More Traditional Problems
I was only a High School Teacher for four years. However, I am a very observant and thoughtful person and I noticed things! Here are some brief comments about some of them, which are all more Organizational in nature.I was somewhat unique in not having gotten a College Degree in Teaching, as mine was in Nuclear Physics. So it turned out that there were many things that I was either not aware of or very minimally aware of. One would have thought that there might have been someone assigned to aid me in becoming a good Teacher, but the reality was that I was completely on my own! NO ONE ever came into my classroom during the first three and a half years, except for once, when my Science Department Chairman came into my classroom and stood at the back for around two minutes and then he left. Since HE was the person who had gotten the School to agree to let me start teaching without the traditional education (after all there was a Brass Plaque on the hallway wall just outside his Office that was regarding me having won the Illinois State Science Fair), it was probably unlikely that he would have ever had anything critical to say regarding my Teaching! The odd reference above to three-and-a-half years was because I had been required to gradually take some Teaching Courses at a Community College, and I finally had to do Student Teaching during the last half of my fourth year of Teaching! And who had been chosen as my Adviser? The man who I had taught to Teach Physics during the previous year! Again, not much chance of me ever hearing anything critical from him!The point here is that, in the event that I had been a really lousy Teacher, there was no method in place where the School Administration would have ever been aware of it! The Teacher who happened to have the room across the hall from my classroom, was defined as a Chemistry Teacher. It seemed to me that there were some problems! He was Greek and he had a truly extreme accent, where even I and the other Teachers often had great difficulty in figuring out what he would say, in the Cafeteria or in or Department Meetings. I wondered how kids would be able to learn Chemistry from him when they clearly had to invest so much effort in simply understanding what he would say. I became very close to many of my students and I occasionally asked about that, as they had all taken Chemistry with that Teacher the year before in order to qualify to take Physics with me. Many of them just laughed, and they admitted they rarely knew what he was talking about! Fortunately, they were smart and motivated students and they were willing to read the (fairly good) Chemistry textbook, and do the homework problems that they COULD understand which he would write on the blackboard! Still, I was not in any position of authority to tell the Administration how they should hire and monitor Teachers, so I just watched such things. I once asked that Teacher what University he had studied Chemistry at, and he informed me that he had never studied Chemistry, even in his High School, so he read the same textbook that his students were using. At least a dozen different Teachers mentioned essentially the same situation, where they would often laugh at simply having to stay at least a day ahead of their students. It immediately seemed to me that IF any student had a creative thought and asked a question which had not already been covered in the textbook, such Teachers who had never studied the subjects they were now expected to Teach, had no possible way of answering their question. EXCEPT by the common response of ALL Teachers in MAKING UP something that SOUNDED GOOD. (I will always remember in about Third Grade when I asked the Teacher why I felt hot air coming out from behind our kitchen refrigerator. She INSTANTLY answered, but with such a poorly made response that even my eight-year-old brain knew that she was absolutely wrong!)
I also knew one English Teacher who seemed to be proud of regularly using the hallucinogenic drug LSD. I never asked him whether he was ever affected while he was Teaching, but I think that was very likely. Clearly, no one ever oversaw him either! Our High School was huge, and there were around 350 Teachers. Maybe that is the excuse for having some Teachers who were clearly incapable of doing useful Teaching. I certainly was aware of well over 300 Teachers who seemed to truly care about their students and their subject, and like most Teachers, they clearly did wonderful jobs of Teaching. So my comments here are about what seemed clearly a small fraction of the Teachers there. Still, if Administrators feel that Students should be permitted Zero Tolerance about many things, I really wanted to speak up to try to weed out some really bad, and in some cases, really incompetent, Teachers. But I DID learn very early on that what my goal should be was to make it through TWO YEARS of Teaching, because then I would AUTOMATICALLY have Tenure, meaning I would have a Teaching job for life! So I realized that for me to speak up regarding some other Teacher's incompetence could never result in that Teacher being censured or fired, and as I had then not yet received my own Tenure, it probably would have resulted in ME being fired, maybe for being a troublemaker!
There was a Shop Teacher who seemed friendly enough, but his capability to form sentences in the Teacher's Lounge always made me wonder if he had to sign his paychecks with an X! He sometimes sat in in our card games in the Lounge, and he seemed to often have great difficulty in understanding basic rules of simple common card games, and his comments on other subjects always seemed extremely uninformed. I didn't do this because I knew it would be very cruel to do, but I was sometimes tempted to ask him what the name of the President was, or the Capital of Illinois, or such things. I truly doubted that he had any idea on such things. Could he have completed College to receive a Degree? It boggled my mind? Could he have taught Shop? I suppose so, but I always felt that he probably had to MAKE UP answers to many student's questions. But many students were very intelligent and very observant. One simply told me one day that there were some Teachers who no questions should be asked! He and I both laughed, because in ALL of my classes, I tried to cause EVERY brain in the classroom to be active, and I would try to involve them all in "challenges". Like pointing out my classroom window at the City Water Tower and asking the class how tall it is, or how they could tell me on the following day. I WANTED them to have a dozen different answers! Go to the City Hall and ask? Find out what company had built the water tower and call them. Get all the kids in a class to go over to the water tower and stand on each others' shoulders, and add up their heights. Find out what company had painted the name of the City on the tower and find out how tall the letters were, and work from there. And, of course, there were always students who had read our textbook and had learned about "similar triangles" and they gave the sort of answer that a Teacher smiles about!
