Nerdfighters Gazette

High-school age Nerdfighters who subscribe to the New York Times will no doubt have read with interest the article in the Sunday New York Times Magazine entitled “Building a Better Teacher” (for those that don’t subscribe, the article can be found here. ) As I sat at the breakfast table reading that article, I found myself simultaneously laughing and trying very hard not to cry at the sheer stupidity of the entire article.
Anybody who has survived any amount of time in a public school system is probably used to bureaucratic hand-wringing about, well, whatever it is that worries bureaucrats who haven’t been in school for forty years. We get used to having our achievement measured by standardized tests that ignore the fact that we’re human beings in favor of the fact that if they test us enough, eventually they can make some sort of bar graph with it to present at a meeting. And apparently the revelation that has come out of thousands of hours of School Board bigwigs’ meetings is, in the words of the New York Times, “Teachers working in the same building, teaching the same grade, produced very different outcomes.”
WOW. Hold on a second here, NYT, do you mean to say… that teachers aren’t just automatons force-feeding information to unresponsive students? That there exists such a thing as a good teacher and a bad teacher? And…wait, are you trying to say that good teachers do a better job of teaching students than bad teachers? MY GOD, I THINK MY MIND JUST GOT BLOWN! (That’s the kind of high-quality logical thinking that they just don’t teach us in school!)
The article was all about what makes a good teacher, how to get good teachers teaching and how to make a bad teacher into a good teacher. I won’t talk too much about the contents here as you can go read it yourself; suffice to say that it quoted teachers and meta-teachers (I think they’re actually called “educational consultants or something; but meta-teacher is clearly a better word for the people that teach teachers how to teach) to try to make sense of, in a nutshell, how teachers should teach.
The one group of people that wasn’t consulted– and in fact was barely mentioned in the article, was the students. In failing to consult the students about good teaching, they are overlooking the one group that has done the most extensive and, more importantly, recent research on what makes a good teacher. Students know what good teachers are because they are forced into daily contact with both good and bad teachers. And any student, having done this involuntary research, can see that most of the NYT article is made up of various flavours of bunk, blarney, baloney and bullshit. For example: the concept of “The J-factor”, which is “a list of ways to inject a classroom with joy, from giving students nicknames to handing out vocabulary words in sealed envelopes to build suspense.”
*facepalm*
I don’t know about you, but the thing that gives me the most joy in a classroom is to be in the company of an enthusiastic and intelligent teacher who cares about the subject, cares about the students and genuinely wants every member of the class to both pass the exam and to get something out of the class that can’t be tested: a love of learning and a new way of thinking about our position as human beings in the world.
That’s what makes a good teacher. Not vocabulary words in sealed envelopes. What “educators” (which is apparently some sort of umbrella term that not only includes teachers, but also people who have never set foot in a classroom in a teaching capacity and spend their days dreaming up new “initiatives” to help teachers do their jobs better) don’t recognize is that STUDENTS WANT TO LEARN. We want to learn to pass the course, and we also want to learn because the vast majority of students do have a genuine love of knowledge and respect for human ingenuity and learning.
My recommendation for an “educator” who wants to know what makes a good teacher is that they visit Rate my Teachers. There they will find honest feedback and ideas for improvement from real students who are impacted by the decision of School Board bigwigs. Only when students and teachers are recognized as real human beings with emotions, faults and desires is either group able to make a real impact on the other.

***While I’m on the subject of teaching–and because the NYT article contained some discussion of the teaching of math– I would like to recommend that anybody who has ever struggled in math and blamed themselves read A Mathematician’s Lament by Paul Lockhart. It’s a PDF file and you should download it because you’ll want to read it again and again. It is a fascinating, innovative and completely true exploration of the state of mathematical education today and if you have ever beaten yourself up over your perceived “mathematical incompetency”, you need to read it. It’s so good it might even serve as brain bleach after the extreme fail produced by the NYT article.

Please write in the comments about your views on education, teaching, your favorite and least favorite teachers and what makes them so.