how rhetoric can work.

And that’s what I did. I told the students they couldn’t change the content of the course, only how the material is introduced? How should I have titled and described the course in order to have ignited their interest? For a generation that has been completely bombarded with ads since birth, they had a surprising amount of difficulty coming up with anything, further reinforcing the need to study rhetoric. We had a couple of interesting narrative descriptions, but a really snappy catch-phrase way to describe the course eluded them.

I shared with them what I came up with: Rhetoric, or How to Get Anything You Want; Rhetoric, or Why you Continually get Conned even though you swear you’re a Cynic; and Education, or Why High School Sucked. Everyone laughed. I had them again. So now, we’re on a mission to understanding how rhetoric works, for better or for worse, and to see if we can’t look at what high school (and higher education) could be or should be, rather than what it is.

It’s all in the words you use.

Obstacle or Opportunity: How do you see your (remedial) course?

I’m teaching three sections of what the university calls Basic Writing, but what is understood as Remedial Writing. These are kids who didn’t achieve a college readiness score for writing on their ACT. These are kids who do not have the writing (and usually reading) skills necessary in order to do college work, in order to really succeed in college. They are often first-generation students, coming from impoverish rural areas with small, sub-par schools. These are kids with big dreams and I, with my required, not-for-credit course, am standing in their way.

No one wants to do remedial writing: students don’t want to take it (who wants to pay for an extra class?), professors don’t want to teach it (good news for me, because it means I have a job). For professors, remedial writing was not what they were hired to do, nor what they were prepared to teach. So, the class represents an obstacle, something that stands between them and what they really want to be doing. For me, it’s a challenge, an opportunity to help students get to a place where they can take the classes I’ve been trained to teach, the classes that I really want to teach. An opportunity to help a student who would otherwise (most likely) fail and dropout.

I tell this to my students: this class is an opportunity for them to improve, to practice and to hone their reading and writing skills. An opportunity to try, fail, try again and do better. The class is like training, like practice, doing the basics over and over again so that they are ready for the big show, the big game. Coaching and playing on gameday is fun; coaching and performing in the practices leading up to gameday is hard. I tell them that if they see this class as a chore, then it will be; if they approach it as a waste of their time, then it will be that, too.

The class, as I teach it, isn’t just about writing, it’s about college success. To become better writers, they need to give themselves time, they need to be able to read and recall what they need to write about efficiently and effectively, they need to have skills and strategies to balance their work and life, and they need to know how to get the right kind of help they need. I can teach them grammar until I’m blue in the face, but if the students don’t have the time or motivation or substance to write, then I’ve wasted my time. I tell my students, in this class, I’m here to put you on the right path to get out of here with your degree.

I am not standing in their way anymore than they are standing in mine. I’m in it for 15 weeks. I hope they come along for the ride.

Tomorrow, how my 200-level (or second-year students) are an even bigger challenge.

The Failure of American Higher Education

Really? More standardized tests? Because those have made students entering college that much more college ready. I’m being sarcastic. Students are taught to the test at the expense of content. Do we really want higher ed to be that way? The basic skills that you talk about SHOULD have been learned in high school (summarizing? grammar? averages? Really? That’s what higher ed’s job has become?). And, these are students who are the result of the testing bonanza that is No Child Left Behind.

I just wrote collegereadywriting.blogspot.comm) about the difference between college professors and high school teachers. If anything, teachers need more content training in order to make the skills they are trying to teach more relevant to the students. But you seem to imply that content is irrelevant (A history major? Don’t need history to do the job. I want SKILLS!). Then lets just get rid of all liberal arts programs, keep the skilled degrees (medicine, engineering, etc), and we’ll all get degrees in tech and “critical thinking.” Never mind that we’ll have no idea how to apply them.

University is fundamentally about creating knowledge, not skill transfer. The skills you need to create knowledge used to come before higher ed, not during. And more testing is not the right solution.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Teachers vs Professors

Dear #edchat participants:

Yesterday we chatted about “How can K-12 and higher ed work together to promote positive change in education?” Well, you chatted, I listened while trying to do four other things. I’m sorry that I missed it, because I’m pretty sure the K-12 teachers involved in the chat outnumbered their higher ed counterparts by a large margin.

