Contents of T:
Teacher
Shortages, The Dirty Little Secret of:
In an attempt to raise the standards of our national public education
system, politicians and the public alike have called for higher teacher
standards and greater teacher accountability. Admittedly, many teachers are
either unmotivated, unqualified, or both. Many teachers do not even have college
coursework in the subjects they teach. As we search for ways to improve the
quality of our teachers, a disturbing counter-trend emerges: reasonable
predictions forecast a great teacher shortage over the next ten years as baby
boomer teachers retire, leaving mass vacancies. If our teachers are not
adequately qualified now, what will happen when the big retirement trend begins?
Where will all the teachers we need (and expect to meet higher standards) come
from? What will drive them to the teaching profession?
As things stand now, nothing. The public and its politicians are burying
their heads in the sand, choosing to ignore in the realm of education the very
rules that govern the rest of the professional world: you get what you pay for.
While businesses woo the most qualified managers with lucrative deals, teachers
are expected to join the profession on an altruistic basis. Some of us have
become teachers because we believe in giving back to the community, working with
young people and contributing to the future of the world; but clearly these
motivations alone are not yielding the educational results we desire. In fact,
our schools are flooded with sub-par educators, the best available amongst a
pool limited by the low respect and low pay that teachers garner.
Too many people who would be excellent teachers consider a career in
education but decide in the end that the salary potential is too limiting. As
long as the salary gap between teaching and entry-level business jobs remains
great, we are going to lose many of our best teaching prospects. Teachers are
not poor. In fact, a single teacher or pair of co-habitating teachers can live a
very comfortable life. But for the new teacher living in an area like New York
City with its high cost of living, or the lifelong educator trying to support a
family, the salary makes teaching a difficult job to love. Until our economic
and social habits change, thereâs only one clear way we can remedy our
upcoming teacher shortage and raise the standards of our educators:
itâs the economy, stupid! In a society which expresses its priorities through
its willingness to spend money, teachers sit low in the occupational hierarchy.
If we want quality teachers, we must reprioritize the place of education in our
society, so that teaching is acknowledged and treated as a valued social force.
I, like many other people in
our community, refuse to spend the rest of my life working at some giant
corporation that exploits millions of people while I sell 40 hours a week/50
weeks a year to it in exchange for some obscene amount of money that is supposed
to make me feel good about having only two weeks ãvacationä a year. I
decided that that was entirely uninteresting in high school, at which point I
decided I wanted to become a teacher.
This decision was made partially out of the desire to exact revenge. I
imagined that there would be no better revenge than doing the job of all the
shitty teachers I had throughout my life better than they could dream of doing
it. However, my version of Îbetterâ was being a cool teacher that everyone
wanted to hang out with and everyone liked. That was the best sort of teaching I
could imagine at the time (this was largely due to the fact that my best
teachers were only good for hanging out with for the most part and rarely for
learning from). Iâve had a similar attitude about many things in my life, when
Iâd see a cop Iâd think about how if I was a cop I would skate with the
skaters and hassle the jocks (note my stereotypical high school thought process)
and I would think the same for almost every person that one feels is leaning
heavily on you when youâre young. So I spent a year studying music education
in which time I learned how to play my instrument Îfor realâ and I was
spending four hours a day practicing, locked up in a tiny practice room and
thinking about how great it will be when I have a big band room and can hang out
and play music with my students. The summer after that year I quit the music
program and began a program in English Education. For the most part I was still
thinking about being a cool teacher although I always knew that along with being
a cool teacher I would be trying to change the kids and other teachers by
setting an example with my actions that reflected my ideals. So Iâd be the
leftist, weird but cool teacher. But that year I started taking classes that
were really about being a teacher (rather than being a musician as most of the
kids in that program were using teaching as something to fall back on). At this
point my conception of what a teacher could and should be altered radically.
Most people spend a huge amount of time in school until their middle
teens, and some until theyâre 18 or 22. Many children have more contact with
their teachers than with their parents and certainly the community that is
created at a school is often as or more valuable to a student than that
particular studentâs family or home community. Many high school teachers come
into direct classroom contact with as many as 175 kids per year (Sizer, 36) and
even at the most progressive high schools the teachers have at least 80 students
to deal with over the course of the semester or the year (these numbers exclude
extracurricular activities which would clearly push these numbers up). With the
opportunity to come into contact with this many students, so many of whom need
the presence and help of a teacher figure in their lives, itâs impossible to
be satisfied with just being cool.
