"Those who can, do. Those who can't,....."

Back in the day when I was going through the teacher training program there was a curious and hard lesson I learned about being in the field of education. I don’t really like other teachers. There may be a few exceptions floating around in the world but I can’t say I personally know any. I don’t like hanging out with them. I don’t like engaging them in conversation. I don’t like the way they talk to people around me. It’s pretty comprehensive.

There are a lot of reasons for this but I believe it boils down to one contradiction. People attracted to the field of teaching feel like they have some great knowledge or insight that they believe they have to impose on others but they tend to be afflicted with some kind of intellectual feebleness. Now it may be argued, and quite correctly that this applies to myself. I am as guilty of inflated ego and thinking I’ve got the huge brilliant idea as any other person who’s gotten into this business. Oddly, and perhaps inappropriately in knowing this I do not take discouragement but hope. It is a hope that both grows in depth and in term as I come to realize how much there really is to learn and how possible it is to learn it. (There's a little bit of Zen-ness, if you will, related to this that I will forbear going into for now.)

My critics will have already realized that I did not confess to being feeble-minded as well as arrogant, a point only too consistent with itself. But it is the issue of intellectual capacity and recent experiences I’ve had with it that have motivated this post. Recently my teacher training was resumed in an on-line format to the end of obtaining my license to teach in a special ed context or at least to keep the feds off my school’s back for a while. Personally for myself I don’t have a particular interest in special education. It doesn’t exactly jive with where I’ve imagined myself going over the next few years but as can be seen from my last post, studying it has enlightened me on several levels with respect to what I actually do have an interest in. A really important thing I’ve learned a lot about is the general intellectual quality of folks in education, a sort of reminder of what it was like to sit in classes with would-be teachers.

The first and most generalizable observation I made was that discussion board posting was pretty terrible. Without detailing the gratuitous spelling and grammatical errors, I found the vast majority of participants to be of relatively low quality. The very vast majority of writing did one of two things: state platitudes about the way things are supposed to be done based on the author's wealth of personal experience or regurgitate parrot-like things written elsewhere (either in the readings or other posts to the discussion board). This exemplifies perfectly what I’m talking about. They are so convinced they already know the answer no one approached the discussions with a questioning mind seeking to challenge any assumptions. They are both arrogant and feeble of mind. To flatter one’s self with the belief in being a critical thinker and then to so readily internalize everything the “authorities” say… to me it is among the most bitter hilarities.

Part of the course involved a group project, some kind of writing and lesson planning. During the first week of the class a couple of people posted with their ideas about what to do for the project. Honestly I didn’t like them too much. So, I kind of waited to see if anyone was going to agree or suggest something else. I’m not really motivated to take charge of groups where I don’t know any of the other people in them. Eventually, I had to go to the island. While I was away others posted and they sort of created a division of labor for work on the assignment. When I got back and read about what they were doing and stated my intentions to help with the project, I pretty much got the cold shoulder. This is a somewhat understandable situation but consistent with the usual teacher belief in self-superiority. It was sort of like, “if this guy isn’t going to be to class on time he will get no fruit cup.” The sort of consensus was that I would make final comments and that would be the extent of my participation. I felt a bit uneasy about this until someone posted a portion of the assignment as she had completed it. After reading it I went from uneasy to worried.

Now I want to clarify one thing. I’m a good enough writer to know that content exceeds mechanics in importance. The stuff that I read may have had some mechanical problems but it was the content that had me squirming like an electrified night-crawler. The lesson was supposed to be for a specific content area but nothing in the learning exercises related to it. It’s not that the components were bad per se they were just completely inconsistent with the proposed learning goals and stated function of the lesson. I posted my comments and waited for more to appear.

As the wait for material became prolonged and my group members posted to me about how I should only need to do simple proof-reading my anxiety increased. I feared I was about to be graded on the work of others, work that would make me feel very ashamed for its poor quality. So I posted again, almost begging that people offer their drafts for my comments. I was hoping that I could get early drafts so that major mods could be accomplished in time to produce good papers without unnecessary work. One of the group members wrote back chiding me for my concern and lack of gratitude that “all the work had already been done for [me].” Eventually this individual posted her share of the work commenting that she was very confident that it would at most require very minimal revisions. It was horrible.

First of all, it had many grammatical and spelling issues. There were many parts that were unintelligible as far their meaning. Add to that the fact that much of the language was adolescent in nature. The organization made no sense. It was as if she had taken bits of information from all over and then lumped them into random groups for fun. A lot of the information was very redundant. There were parts where I had a really hard time understanding exactly what it was that her sources had said. I looked them up for myself and my horror only grew. This person had made incredibly childish errors in interpreting the meaning of the texts she had read. She was so screwed up that she thought an essay among her sources was an empirical study.

I wrote my comments. And rewrote probably more than half the paper, still feeling that the thing belonged on a roll in a bathroom stall. It was so bad, I didn’t want to embarrass her by publishing it to the discussion board so I e-mailed it to her privately, warning that my critique was pretty harsh and asked for her response for improving the paper. She was pretty offended and reprimanded me for unwarranted perfectionism. “I don’t know what you think is so bad about my writing. It was good enough to get me my masters degree.” I almost cried.

She told me she had not read the whole revision, was attaching her limited comments, and then was off for a vacation. All of that would have been fine except that she did not attach her comments. So, here I was stuck with a paper on a topic I didn’t like, taking an approach I didn’t like, producing a revision my partner didn’t like. She didn’t even have the wit or grace to tell me what needed to be fixed before she disappeared in a self-righteous puff of smoke.

After returning from her vacation she posted nasty comments towards me on the discussion board and the teacher stepped in to moderate. Meanwhile, there was work to do on the other parts of the assignment. Their work was posted and it was not that bad but needed some real fixes. Although they were much less oppositional about having my suggestions, they were quite stubborn about not taking them. As I said, they already know what they are doing. How could anything I say further improve on their already perfect work? It’s preposterous. Ignore the fact that my comments are about things like internal inconsistency, logical errors, and truly confusing instructions. My observations aren’t substantive enough to pay attention to. Either that or these educators of children don’t understand consistency, logic, or clarity in communication.

So, these are the sorts of people teaching our youth. No wonder the question is seldom asked, “Is our children learning?” How can they learn from people who don’t know how to learn themselves? I don’t believe kids can learn how to read good and do other things good if their teachers can’t read good themselves.