WHO IS THE BEST TEACHER?

WHO IS THE BEST TEACHER?


James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© December 11, 2010

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Here in Florida there have been hallelujahs from one end of the state to the other. Many elementary and secondary schools have gone from a “C” grade to a “B” grade or an “A” grade.

Teachers have, understandably, been teaching to the state tests, and have been awarded consequently.

Teaching, the most important business of society is a survival game for teachers, and they are learning to play it better and better. I think this whole scheme misses the point.

Public education, which has been evolving for more than a century, going from teacher centered to student centered learning, has placed the onus for success clearly on the shoulders of teachers, when teachers are important but not all inclusive to the learning process. Parents and students complete the triangular process.

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Now, we have a new governor elect in Florida, Rick Scott, who comes from corpocracy where he had a checkered career, but one in which he made a great deal of money. It would appear he plans to make students minions of a corporate manifest to produce a finished product consistent with his healthcare business model.

His plan is to give vouchers to any family that wants them running a dagger through traditional education. Scott’s plan would give the parents of public school students a credit of roughly $5,500 or 85 percent of the expenditure per schoolchild to use for their child’s education. The state would contract with a qualified financial institution to administer the fund and verify appropriate spending from the account. My sense is that this is a nightmare in the making to rival the current educational bureaucracy.

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I am not a trained educator, per se, but one who spent a good deal of my life in school attaining several degrees in both public and private schools. I was a student in the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, and 1970s, and taught at the graduate level as an adjunct professor in the 1980s and 1990s in both land grant institutions and private colleges and universities. I was also a contract consultant to such executive learning institutions as the American Management Association and the Professional Institute. I have also written on education in scores of trade journals and periodicals over the last forty years, and have written several books for mature students in the workforce.

So, in the dichotomy between student and teacher, I have developed some views on traditional education, which I see Governor-elect Rick Scott scrapping without due consideration of the model in place or its culture. It is dangerous to venture beyond a culture without a careful assessment of that culture, or without having a game plan to bring teachers, students and parents on board. Transitional change requires a systemic indoctrination, orientation and implementation strategy. This is the opposite of a wild ride into the future.

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Education has been in the “Present Panic of Now” since the Russians launched Sputnik in 1957, with a frantic compare and compete strategy of throwing the old out and replacing it with the new with blind optimism, ad infinitum. Governor-elect Scott is only the latest.

The casualties of panic strategies over the last sixty years, to my knowledge, have never been carefully measured. We only know that millions of children have slipped through the cracks.

I know my own children lost their appetite for education, and have done relatively well despite rather than because of their formal education. When I was teaching graduate school, I often had otherwise bright people who could not write or read well, and were going through the motions to gain another degree to win promotion. They were not interested in education or being educated.

These students are now parents of students who face the shock of this extended voucher system, an idea to make education unadulterated job training. Not surprising, this is consistent with corpocracy-think.

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SO, WHO IS THE BEST TEACHER?

Over my long life, people who have been disappointed in work and life often have told me it was because “they didn’t have good teachers.” No matter where – Europe, South America, South Africa, or in the United States – it was always the same mantra. I would shake my head and walk away, that is, until I got into the adjunct professor business.

It became clear to me, when I was successful as a teacher; it was because students made me so. It had little to do with me but everything to do with them.

Learning is not a mechanistic business. It is not a business model. It isn’t even a grading system. Learning is an awakening of the person to the world around and beyond that stimulates the mind to grow and grasp its culture and shape its destiny to a measure of consistency fitting to its uniqueness.

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My sister’s son was such a poor high school student that she and my brother-in-law took my nephew to a psychologist to see if he had a learning disability. The psychologist, after examining and testing him, assured the parents, “There is nothing wrong with your son. I noticed he has not missed any school. He is looking for something but hasn’t found it. Once he finds it, he will be fine.”

After high school, he worked as an hourly in a high-tech firm, and quickly reached his maximum pay level. In his twenties, seeing a bleak future, he wondered if a job was all there was to life.

Then one day he was at a friend’s house, and saw his computer. The rest is history. He loved that computer, and the more he learned about it the more he wanted to know. He went back to school, and over a torturous six years, earned his degree in computer science and is now, and has been for years, a successful computer programmer and consultant. Along the way, given his love and passion, he made a lot of teachers successful.

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Learning is not a place but a mindset. For learning to flourish, there has to be a climate conducive to learning, and that is not necessarily a regimented rote-learning curriculum where students memorize and regurgitate what is presented in a quest for grades. You can be an “A” student and not retain as much as a “C” student who is interested in creating conceptual building blocks to understanding a subject.

The late Stephen Jay Gould questioned the idea of intelligence testing in “The Mismeasure of Man” (1981). Others have challenged the relevance of SATs, GREs and other instruments meant to measure learning.

My sense is that the biggest challenge of education is to make the student aware that he or she is the best teacher. Now, that is not meant to be coy. I mean it sincerely. I think the best teacher of the student is the student, where the sense of being a student and learning being the vehicle combine to establish passion and meaning to life.