I have completed 2 years of this program now and the next step is to
begin student teaching which is a scary prospect indeed, but also one that will
begin to fulfill the promise I see that is set out for prospective teachers.
This promise is the opportunity to play an integral part in the formation of
hundreds of studentsâ lives in a way that is direct, sincere and powerful. But
the question, of course, is how this is done without just hanging out with kids
and telling them how one thinks it is. This question has been answered
repeatedly by the classes Iâve taken and the books Iâve read.
Reexamining
the Relationship Between Student and Teacher
Ninety five percent of my classes in school were either exclusively or
nearly exclusively lecture oriented. The situation created by these types of
learning situations is that the teacher becomes an all-knowing figure that
passes down the sacred information to the children who attempt to memorize it in
order to spit it back out with as few alterations as possible in the future.
There is nothing egalitarian about lecture classes, there is nothing cooperative
or dialogical about lecture classes. The flow of ideas only goes in one
direction. Beyond this, lectures can be boring as hell when one has to sit
through them for hours each day (never mind how hard this gets when hormones
kick in and thereâs all sorts of energy that needs to be expressed). There is
an obvious disrespect for the additions a student could make to a classroom in
one that never asks for her/his opinion or ideas. A student-centered classroom,
where the students and teacher take equal part in deciding the curriculum and
running the class would create an atmosphere of respect and responsibility. A
classroom in which the teacher acts more as a facilitator than a dictator is the
only sort of egalitarian teaching I can think of.
Reexamining
the Idea of Testing
We all grow up under the strain of tests and grades. There are always
deadlines and ultimatums. The kids that donât receive good test grades end up
receiving low grades in their classes. But do we ever wonder if testing is
perhaps not the best way to determine what a student knows? If we consider that
the student population of most schools is diverse, at least insofar as
interests, learning methods and test taking abilities it is absurd to determine
a studentâs ability in only one way. A number of methods should be employed in
order to determine exactly what a student has learned in order to make room for
the probability that all students are not the same. A method that is gaining
popularity is that of the portfolio. Having students put together portfolios of
their best work or the work that best shows what sort of progress theyâve made
allows a student to express exactly what they feel they have gotten out of a
particular class, semester, subject, etc. Portfolios can and should be complex
and difficult things to produce so that they are as rigorous as testing;
however, there is no pressure to memorize obscure facts that one has no interest
in and there is no demand for students to squeeze into one sort of mold that
they simply cannot. These portfolios should also be accompanied by a
presentation (that is often in front of other students, several teachers,
administrators and family) in which the student presents the portfolio and
explains why it is an accurate representation of what she/he has learned and why
they should be allowed to pass to the next class, move on to the next grade, and
graduate. I am not suggesting that testing be entirely done away with, however I
think it should be used as one of several assessment methods.
Reexamining
Grades and Grading
Grades are an attempt to quantify data that is simply not quantifiable.
When one writes a paper and receives a ÎBâ, what does that mean? And how
many times has a grade like that been nearly the only feedback a teacher
supplies? At the end of a math test a teacher adds up all the right answers
(sometimes coming up with a formula for partially correct answers) and writes
ÎBâ on the first page. In both cases one assigns a certain meaning to this
letter, reducing a pool of ideas to a single vague symbol. One is either happy
with that letter or wishes it was some other letter. But what are those letters
saying? How can a bunch of ideas be quantified into a letter grade or a
numerical grade (ãMy GPA is 3.8, I got a 77 on my history quizä???)?
Essentially these terms really donât provide a very accurate measure of what
went on in the classroom or on the test; a simple letter can never express the
complexities of a paper, a semester of class or a chapter test in math. One
simply cannot wring that much meaning out of it. But in the age of number
crunching we are satisfied that a 2 digit number or letter of the alphabet can
sum up all that work. Whatâs the alternative though? Evaluations. An essay
deserves an appropriate amount of writing in response, a test deserves itâs
own amount, a semester of work requires a very long and detailed response to an
entire semester of work. Obviously the structure of most schools would have to
change so that teachers would have the possibility of authentically assessing
each studentâs essay but thatâs the only true and accurate form of
evaluation that I have encountered.
