The Oil Drum

89 comments on Turning an Oil Tanker

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rev karl on January 8, 2008 - 11:41pm

It's even worse. The teachers many of us had in the 50's and 60's were mostly very smart women with fewer options than today. So, we had the best and brightest teaching us from Kindergarten on up. These women are now out of the teaching corps.

I am involved with Teacher preparation now (undergrad and grad) and the students entering the teaching field, while still mostly women, are no longer as smart and curious as in the old days. In addition, with the de-professionalization of teaching (here's the curriculum, don't deviate) and the requirements of No Child Left Behind (endless testing of often meaningless trivia), many of the remaining inspired teachers are simply getting out of the field. Helicopter parents, incompetent administrators, and parents with lawyers second-guessing everything that happens in the classroom finishes off the rest of the good teachers.

What this really means is that the "generalists" in the gradeschool classrooms who need to know a little about a LOT of things, or at least how to show students HOW to learn, or simply model curiosity, - are simply not there. The students I run into in teacher prep are rarely curious about anything more than might be on the next exam. I don't think this is unique to teacher prep but since these students have potentially 30-40 years in front of THEIR students, this incurious installed learning infrastructure will potentially be with us for a very, very long time. Of course we know that half of all new teachers leave the field within 5 years. Guess which teachers stay, and which ones leave.

As the great Mogambo says, "We are all freakin' doomed!"

Rev Karl

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pondlife on January 9, 2008 - 4:22am

My wife is a senior teacher in the UK. Your description sounds EXACTLY parallel to hers.

Scary

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BalticMan on January 10, 2008 - 3:33pm

Rev Karl and pondlife, my wife has been teaching here in Lithuania since she graduated from the Pedagogical Institute (yeah, I know, that dates me, if anyone knows the local folkways). Add Lithuania to the list of countries with a teaching system under severe stress. Rev Karl's phrase "here's the curriculum, don't deviate" really sums it up. What a succinct way to describe de-professionalization. A flickering ray of hope, however: in discussions of what to do, more and more people refer to the need for professional respect, and that is not just a code phrase for higher pay. There is increasing awareness that the generations that transformed Lithuania from a rural backwater to an industrial backwater (sorry, couldn't resist...) are aging, and replacements are desperately needed. Without good teaching, those replacements won't be coming any time soon.

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step back on January 9, 2008 - 9:40am

The students I run into in teacher prep are rarely curious about anything more than what might be on the next exam.

Aha. This is the invisible hand working its wise magic!

Economic efficiency dictates that one keep his nose to the grind stone.

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“This order [i.e. capitalism] is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with the economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt.”

—Max Weber, 1905