TEACHERS and students, syllabuses and courses, and teaching and its problems — the real and the imagined — continue to hit the headlines and be topics for media discussion and campaigns.
As they should.
Let’s try to focus on the fundamentals, without degenerating into fundamentalism.
What should be our absolute and reasonable baseline expectations for those in the teaching profession in early 21st century Australia ?
1. Teachers should know how to teach.
2. Teachers should, in two quite distinct senses, know what to teach.
3. Teacher preparation should deal equally competently with 1 and 2.
4. Teachers’ pay should be appropriate for such an important social duty.
5. Classroom work should be esteemed and honoured, and remunerated accordingly.
Teachers should know how to teach
Teaching is both a profession and a craft, and, as a craft, it has a range and variety of skills which are in the sine qua non category. The same claim could be made of just about any other profession — each one has its craft skills and techniques which are neither innate nor intuitive: they must be learned, usually by on-the-job training. Would you entrust yourselves to those nervous-looking brain surgeons if you knew they‘d not done internships ? Or to that young airline pilot whose few flying hours were all in the flight-simulator ?
Smart, alert and eager novice-teachers will best learn teaching skills from knowledgeable, committed and effective teachers — mainly in classrooms and teachers’ offices and common rooms. They won’t — and clearly don’t — learn these in lecture halls, especially when the lecturers themselves have not been in real classrooms with live pupils for many years.
It may be unfashionable to call such a learning process “training”, but that’s what it is — good habits are learned, bad ones are not, or are unlearned. There should be a lot of exemplars to be imitated, a lot of one-on-one mentoring.
Whingeing about extra costs simply demonstrates that good teaching is considered unimportant.
Teachers should, in two quite distinct senses, know what to teach
Teachers should know stuff — Part One
Nobody who is [relatively] illiterate should be teaching reading; nobody who is [relatively] innumerate should be teaching mathematics. No basic primary school science classes should be being taken by [people employed as] teachers who are ignorant of the basics of the physical sciences (let alone hostile to them); mutatis mutandis for any and every subject.
The not so good old days of “keeping a page ahead of the kids” should have ended long ago — that such ignorance [and it’s more a systemic than a personal fault] is still permitted in the 21st century’s first decade is not far short of socially and culturally criminal.
Teachers should, by and large, know a lot more stuff than their pupils know, and they should be proud of that, and esteemed for it. What’s more important, they should be educated in both a greater depth and breadth of knowledge than they currently are. For secondary teachers, you’d reckon a double graduate degree would be the minimum.
Take would-be teachers of English, for instance. A double major in language and literature subjects should be reckoned as Good, but Not Quite Good Enough. Majors in, say, at least two of the following as well would give such teachers both breadth and depth: French, Latin and/or Greek, Classical, European and British history, Fine Arts, Linguistics, Politics, Economics and Sociology, or — and this Melbourne Uni major was one of the best — the History & Philosophy of Science.
Think how much more fruitfully, authoritatively and interestingly a question like “Sir/Ms, why does English have such a lot of synonyms ?” would be answered if Teach knew more than just what they were …
“Well, we can thank William the Bastard …”
“William the What ?”
“ … the Bastard, or, William the Concreter to his friends — more about that later. If most of you can dodge the dangers of drinking, driving and drugs for the next ten years, you’ll still be around in 2066 to celebrate his millennium”.
And so on, including mentioning a couple of references books in the school’s well-stocked library, and some dub-dub-dubs to look up at home. Oh, and always a “If someone can remind me next period to tell you why his descendants spell bastard without an ‘s’ …”.
Or, in a Yr 10 Science class:
“Ms/Sir, you know how you gave us those famous scientists to research, how come there weren’t any between all those Greeks and people like Copernicus, Galileo and Newman ?”
“Newton ?”
“Yeah, him, the guy with the apple”.
“Yeah, the guy with the apple. Well, you’ve noticed that big gap — thought you would. Well, you remember Hypatia and what happened to her, and why Copernicus was too chicken to publish his book until he was safely dead, well, that 1000 years between all the Greek geeks and the Renaissance is often called the Dark Ages, and that’s because some historians reckon …” Et wonderfully, enlighteningly and stimulatingly cetera.