Reexamination
of What It Means To Be Smart
Just as alternative forms of testing need to used in order to make room
for the existence of a diverse student body, so should alternate versions of
intelligence be accepted in order to allow for the multitude of talents
(intelligences) that exist in our society. Howard Gardner, a Professor at
Harvard, has concocted this beautiful and controversial theory in which he
creates a system wherein he places equal importance on the following seven forms
of intelligence: linguistic, logical-mathematical, musical, spatial, bodily
kinesthetic, interpersonal, and intrapersonal (Gardner is currently considering
adding an eighth to his list as well). Historically, only the first two have
ever been considered (even most artists or musicians we may call geniuses but
probably not intelligent without some sort of qualifying statement such as,
ãBut not Îbookâ smartä). Previously all kids may have had talents but
now, because of Gardnerâs theory, we can consider the musician or athlete as
intelligent as the writer or mathematician, just intelligent in a different way.
It may seem like a bunch of nonsense to consider Michael Jordan as intelligent
as Einstein, however intelligence, as defined by Merrian-Webster as ãThe
ability to learn or understand or to deal with new or trying situationsä.
Gardnerâs own widely accepted definition is, ãthe ability to solve problems
or to fashion a product, to make something that is of value in at least one
culture.ä Clearly both Einstein and Jordan meet both definitions and each of
them has an intelligence that the other most likely lacks. What does this mean?
This means that band is as important as math, that theater is as important as
English, that art is as important as science - that no educational pursuit can
be viewed as inherently more intelligent than any other. One can say that math
is more important than band or science is more useful than art, but thatâs not
an objective truth by any stretch of the imagination. Until Gardnerâs theory
came along, it was accepted as such.
These are just a few of the possibilities that exist for a radical change
in teaching and learning and these are just a few of the changes that Iâm
interested in making in order to make schooling an activity that makes sense.
There is such an enormous amount of possibility in schooling and teaching that
as time goes on I get more and more excited and serious about studying to become
a teacher. Everyday I will have the opportunity to change a kid, change a fellow
teacher, change a parent, change the system and be changed by all of these
things as well. Teaching is everyday activism, a job that, while exhausting (I
donât know any serious teachers who donât find their job extremely hard and
totally draining) itâs something that when you ask yourself, ãWhat did I do
with my life?ä you can answer enthusiastically.
For
further reading:
Sizer,
Theodore. Horaceâs
Compromise: The Dilemma of The America High School. 1992, Houghton Mifflin
(a radical work at the time of itâs publication and a great way for beginners
to get some basic ideas about progressive education)
Mayher,
John. Uncommon Sense:
Theoretical Practice in language Education. 1990, Boynton/Cook. (A bible for
the serious student)
Pradl,
Gordon. Literature for
Democracy: Reading as a Social Act. 1996, Boynton/Cool. (A book about how
reading and discussing literature propagates a democratic and egalitarian
society)
Kohl,
Herbert. 36 Children.
1967, Signet. (ãA young teacherâs account of his revolutionary,
unforgettable year in a ghetto classroomä)
Gardner,
Howard. ãMultiple
Intelligences: Implications for Art and Creativityä. in W. Moody Artistic
Intelligences: Implications for Education. 1990, Teacherâs College Press.
We
also have boat loads of amazing articles that we are willing to copy and mail to
interested people anywhere.
We cannot avoid technology.
The ludditeâs dream is an illusion, and a vain attempt at avoiding the
inevitable expression of human curiosity and ingenuity. Indeed, technology
represents the logical next step of human evolution, where transfer of genetic
material was augmented by the additional inheritance of the meme
21
(a unit of cultural inheritance), which are now furthered by the
technology
handed down to successive generations. And so, it is inadequate to resist
technology and yet, technology looms undeniably as a threat to our global
survival. The critical questions for humanity, and the earth itself, is: Can
we use technology to sustain, rather than destroy, our fragile existence?
If you donât listen to this radio show, you are missing out.
Have
you ever stopped to wonder about the cruel things that were embraced by
generations past? Ever thought: ãHow did the German people allow the Holocaust
to happen?ä, ãHow did decent Americans tolerate slavery?ä / The sad truth
is weâre awfully prone to injustice, and it doesnât take much to push us to
violence. And when youâre born into a way of doing things, itâs hard to step
back from that pattern and self-examine. The philosophies of rationalization are
passed down from generation to generation. / And yet, we defy our parentsâ
ways in small arenas, realizing the previous wrong and refusing to continue it.
This is progression - that question: ãHow did they tolerate that?ä - but
of course there are natural conclusions to be drawn from our own divergence from
paternal directions... some day our children will too ask ãHow did they
tolerate that?ä. What is it that weâre doing, right now, that will one day
be seen as a barbaric atrocity? Well, I donât claim to be privy to the future,
but Iâve got one theory: It wonât be long before the members of a future
generation say: ãHow could they eat animals? How could they do that to other
living creatures? How could they do that to the earth?ä It just doesnât seem
like our hollow rationalizations can hold up for much longer. / I try to be
ahead of my time.
