On Teaching

A bit frustrated recently applying for jobs back in the US.  I could be applying to more jobs and following up more vigorously, but the rejections wear you down after awhile. It's a crash course in Stoicism.

Here are some of the questions I've had to field as I've applied for teaching jobs:

• Why do you want to teach in a Catholic school?
• How would you address a wide range of skills in the classroom?
• What do you think causes students to fall behind academically? What helps them succeed?
• How would you address the diverse set of student and family needs that you are likely to face?
• How have you demonstrated a commitment to urban education?
• How would you communicate a sense of urgency in your classroom?
• Describe a time when you demonstrated a "whatever it takes" mindset.

They're reasonable enough questions in themselves, I'll admit. But I constantly have the feeling of having to jump through hoops. I know that people have in mind a certain ideal; I try to persuade them that I fit that ideal.  The more time I spend trying to persuade people I'm good, the more I begin to doubt whether I really am good; the more I utter the words I believe express their values, the less I believe I'm talking about anything really valuable.  What are my true opinions about education?

Sometimes I think that all educators are sophists.  We claim expert knowledge either in some specific area or in teaching in general, and then aver that we have the ability to impart this expertise to our pupils in exchange for money.  Finally, we claim that by imparting this expertise to our pupils, we will make them into good and (much more importantly) successful.  

When I say that educators are sophists, I mean, like Plato, that the claim is a con. Neither do we have expertise, nor, if we had it, could we impart it to our students, nor, could we impart it to our students, do we have any reason to believe that it would make them good or successful. 

That isn't to say that students never learn anything from their teachers -- but the question is whether teachers are the reason they learn, or merely the occasion for that learning.  I suspect that we are more occasion than cause.  That's why I've never been very enthusiastic about hiring teachers myself.

But I still play the game and ask for money, just like the others, which makes me a hypocrite. I am keenly aware of being a hypocrite, in a couple ways. 

First, I have no idea how to guarantee that students learn something. There are things I know how to do, but they amount to little more than window dressing. What do I know how to do?

• Design PPT presentations summarizing stories, articles, poems.
• Give speeches about stories, articles, poems (these two items work in tandem).
• Design and give students work-sheets (papers) upon which are written questions about the stories, articles, and poems.
• Formulate pointed questions that are designed to put what I believe are the correct answers to my questions into the students' mouths (if not their minds).

Maybe this is what they call "English Language Arts".  There are a few more things that I haven't practiced: creating elaborate group projects, making students draw pictures or act out what they're reading, leading round table discussions. I'm limited by what I can conceive and what I can persuade my students to do. Well, that seems to be the whole of teaching: persuading students to do things that look impressive to administrators. 

When you see a teacher in a photograph, the teacher is always perched above a group of students pointing to something, maybe in a book or maybe beyond the range of the picture, and the students are looking intently at the teacher's outstretched finger. This is nothing but a symbol for communication -- the teacher shows something to the students, and the students see it.  But this isn't even the essence of teaching, which is supposed to mean making (making!) the students know something and in such a way, I suppose, that they can then know things they would not have been able to know before.  No picture can show that.  Even a conversation or an essay, perhaps, could not show that.  Do any of us even know what it is?

I skimmed recently a podcast by Freakonomics.  They discussed the idea that a good teacher raises a student's life-time expected income by some large sum, maybe $1,000,000.  Must have been more, actually. Anyway, it was depressing, because it made me think that in our whole public conversation about education, we still see it, after all, as a means. We want good teachers, and we want teachers to have skills, but mainly because we're after that extra million.  And it takes me right back to the frustrations I experience in my "daily practice" -- most students have to be motivated to learn. They don't care about it in itself.  Even the bright and motivated ones, furthermore, I suspect care not because they are really very interested in the subject, but because they are keen after their futures.  It's no wonder our education system is in such dire straits: education isn't something, as Socrates would say, that we have ever given the slightest thought to.

Take math, for instance: we worry that comparatively we are not as good at it as other countries.  Because those other countries that are better at it will outperform us in the future -- will have better technology, more jobs, and so on.  But we should worry that we don't like math enough, that we aren't learning to appreciate it.  Education, individually, nationally, and internationally, is too focused on competition -- and not the competition "between potter and potter" (Hesiod), but the sort of empty competition that cares about the product to the exclusion of the process.

In short, teaching is depressing. It's like watching your favorite movie with someone who has no interest in it. You try and you try to make the person like the movie, but he just stays around because you promised you'd take him out for drinks after the movie was over -- if he could answer your questions about it.  And through the whole process you become so exhausted that you start to wonder whether you even like the movie.  You don't watch it in your free time anymore, certainly, or other movies like it.  And that's the other reason you start to feel like a hypocrite.

The only thing more exhausting than teaching is our ideas about it. Mine, anyway.