Pay to Play ( or drink or eat or .....) ?

For a while, I did not believe that there really was strong anti-teacher/public education sentiment.  Yeah I thought that since everyone was forced to go to school and everyone complained as we do whenever we are mandated to do something (even if it is for our own good),  that people’s feelings about teachers and public education were like their feelings about going to the dentist – unpleasant but worthwhile.

What started me as a true believer in a sentiment to tear down public education and relegate the teaching profession to the same status as waitressing was reading the news stories and comments in various local and national papers.  I was surprised not only by the misinformation about the life of the teacher (overpaid, underworked and just in it for summers off), but also the system in general ( the US Constitution provides for fire departments, but not schools), and the services it provides (I taught my kids to read before they entered school so why are highly educated teachers needed)

What has sent me completely over the edge is the news story in my local paper, The Altoona Mirror about a local district, Tyrone, who is considering the following in its proposed school budget:

If passed, employees would have to pay $50 annually to have a refrigerator in their classroom or office, $20 for a coffee pot and $15 for a microwave.

What is up with this?  Why would a school district do this?   Well, the missing information is that the teachers refused a pay freeze, citing the fiscally sound state of the school district’s finances. 

This “appliance use fee” sounds like petty retaliation to me!

So let’s run the numbers.  It costs about $6 in electricity (assuming $0.12 /kW hr) to run a 500W microwave for 30 minutes for each school day. And no one runs a microwave for 30 minutes so the cost is even lower. A dorm fridge is about $25 for the school year. A coffee maker? Maybe $7/school year.

So what does the school district hope to gain?  Financially, NOTHING!!!  They just want to wield power, to put teachers in their supposed place.  I wonder if they serve coffee at school board meetings?  Do the school board members pay per cup or does the school district collect a monthly fee?

What is next? Pay Toilets?  Oh that won’t work because teachers never have time to go to the bathroom anyway.

Still an Engineer

 I opended the results of my kids Iowa test scores and have found myself excited to see a 95 th percentile on the sheet.  Why am I happy?  I do not even know the content that was assessed.  Reading Todd Farley’s book about his lucrative career in standardized testing which began by grading exams in the basement of an abandoned mall, I am sure that I will never have that feeling again, especially when the test includes open-ended items. 

Why do we trust tests given by people we don’t know and who have never met our children and yet we do not trust meaningful evaluations given by people who see our children for over 180 days each year? 

          Perhaps it is the low status given to the teacher profession.  We all know the anecdotes about how easy it is to get into an education program.  After all, those who can’t , teach.  And of course, we get summers off!!! 

Well ,as a former engineer, I find teaching incredibly challenging and yet familiar, not unlike solving a measurement problem in the lab.  It requires adapting known concepts about what is good instructional practice like frequent formative assessment, using student ideas, construction of knowledge through language, and applying them to a specific situation like:

          “It is a Tuesday in November and we are in the second day of projectile motion with a class of  28 12^th graders, some of whom have trouble solving 2t² -7 = 12.  It is 9a.m. as opposed to the 11:30 class (right before lunch) with 12 people who all can do algebra well, except for one for whom 2x = 4 is a challenge .  We have already sorted 15 situations into various student devised groupings so the students have seen the breadth of situations and have made a first attempt at teasing out important difference.  Are they now ready to start pulling numbers out of the problems and assigning them to variables?  Or maybe we should practice drawing the trajectories of the objects because if we jump into numbers too soon then the students just want to plug numbers into a formula.  We also need to do the lab in which the students organize themselves to see how flight time varies with launch speed, height and angle.  Oh and Thanksgiving break is in a week so we need to be at a solid stopping point by then.  What to do first?

          I am sure this rambling would come as a surprise to not only most of the non-teaching public, but also to education majors and even beginning teachers.  Most people think that you just “cover” the material from the book and the curriculum tells you what to do.  WRONG!! 

Teachers are professionals who rely on their education and judgment constantly, just like engineers.  I needed to design a way to measure the leaching of an alpha emitter from samples of glass to mimic the erosion of vitrified nuclear waste.  This required lots of math and creativity, but not the split second decision making skill of being a teacher.  My alpha particles behaved according to physics so they acted the same way every day and I could analytically test my different ideas one at a time.  Each year my physics classes have their own personalities.  Even in the same year, the personality changes depending on the season, day of the week, who is absent…!  I need multiple solutions to multiple problems twenty times a day. 

          So I propose a new name for teaching: Instructional Engineering which will be defined as a branch of engineering that designs learning experiences for young people involving the disciplines of psychology, statistics, ergonomics, human resources, business administration, family studies, along with the content of the learning goals ( physics, math, US history, etc.). 

          I guarantee that Todd Farley, the out of work would –be writer,  would not have gotten a job grading in the basement of a mall if the title of the tests were the Standardized Instructional Engineering Exams.  Actually, those exams would never even exist because why would we not trust the engineers to design quality lessons for the students.  It’s not as if they are just teachers.  Problem solved!