I take my students on a camping trip twice a year; it is a great
experience for students and teachers alike, and is perhaps the highlight of my
year. Certainly the most intense part of the trip from my perspective is the
trust walk: late at night we take a hike without flashlights, and at a certain
point along the route, we stop and walk, one by one, along a quarter-mile
stretch of path. Walking alone in the dark, in the wilderness, is one of the
most scary and most intense experiences a city kid could have. While we live in
constant fear of a feasible unknown danger when we walk the streets of Brooklyn
and Queens, it is strange to consider just how afraid we are in the woods, where
tripping and falling would be the only event which could ever harm us. I tell my
kids:
Throughout
this trip we have worked together, forming friendships through our cooperation.
I hope that for the rest of your life you are surrounded by people who are
caring and helpful. But sometimes we need to learn to walk alone for brief
periods of time, unaided by others.
This
is what the Trust Walk is about, and my sermon on its merit is as much addressed
at me as it is at them.
Tubal
Ligation & Eugenics - Welcome to America!:
Puerto Rico, in 1900, two years after the US invaded it, was placed under
the provision of the Foraker Act. This act, passed by the US congress,
reconfigured the political structure of the island by declaring that the US
appoint its own officials to administer it. This was a wonderfully official
declaration for the US mainland, since it gave the island almost entirely over
to US discretion. Under the Foraker Act, Puerto Ricoâs economic and
political interests became those of the United States. With this act, the US
effectively established itself as 85 percent of the islandâs political power.
Moreover, each preexisting US law immediately became applicable in Puerto Rico.
Hence, congress and the United States president had the legal power to create,
accept, or veto any piece of legislation on the island. Soon, the concerns of
the Puerto Rican natives were transferred to the US through reports written by
American officials and hired developers. Many of these reports communicated
racist and classist interpretations to congress. They asserted that the Puerto
Rican people were lazy, undignified, and uninterested in improving their
economic problems (see Stuart Chaseâs ãOperation Bootstrap in Puerto
Rico: Report of Progressä, National Planning Association, No. 75,
September 1951). In 1900, Charles Allen, the first US appointed governor of
Puerto Rico, reported that ãthere were too many poor, jobless Puerto Ricans
and not enough men of capital.ä ·Just the kind of guy you would want looking
out for you, huh? The US intended to manipulate Puerto Rico for the purpose of
facilitating their own economic interests on the island. By 1930, outside
sources owned more than half of the land, and by 1937, the unemployment rate was
37%. US planners often referred to unemployed Puerto Ricans as ãexcess
population.ä That is, if the native people did not facilitate the corporate
conquest of their own land, they were perceived as unnecessarily being there.
Propagandized billboards and flyers advertised opportunities available on the
mainland for ãambitiousä Puerto Ricans. The propaganda was successful.
Between 1945 and 1949, over a half million of the islandâs population
migrated, primarily to US mainland.
We now turn to the issues of eugenics and tubal ligation. Eugenics,
oversimply, was a proposed and accepted Îscienceâ which was formally
disproved as a legitimate science somewhere around the turn to the twentieth
century. Eugenics claimed to prove by observation that peoplesâ ethnicity
delineated them as inferior or superior with regard to other groups of people.
Eugenics was believed in for too long to be eradicated at the same instance that
its fallacious absurdity was formally declared. And gee, might I be going out on
a limb to claim that slightly more than a residue still remains of eugenics?
Puerto Rico was still an overpopulated land. The US planners justified their
utter disregard for the natives of Puerto Rico with the eugenical idea that the
Puerto Rican people were, by virtue of their ethnicity, lazy and stupid. Many of
them did not speak English, and as a result, the prejudice US planners saw them
as people unable to talk or communicate intelligently. Basically, if you were
poor and non-white, your being non-white was viewed as the reason why you had to
be a poor person. The eugenic views of US planners prevented them from believing
that the Puerto Rican people could claim a stake in this Înew American
territory.â According to eugenics, Puerto Ricans were already defeated because
they were Puerto Ricans. Eugenics made it abundantly clear that the United
States wanted Puerto Rico, but not the Puerto Rican people. The US needed to
find a somewhat humane way to reduce the Îexcess populationâ of Puerto
Ricans living in Puerto Rico· They failed to find one.