There were a lot of criticisms leveled at higher ed professors, that we are poor teachers and are stuck in a stone ages when it comes to ed tech. But, while most universities (as it was pointed out) claim evaluate their professors on teaching, research and community service, they actually spend a serious amount of time judging a professor’s research output while just making sure they have taught and done something that remotely resembles community service. Research in your field is king. You get a PhD in your subject area, be it biology, literature, nursing or music.

Because we are not rewarded for improving our teaching, we don’t do it. Our time is spent on administrative duties, our research and, yes, teaching. But we have been told, you need to do research to get tenure. So we make research our priority. Our PD? Going to conferences in our field, to learn about the latest research and findings. We are expected to stay on top of what’s going on in the field we teach. Ed tech? What’s that? Will it help me get tenure? No? No, thanks!

So I admit and agree that most university professors could learn a thing or two from the K-12 teachers who participate in #edchat on twitter. But, please give us credit for being experts in our fields. When professors complain about unprepared students coming into their classes, they are usually talking about two areas: not having what we would consider the basic knowledge/skills in that area and not knowing how to be independent learners (“good students”). Facing a room full of disinterested and unprepared students just makes us mad. We think we spend too much time teaching the students what they should have learned in high school and not enough time teaching what we are passionate about. That passion? It shines through, tech or no tech.

Professors are all good students: independent learners, highly motivated self-starters and passionate. If we weren’t, then that dissertation would never have been written. Trust me. You choose grad school in part because of a passion you have for a subject and the right skill set (enjoy reading/writing/doing experiments). We know our area, we love our area, and we want to share that knowledge. When we think of ed reform, we don’t think about HOW you teach, we think about WHAT you teach. Because we love WHAT we teach. How we teach it is really a secondary concern.

I ask you, K-12 teachers, do you consider yourself experts in pedagogy or experts in your field ? Which do you think is more important? Is your PD exclusively in the latest ped or ed tech? Or do you brush up on deepening your knowledge and understanding of a subject area? If you teach English, have you ever done a grad class, not in ed, not in teaching English, but English literature or writing?

There is a division of labor that needs to be overcome. Yes, university professors need to work to be better teachers. But can K-12 become better at the subjects they are teaching? You can ace all of your education classes, but if you don’t do well in the subject area classes, should you be allowed to teach that subject? I agree with all of the suggestions about exposing K-12 students to the wonderful work and research professors are doing, to inspire them. But that should also extend to the teachers, so that they can remain current in not only how they teach, but what they teach.

What My Mother Taught Me

My mother instilled my respect for education and educators. She read to me early and often as a baby and small child. She sent me to reading school when I was four so I would know how to read in English, even though I was about to start school in French. She sent me to French Immersion school, so I would grow up knowing two languages. She allowed me to chance school boards (kinda like a district, but not really) for high school, so I could go to a more academic rigorous school and get away from the students who had bullied me all throughout elementary school. She never let me give up. She never accepted a poor grade from me. There was never a question that I would go on to university.

But one of the most important lessons she taught me, a lesson that has taken me this long to learn and appreciate, is the lesson about who you know. She went beyond “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.” No, with my mom, it was “It’s not who you know, it’s how you use them.” This was a lesson she learned from her own mother, a lesson she pushed onto us, my brother and I, every chance she got. It’s a lesson she keeps trying to teach me, even today.

She understood the importance of networking. She knew that she didn’t have the connections we needed, but she wasn’t afraid of reaching out, beyond her circle, into other circles, in order to give us a chance to live out our dreams. Want to be a journalist? Here is the email address of a guy who was friends with a former co-worker with whom I went to see The Rolling Stones with 10 years ago. Getting a PhD? A friend of mine who I went to university with that one year is now president of a college. Contact him. Writing a book? I don’t know anyone off the top of my head, but let me ask around. I’ll see what I can find.

She tried to lead by example. But she also encouraged us to reach out beyond our circle, like to examine what the parents of the kids we coached swimming did for a living. My brother got some of his first photography work that way. When I told her I was starting my own business, she immediately began to run through the list of all my contacts, as well as her own, in an effort to help me drum up some business.