The second best teacher is an accomplished student in the discipline being studied. No one understands the mind and nuances of the student than another student who has mastered the subject, or is on his or her way to mastering it. Smart students have always known this.

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When I went from a parochial grammar school to a public high school, mainly being recruited because I was an athlete, teachers during my first two years of high school didn’t take me seriously as a student, but other students, accomplished students without a bias against me as a jock, did. I made it my business to eat lunch with them, and to seek their help when I needed it. Without exception, they were obliging.

During my junior and senior years, I would eat lunch in the auditorium and students would come to sit with me to discuss word problems they had in algebra and geometry.

In the process of doing that, I discovered why the good students were so willing to help me: by teaching others we become better students ourselves; by explaining the steps to the solution of problems we acquire a better grasp of the discipline. For the student as teacher it is a win-win proposition for both.

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The role of parents in this learning equation is fundamental.

The first bridge to cross for parents is that it is not all about them. It is not all about their biases for or against education, or how smart or dull they were in school, or even how much education they have had, or they lie about having. It is all about the son or daughter.

Back to what I’ve said earlier, I’ve heard parents tell their children, “I never had any good teachers,” implying that was the reason they have had to struggle.

The statement is erroneous in the first light based on what I’ve said above, but it is erroneous in another light because it suggests that school is a place you have to go to learn for a number of years, and then school and learning is out for life.

School is never out. Everyone gets a report card every day of life. Learning is a lifelong experience. When you stop learning, you start digging a hole in your soul. The irony is that grammar school, high school and college graduations are called “commencements,” and the word means “to have or start or make a beginning.”

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The quickest way for a parent to turn off a child is to act as a know-it-all, or to never be able to say, “I don’t know, but I can find out.”

Children are not stupid. They quickly decipher what parents say to what they expect of them. It doesn’t take much encouragement for a student to think education sucks if the parents do.

My da thought book learning was emasculating and unmanly. “Girls,” he said, “are always reading books. Boys do things. They get jobs. They develop common sense.” He was convinced I had little common sense. I never had a job but was always playing sports or reading books. My mother, a high school graduate, was of another mind. She knew education was the only ticket for a poor kid to break the jinks of poverty.

My da was a good man but only went to the seventh grade. It handicapped him for life in more ways than one.

I’ve known a number of young people in this present generation that have handicapped themselves: girls who have dropped out of school, got pregnant, lived off and on with boyfriends that failed to support their children, living lives going nowhere, and not because they lacked brains or talent or ability.

Notice I didn’t say they lacked opportunity.

Too often young people skate by an opportunity to get an education as if it doesn’t exist. They could go to junior college, night school, or take an on-line course, but that might mean giving up their free time, their nightlife, their friends, their drinking and partying buddies. It always boils down to choices, and many of the also-rans consistently make bad choices.

I’ve known guys, as far back as my generation, who never got educated or developed a value added skill because they were in hock to car and insurance car payments, and “had to work” instead of going to school.

Then I’ve known people who stayed in school and hated every minute of it acquiring degrees and professional credentials that they never used or abused because it was not what they really wanted to do, or to be. Many of them had no idea what they wanted to do or be because they never took the time to think about it; they only knew what they didn’t want to do or be. If this sounds insane, trust me, it is more common than you might think.

Too many people seek a career because they believe they will make a lot of money. They will even enter a profession they hate because of this motivation. This seldom works out to their advantage. Do what you love and the money will follow. It is never the reverse of this.

When you educate yourself to a job, and most education is so directed, it becomes vocational education but without the vocation. Sad.

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There are people reading this that I can hear say, “Why bother? Do you expect to change the educational calculus?”

I will answer by saying many students will succeed despite rather than because of whatever the current educational system. Unfortunately, this is not the majority. These students know they are their own best teachers. They are not afraid to ask embarrassing questions in class, or to seek out the smartest student in the discipline and get his or her reading on the subject. Nor do they limit their learning to the classroom or to their peers. They listen, process and evaluate everything they experience wherever they are. They are a learning machine. They know they cannot stand on the moment but must be organized to grow and develop as long as life pulsates through their spirit.

We need more of them but I sense the system, including the latest rendition of Governor-elect Scott is not geared to produce them. I find that strange because the Governor-elect is the embodiment of what I describe here. His only problem, I suspect, is that he senses he is unique and that the model that worked for him is an aberration, and he must institute something that resembles a regimental departure from his self-learning.

So, the answer is that voucher education will not change anything but will disrupt everything. This is so because of the planned scale without suitable acknowledgement and consideration of teachers, students and parents in the present mode of culture and education.

The first step was not to compose a committee of experts, but to define the problem of education in functional and approachable terms with input from teachers, students and parents.

This is necessary to see and understand before everyone can be expected to be on board. Teachers and parents want the best for students. They are so immersed in the day-today problems that they have little time for the heavy lifting. They need guidance and direction in defining the subsequent steps forward. This takes time, patience, persistence, and prudence, the essentials to building creative consensus in a framework of sustained cooperation. Change is inevitable, but not change for change’s sake.

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