Rereading Diane Ravitch’s The Death and Life of the Great American School System, the phrase which stands out for me so far is on page 12, “We must take care that out teachers are well educated, not just well trained.” As someone who is interested in teacher professional development and as a teacher getting close to a 20 year career, I see a huge difference between being educated and being trained. There is a chasm between the two that when applied to the teaching profession, could not and should not be bridged. The work and preparation of a teacher should not be compared to that of a fast food worker.
The well trained McDonald’s line chef knows procedures, but had no part in creating them. The well trained cashier is not expected to deal with novel situations as a routine part of their workday. After all, there are not that many new problems encountered making French fries that are not covered in the McDonald’s manual. At the end of the shift, the well trained worker clocks out and goes home without a thought of what will happen at work the next day. There is no need since it will be exactly the same as all the previous days. Listening to the news or talking to neighbors will not create thoughts about the role of their job in the future of America. The well trained drive-thru cashier will not wake up at 3 a.m. will a great new idea on how to ring up a value meal.
Teachers are well educated professionals. A well educated professional is responsible for diagnosing and engineering solutions to new problems. These problems are a routine part of their work day. A well educated professional has the big picture of how economics, politics, and societal norms play a part in their professional lives. A teacher is constantly exploring new ways to present content to students or to manage time more efficiently.
Awhile ago I was asked by an administrator to not only describe all my teaching strategies and procedures, but also to describe when I used each one in the specific areas of my curriculum. I jokingly asked if I was supposed to write a book. In retrospect, I was not joking. It would take a multi volume boxed set to describe the decision making process of this one physics teacher working in one specific school with her specific goals for her classes. It could never be a training manual to be duplicated by others just off a teacher assembly line.
A manual cannot be written that could approach describing the dynamic school environment, subject as it is to a myriad of unseen forces. The Aurora Borealis appears to most observers as a random swirl of colors that appear with unpredictable timing. To a physicist, the Northern Lights are a result of only one of the four fundamental forces in the universe and can be described mathematically. Has anyone ever succeeded in mathematically describing the “forces” at play in a high school physics class? Has anyone even tried? A teacher wishes they only had to work with the four fundamental forces of the universe. For example, has Johnny gotten enough sleep? Eaten anything since yesterday? Just broken up with a girlfriend? Just found out mom has cancer? Just gotten a new video game? Just gotten accepted/rejected from college? Had to work until 11pm at a fast food restaurant? Totaled his car? Oh, and note that NOTHING on this list has anything to do with academics. That’s another list!
Later In Chapter 3, Diane Ravitch goes onto to muse that “it seems curious that elected officials (in designing NCLB) would set such ambitious targets for achieving ends over which they had to little control.” Looking at the previous list, this comment is right on target. Education is messy process with many variables out of reach to educators at any level. Schools cannot control for the previous experiences of the student like McDonald’s can choose the exact variety of Russet potato for their fries. Schools cannot “store” their students in a great home like McDonald’s can store their all beef patties in a climate controlled refrigerator. Schools cannot open up their students minds to see why they cannot understand that an object can be moving without a force pushing it like McDonald’s can open up the shake machine to see why the shakes are coming out all runny. And schools cannot hand teachers a training manual on how much time to give students to complete a projectile motion lab on the Friday before Christmas break like McDonald’s can hand a manual to the fryer operator detailing how long to leave the nuggets in the oil so they come out crispy but not burnt.
Great teachers are a product of their hard work and creativity, not a step by step training manual on which button to push to set the fryer timer. Great teachers are well educated, not well trained.
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