Teacher: Education is Broken, or, Teacher Education is Broken?

“You’re coming to school with me today”, my New York City high school English teacher father said on all those elementary Catholic school holidays which left me free when the public school kids were not.  There are hardly any subject lessons I remember.  But one had to do with commas.  Indeed, punctuation placement and reading transforms meaning.  So, there are two very different meanings to the following sentence depending on the presence and reading of commas:  “The dog, said the man, is very disobedient.” and “The dog said the man is very disobedient.”  Thus, when the commas are read in the former it is “the man” who is speaking about the dog; when in the latter it is “the dog” who is speaking about the man.  And here with this title, “Teacher:  Education is Broken”, when the colon is read it is a teacher who is claiming that Education is Broken.  However, when the colon is unacknowledged, “Teacher Education is Broken” is read and, well, that is a wholly different meaning.  And I yesterday read the latter in a facebook news post.  As it turns out, the meaning was suppose to be the former as the title referred to a CNN interview snippet of Sir Ken Robinson saying that education is, indeed, broken (http://edition.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/living/2010/03/16/sir.ken.robinson.ted2010.cnn.html?ref=nf).  I suspect somewhere in Sir Ken’s repertoire of criticism there is the sentiment that teacher education is broken as well, but not in this snippet.

Still, the idea that teacher education is broken is, to my mind, too often correct.  However, I cannot fault colleges of education for preparing their pre-service teachers to work within the current system, after all, they would be failing their mission to do the best for their students to survive and succeed in their chosen profession.  That the structures of their chosen profession are broken, are failing the children who are forced to be there, is certainly beyond the province of the education schools’ ability to change, even if they could. 

Usually, when criticized, teaching programs are slammed for doing too little in giving their pre-service teachers sufficient methods to do the job properly.  This was not exactly the case for me when I went to Brooklyn College to complete my teaching methods requirements for public high school qualification. I had been headed for the professorate once I decided to go for my Master’s degree and than on for my Doctorate.  As a pre-service college professor, I was taught to do research not taught to teach.  College teachers largely teach how we were taught, for good and for ill.  I had been teaching part time at the college level for just over ten years, so I had integrated in my teaching style what I considered the best of those professors I had had.  Thus, when I came to the courses which were suppose to teach me how to teach, I was surprised when my professor was instructing us on techniques which mostly followed what I was already doing. 

While my degrees are in Media/Communication Arts, the City of New York decided I was a Social Studies teacher.  (How this happened is a story for another day.) This was fine with me as I love history and was well read in Irish and American history.  So, when I took methods courses I was being taught how to teach Social Studies.  The professor in charge was then the Social Studies Department Chair at Abraham Lincoln High School in Brooklyn.  As Chair he was able to create his own teaching program and he selected the honors and AP classes.  He was a master teacher, giving us teaching techniques meant to stimulate curiosity, thought and comment in our students. 

I should have taken the clues to heart when I did my student teaching, but I was too engrossed in trying to apply what I was being taught, attempting to stimulate curiosity, critical thinking and reflective comment in each and every youngster in front of me.  My cooperating teacher thought what I was doing was just great, but, he said, I was working way too hard:  you think you are back at college with kids who care, who want to be in your class and who are willing to engage, heck, who are prepared to engage in the kind of learning your lessons assume.  But I didn’t pay attention, not at all.

In the fullness of time I was appointed to Erasmus Hall, in charge of four Global Studies classes of ninth graders who were two to three years deficient on all measures and a Principles of Government class of somnambulant super seniors with teaching techniques suited to high school honors and well motivated college students.  It certainly doesn’t take a brain surgeon to know what happened to me.  I lasted all of two months:  I drove my students wild and they drove me out of class, out of the school and out of the job!

Did my professor and the courses I took ill-prepare me to go into the New York City public high schools?  You bet!  But, I believe I received a solid grounding in the kind of pedagogy meant best to do all those great and wonderful things with youngsters we all wish we can do:   stimulate curiosity, critical thinking and reflective comment.