And to think people are being paid vast sums to denigrate the notion that teachers should know stuff.
Teachers should know stuff — Part Two
Teachers should be entitled to know what they’re expected to teach, on a yearly basis, and on a year-group basis. They should not have to re-invent curricular wheels every year — unless, of course, they get time in lieu, at higher rates of pay, like the screen-jockeys at EdCentral. They should not be given, as teachers in Victoria were in the early 1990s, a Melbourne telephone book-sized tome of vague statements and feel-good opinions and be told “Go, Teach”.
In plain words, there should be syllabuses, with content, subject-matter related content, and possibly a practical, and flexible, term schedule, with a range of workable suggestions on ways to teach various topics, and perhaps plenty of www’s to visit. And decidedly no annual introduction of new jargon.
It should not be all that hard to work out — unless we’ve completely fallen for the 100% content-free curriculum — what school students need to know by the end of Yr 10 for them to have a fair chance of functioning as cultural and social literates in the first few decades of the 21st century. There may be legitimate differences about some of the details and the emphases, but a reasonable consensus on the broad general sweep should not be all that difficult.
Teacher preparation should deal equally competently with the How To and the What To of Teaching
Your doctor might see your kids only three or four times a year for only about twenty minutes a time, but you’d not want one who’d done just a three-year basic course [with almost no anatomy, say, or toxicology or epidemiology] and whose internship consisted of lectures by medicos who’d not been in practice for ten years or more, would you ?
So, why is the equivalent tolerated in preparing teachers, who see your kids from one to several hours each day for about 200 days a year ?
Teachers’ pay should be appropriate for such an important social duty
Few teachers would disagree; few would reckon that they’re currently well remunerated, recent pay rises notwithstanding. However, there’s a fairly widespread vox pop view that teachers are over-paid and under-worked, especially with all those “holidays” — a point of view strongly, if erroneously, re-inforced by pupil-free days in term time.
Perhaps there’s an element of “paying peanuts and getting monkeys” in this widespread attitude.
Perhaps teachers have not much choice but to tolerate a level of pay commensurate with the level of teacher competence that our society presently tolerates. So, until the majority of voters demand better schools with more proficient teaching, maybe not much improvement can be expected.
Effective classroom work should be esteemed and honoured, and remunerated accordingly
At the moment, the crazy thing, the dispiriting thing, the absolutely stupid thing, in teaching is that, after the first ten or so years, the only way to increase your pay for all those years of knowledgeable, committed and effective teaching, is to, wait for this, take a deep breath, sit down if needed with a glass of water, is to …
… STOP TEACHING.
Yes, stop doing what you’re good at. Yes, stop doing what your students need. And, yes, stop doing what you love.
Say you’re a teacher of senior English Literature and you take some unpaid leave and do one of those excellent University of Cambridge [northern] Summer Schools — the writer can vouch for their quality.
What’s the response ?
Is it “Great ! That’ll enhance your already thorough teaching of Yr 12 Lit, and the reputation of the School. Give me a complete list of expenses and I’ll add that re-imbursement to the extra per month you’ve already earned through this initiative” ?
Not in teaching, mate.
But, if you do a course, in term time, naturally, in Proto-modernist Meta-connotations of Psychic Transformalities in the Ur-textual Delineation of Lethe-afflicted Pallor-limited Masculine-orientated Anthropoid Constructs, you’ll be on your way to the following: a nice desk and a new 19” Dell at the EdCentral Collective, together with a substantial pay rise (maybe even with Departmental credit card and car), and NO MORE IRRITATING, NOISY, SMELLY, FRACTIOUS BLOODY STUDENTS.
If, on the other hand, you LIKE TEACHING STUFF to KIDS, you’ll get NONE OF THE ABOVE.
Yes, at the EdCentral Collective, the gods must be crazy. Or we’re crazy to pay them any mind.
PS: If you want to read about Richard Eye Eye, or the Chicken Run Girl, let me know in Comments.
Leonard Colquhoun 7248