As I look back at it, it’s because of her that I feel comfortable on a social networking site like Twitter or Facebook, comfortable reaching out and asking for help (if you’re often on the receiving end of my requests, then you can blame my mom). I don’t think my mom, or her mom, ever imagined that their advice could eventually lead me to reach so many different people, but here I am, learning about social media, website development, education reform, charter schools, homeschooling and unschooling. And I am learning that I am a part of something very much larger than myself.

Thanks, Mom. Happy Mother’s Day!

Thanks to my Teachers

In honor of National Teacher Appreciation Day, I’d like to take this opportunity to thank a few of the teachers who made a lasting positive impression on my life as a young student. And I want to reflect on what features they all share, what made them all have such a huge impact on my educational development.

My favorite teacher in elementary school was Mrs. Cummings. She said funny words like tiki-boo, told us stories of growing up in Scotland, and read Charlotte’s Web, giving Templeton the Rat a (best to my memory) Cockney accent. I had her in both Grade 3 and 5 and she was my first English teacher, responsible for making sure that a bunch of kids who had just spent their first three years of school entirely in French could read and write in English, too. She taught us cursive writing and coming into her class represented the time when we could finally use a pen to write.

Mme. Vasile comes a close second and she was my favorite teacher in French. A drill sergeant, I had her in Grades 4 and 6. We used to have weekly lists of words that we needed to know how to spell, their definitions, what part-of-speech they were, and, if they were verbs, how to conjugate them in up to seven different tenses. I knew more French grammar coming out of Grade 6 than I ever knew again. She also taught us art and while we sat doing our projects, she would tell us stories about her dogs. Her car, a big American boat of a car, maroon, was always the first one in the parking lot in the morning, after the janitor.

In (what would be considered) middle school and high school, my favorite teachers were two math teachers, Mrs. Pasquale and Mrs. Ryan. Mrs. Pasquale used to let us have “Bad-Joke Fridays” is her class was the last class of the day on a Friday. She taught us how to do math competitions, teaching us tricks and plays to do math faster and more efficiently. And, she loved Monty Python. Mrs. Ryan was responsible for teaching us trigonometry. She had a chant that she taught us in order for us to remember the values of sign, cosign and tangent. She would have us march down the halls, chanting. She was another dog lover, and told us stories about how she became a math teacher because she was absolutely hopeless at physics.

My other favorite teacher in high school wasn’t actually one of my teachers, but my debating coach, Mr. Y (I can’t for the life of me remember how to spell his last name). He was a history teacher, and he had been away for a number of years to work on his PhD and a CBC documentary on World War Two. He, among other things, drew the maps for the program and at one point, described a battle on camera while standing in the field in France where the battle had taken place. He also shared a love for Monty Python and Star Trek: TNG. He brought us to debates, coached our team, put up with our ridiculousness, and taught me how to make an argument.

In college, I had another favorite math teacher, Mme. Desrochers. I had her for three of my four required math classes, including two levels of Calculus. She was excellent at explaining the concepts we needed to learn, made our classwork and homework relevant to what we needed to know for our exams, and was particularly beloved by students who had previously only studied in French because she took the time to explain and to translate terms. She also loved Monet.

Finally, in university (there’s a difference in Quebec), my favorite teacher was Anne Scowcroft. She was “just” an adjunct, but she was by far the most demanding and most rewarding teacher I had. She was the one who taught me about editing and rewriting, about never settling in my writing, and how to present my writing (and myself) professionally. We all wanted to earn our grade from her, to impress her. She was a local writer who made her living doing freelance, translating and teaching. She ran a small writer’s circle, wrote poetry and homeschooled her children.

All of these teachers share a number of characteristics: they were demanding but always worked with us so we could meet those demands; they made whatever subject they were teaching come alive, made it relevant and/or interesting and exciting; they were organized and consistent in their approach to teaching their subject; they were passionate about what they taught; and, they brought themselves into the classroom.

I think that that’s the one thing that sticks out the most for me about all of these teachers: they allowed themselves to be human. They shared parts of themselves with us, what they loved outside of the classroom, outside of their subject area. Their passion about math or reading or writing or history came through to me, but it was wonderful to hear them be just as passionate about life outside of the classroom. I’m not sure why. Was I able to more easily relate to them? Did it inspire me because I shared their varied passions, but also understood how people could misunderstand that passion (I loved swimming – no one else did)?