So if a kid happened to know someone who was a Surveyor, maybe his brain would be thinking along the lines of hiring a Surveyor with a Transit, and letting him do the triangles stuff! I saw ALL such answers to be wonderful! I wanted my students to know that just because I thought I knew some RIGHT ANSWER, there are probably lots more of equally right answers! But sometimes a student would ask to use the chalk, and would draw something on the blackboard while he described his method for that day's challenge! I would sometimes notice that he had made some serious error and his method would not work, but I rarely would say anything. But some kid would raise his or her hand, and ask me whether that line in that drawing could be as the previous student had described. I would then often ask the second student if there was a better presentation, and he or she would get the chalk and go to it. The kids LOVED this! Instead of ME "announcing" correct answers, I expected THEM to see when one of them had made a mistake! The first kid would often have the opportunity to defend his comments. But sometimes there would be six kids with hands desperately waving in the air, wanting to be heard! LOTS OF ACTIVE BRAINS! Which I considered to be a central purpose of why I was trying to Teach. Yes, I knew that many Teachers simply state facts that the students were expected to memorize. The alphabet? Absolutely! But I thought I saw value in the students BEING ABLE TO THINK and not just memorize!
I hope these anecdotes make that distinction clear.
It is darkly amusing to me that by the Testing structure that was imposed by No Child Left Behind, I would have been fired for "wasting time" in trying to get my students to THINK! NOTHING is to interfere with modern Teachers getting students to MEMORIZE THE ANSWERS to the essentially known questions that the students will be asked when that School is Evaluated! I have sometimes wondered if my students would have done very well in the extremely structured tests used today. My Physics students certainly did extremely well on the tests which were provided with the PSSC Physics textbook and Curriculum. Every test had 35 questions, each of which had five multiple choices. If a student (or a chimpanzee) simply chose the same letter for all 35 questions, he/she probably would have gotten around 7 correct. Usually, the grading curve that was provided had 9 as qualifying as a D. And around 22 correct was usually an A. Apparently, the textbook suppliers had determined that such numbers generally gave 10% A's and 10% F's, 20% B's and D's, and 40% C's, the desired Gaussian distribution. My students tended to get nearly all A's, and it was fairly rare that any of my students got lower than a B. THAT got me into trouble! One day, several men in suits showed up during my Physics classes and they stood in the back of the room. I later learned that they were from the company that had provided the PSSC textbooks, and the had DECIDED that I was somehow cheating by giving test answers to the students! (I even TOLD my students that those men who had visited did not think that they were as smart as they were! The men came back on a test day, and I think they switched the tests, apparently expecting my students to mostly fail for having wrong stolen answers! Nope! I think the students wanted to make a point that day, and I believe that all but one got A's that day! The boy who ONLY got a B was kidded by his classmates. The visiting men decided to grade those tests, while they were still in my classroom (although my students had gone to a different Class by then.) It was fun to see them quietly discussing results that they could not comprehend!
I have always liked to think that the fact that I tried to get my students to have ACTIVE BRAINS, and to actually develop the capability of THINKING, might have had some effect. I do not recall any of the students having been named Einstein, but I know they were central in blowing the doors off those bureaucrats' attitudes about students! My effect was probably relatively minimal. DID I ever need to present Advanced Relativity to them? No. Or Nuclear Resonance? No. I certainly could have tried, as I knew those subject well. But I like to think that THE STUDENTS had grown in BEING EXPECTED to learn how to work at thinking through problems and solutions. I have always believed that some of the best learning had occurred when a student had left a WRONG idea on the blackboard, and where it was sometimes a minute or two before some other student had thought it through and saw the error. And then seeing all those kids with arms waving in the air because THEY had figured out what was wrong and/or what was a better answer. We sometimes replaced one wrong answer with another wrong answer, and it might have sounded like a political debate when lots of students tried to talk at the same time regarding getting to an answer! I believe that it was only once that they were still struggling (with each other, mostly!) with the class period coming near an end, where I needed to make a comment. I did not ANSWER the matter they were struggling with, but their minds were so active and they had just spent half an hour trying to think it through (in 30 different ways), that I barely got my "hint" out when a dozen students all raised their hands! I remember picking a girl who had never raised her hand before, because I knew she would love the chance of telling them what they were also all thinking!
You might have realized from these comments that I "bonded" to most of my students. I wonder if such bonding is possible when a Teacher spends all day every day as a Lecturer. But my students KNEW that I felt very strongly about trying to Teach them stuff.
I always felt that a GOOD evaluation of whether I was any good as a Teacher would have been to find those students FIVE YEARS LATER, and give them one of the tests then. I tend to suspect that most (adults) would do terribly on course work of High School classes, BECAUSE I suspect that most (Lecture) Teaching fades from memory. But IF I actually had any effect on aiding my students to have LEARNED HOW TO THINK, I would like think that they might do decently well, even many years later. But that might just be an arrogant attitude of a Teacher who wants to believe that he did some good! I'll never know!