A new economic strategy, under the public pretense of a Family Planning
Project, began to advertise an innovative and Îperfectly safeâ form of birth
control. An enormous wave of propaganda was designed to portray the birth
control program as a generous way for the US to help Puerto Ricans out of their
economic straits. It was advertised as an act of Puerto Rican patriotism. Of
course, the Puerto Rican people did recognize the overpopulation on their
island. Knowing also that the overpopulation posed a problem for the development
of their island, they were aware that a decrease in the islandâs population
would benefit the US planners. For this fact too, there was no visible reason
why they should have doubted the so-called Family Planning Project. But the US
did not disclose the full story. Their program was far from being as safe and
generous as advertised, since it entailed a new, untested, surgical procedure.
Tubal ligation is an invasive method of sterilization. Whatâs more, tubal
ligation is an irreversible procedure. This was the helping hand that we so
kindly offered to the people of Puerto Rico. Most of the Puerto Rican wimmin
were not informed that this surgery was irreversible, and they could not have
known this from existing knowledge since they were the unwitting experiments.
They were often given release forms that disclosed the fact of irreversibility
in small ENGLISH print! How convenient· to preface serious surgery on a mass
scale to solicited and deceived subjects using a release form written in a
language that most of the patients were still learning. At no moment was any
consultation provided. If no questions were asked, no answers were volunteered.
The ethics of this deceptive and experimental mass surgery on Puerto Rican
wimmin was not even a question. Eugenics ensured the doctors and planners that
what they were doing was O.K. because of the people they were doing it to.
Hence, eugenics was necessary for mass tubal ligation. It followed the same
principles of animal experimentation, whereby the supposed substandard status of
the test subjects justifies the attempt to use them to help a superior group of
beings. Eugenics and tubal ligation were partners in the crime of the
irresponsible atrocity of a dangerous and large-scale violation of human rights,
and the racialization of a people as a whole.
Although it was initially conceived as a family planning project, very
few men had themselves sterilized. The wimmin were propagandistically saturated
with this makeshift solution, to so much further an extent than the men, that
they saw it almost as their ethical responsibility to the well-being of their
families. Wimmin were approached by American ãfamily plannersä who were
indeed recruiting agents for tubal ligation. These Îfamily plannersâ
approached the wimmin when their families were away, and encouraged their
victims to make the right decision and to be good citizens. The goal was
advertised: ãZero Population!ä BETWEEN 1930 AND 1974, 200,000 PUERTO RICAN
WIMMIN RECEIVED ãLA OPERACION.ä ·200,000 FORCIBLY STERILIZED UNDER
EUGENICAL LAWS.
Sterilization programs in Puerto Rico persisted until the mid 1970âs.
In 1956, contraceptive pills 20 times stronger than the pills used today were
first tested on wimmin who lived in government housing projects. The wimmin were
again not informed that they were the first human beings to ever ingest these
pills. Many of these wimmin were severely injured, some permanently. The
pharmaceutical companies did not have to go through the FDA in order to perform
this human experiment. Since Puerto Rico was not officially a state (it was
considered a Îterritoryâ), they remained with the commonwealth status which
did not legally bind the pharmaceutical companies to comply with standard US
regulations.
In 1974, there was another organized effort for increased migration and
reduction of the birth rate. That year, an even more intensive sterilization
program was implemented. 24,000 MORE WIMMIN WERE STERILIZED IN 2 YEARS. IN 1974,
PUERTO RICAN GOVERNMENT STATISTICS REVEALED THAT 35% OF THE WIMMIN ON THE ISLAND
AT AN AVERAGE AGE OF 26 HAD BEEN STERILIZED. THIS STATISTIC HAS NEVER BEEN
DUPLICATED ON THE US MAINLAND.
This essay does not regard information that is commonly discussed in the
mainstream, or in the average history class. Why? ·Perhaps because it is our
own shameful history. Patriotic American professors and your typical god-fearing
citizens have no use for such information. As far as Iâm concerned, these
atrocities are recent enough to be treated as current events. They are more
current than we can comfortably acknowledge. To ignore them is not merely to
ignore a part of history, but to ignore a part of yourself. No, you and I were
not the family planners or developers, and we are not accountable for events
that took place before our births. But these events will account for us. If they
were to take place again tomorrow, most of us would be protected under the
eugenical laws by virtue of the socially constructed groups we were born into.
History can never be completely left behind us, for it is always within
us as we move on. This claim is not made with Îfigurativeâ speech. It is no
more a metaphor than the claim that we leave history behind. Consider your
history· Consider your privileges· Consider yourself. · I mean this quite
literally.
ÎBig
Upsâ to Eva Vega; to her research on this, and to her teaching me almost all
of the things above.