Passion and humanity. Consistency and high standards. Dedication and willingness to help. These are the qualities I aspire to posses as an educator. And I thank these teachers, who will probably never read this blog, for inspiring me to become who I am today.

Who will be our future teachers?

There has been (quite rightfully) a lot of discussion about how the new Reach for the Top competition has placed too much emphasis on test scores and thus limits a student’s creative potential, not to mention undermines possibility of success in vocational fields. Many of the critiques have come from teachers themselves (in fact, all of the articles I have linked to are from educators). But one question that remains (at least, in what I have come across) unasked is, what does this mean for the teaching profession? And I’m not talking about those who are currently teaching (they have made their position perfectly clear). More specifically, who are going to the teachers of the future?

As a college English instructor “specializing” in Freshman/Intro gen. ed. courses, I have taught students from all majors, including education. And, unfortunately, education students have tended to be the weakest. They were always very conscientious, very nice, came to my office hours, and seemed to try hard. They usually did very well on tests. But when it came to essays…Perhaps they stood out in my mind because it scared me so much that these were the people who were going to be (possibly) educating my children.

It’s a question we’ve all asked, who becomes a teacher, and why? We have all heard the cynical/derogatory theories (couldn’t cut it anywhere else, wanted a job for life, no ambition, etc). But upon reflection, I’ve come up with a theory that those who tend towards education are those who did well in school and for the most part, enjoyed it. Those who did well on tests. Those who were able to sit still and listen. And this might represent the largest obstacle to true school reform: many teachers chose teaching in order to recreate the system that was successful for them.

Because, let’s face it, if traditional schooling doesn’t reward creative and innovative students, it certainly doesn’t reward overly creative and innovative teachers either. How do you “get ahead”? Get a higher degree. Taught by professors who are rewarded (granted tenure) for not being particularly innovative, either (publish articles, present papers at conferences).

This observation struck me as I sat at a conference, listening to a professor read a paper while I prepared to do the same, except I glanced at my twitter feed to read about web 2.0 teaching tools. The person presenting was talking about a long-lost memoir dealing with the Haitian rebellion; he has one of two copies of the original French text. I saw parallels between the text and a book I am currently reading. He was very proprietary about the manuscript. Why? This was his golden ticket. He could find a way to put it online in order for scholars to access an important historical and literary text. But, because of the requirements of tenure and promotion, he is saving it for an academic press. And I don’t blame him.

This is how higher ed (for the most part) rewards professors: be innovative (long-lost text!) in your research but completely archaic (academic press, scholarly article, conference presentation) in terms of delivery methods. Rewards professors in any discipline, including education. So, we have professors (locked in their own system) teaching teachers, locked in another. But this is how we have decided to reward teachers. Not for improving or innovating, but by getting a masters.

As many articles have pointed out, smart students don’t actually like school all that much because they’re bored. I was really good at school, but I didn’t particularly like it. I could sit still well enough, but I never really paid too much attention in class. I suspect many of my teachers hated me because I so clearly did little to no work, didn’t take notes, etc, and yet still did very well. But I loved university. The freedom. The challenge. The professors. My classmates. So, I stayed with what I loved. The university.

And while the university has not proven to fulfill its promise, I can’t imagine going back to a) do another degree in education and b) teach in high school. After spending all this time trying to undo the “teaching for the test” learning that students have been fed throughout high school, how could I willingly go forward to teach just that?

Do I want to work in an area where teachers are unable to do the obvious? Do I want to go into a profession where leaders and innovators have to basically opt out of the system and start charter or private schools? Where if I have a poor coworker, it is practically impossible to do anything about it (yeah, I know, the university is no better)? Where I am scapegoated by politicians?

The LAUSD recently opened up bidding for new schools to anyone who was interested. The result? Groups of teachers put together bids that beat out more established charter schools. As put by A.J. Duffy, it represents “put up or shut up” time for the teachers: “it gives us what we’ve been asking for: control over the schools, along with other stakeholders. Let us create the curriculum; let us create the professional development and decide how to use the money. We get blamed for everything, but we’ve never been in control.”

I am a good teacher – I have the student and peer evaluations to back me up. But none of that matters. I know I am supposed to be a teacher. But how much am I willing to give up in order to be a teacher? How much is anyone willing to give up?