Editor’s note: This commentary is by Peter Berger, an English teacher at Weathersfield School, who writes “Poor Elijah’s Almanack.” The column appears in several publications, including the Times Argus, the Rutland Herald and the Stowe Reporter.
By now teachers across the country have gotten their letters. I’m talking about the upbeat, anticipatory, big smile, “You won’t believe how we’ve rearranged the world over the summer,” welcome back letters. In them our administrators assure us they’ve spent the summer perfecting all the new philosophies, policies and procedures that didn’t work last year. They also announce even more new philosophies, policies and procedures that undoubtedly won’t work this year. Naturally, they don’t include the part about not working.
We learn about the new stuff, including the new stuff that isn’t new, at meetings. These meetings often begin with a trending YouTube video displayed on a giant screen, to which we’re expected to dance in front our seats. This command exuberance is inevitably followed by PowerPoint presentations displayed on the same giant screen at the front of the auditorium. Less spontaneous speakers read what’s on the screen as if we can’t see it. More spontaneous speakers paraphrase what’s on the screen as if we can’t see it. It’s worth mentioning that what’s on the screen usually isn’t worth reading or paraphrasing. At some point one of the speakers always informs us that lecturing is an obsolete teaching method.
This goes on for days until our students arrive. It’s a great relief when they do.
Over the summer I collected a pile of articles pumping teachers up for an “unsurpassed,” “brand new year filled with promise and opportunity.” I had a few other jobs before I landed in my classroom, and nobody ever threw a parade when we showed up to unload trucks or frame houses, so maybe that’s why I don’t get especially whipped up when someone primes me to make this “school year your best yet.” I’m lucky enough to enjoy my job, but I enjoy it because of my students, not because of the cheerleaders who sit behind desks and tell me how fulfilled I should feel.
Bearing titles like “Ten Tips for Creating a Great School Year,” these articles offer surefire suggestions to “motivate and engage your students.” Some are teacher-oriented, like “eat your lunch in peace.” One advises me to identify when I’m “most productive” and “protect that time like a mama bear” against any “interruptions.” This would be more practical if my job didn’t involve teaching scores of other people’s children according to a schedule framed around dozens of teachers teaching hundreds of other people’s children.
Some tips are designed to build teacher morale, reminding us that “we believe, we inspire, we teach,” a sentiment that captures our loftiest classroom moments but not the necessary grunt work that occupies most of our days. Other platitudes, like “all children can learn,” can’t help morale because they’re demonstrably untrue. Many children for a host of reasons can’t learn what they need to, and others who could learn choose not to. The next time you hear somebody claim that teachers employing “best practices” can “engage and motivate” all their students, consider how you responded the last time your doctor advised you to exercise and eat better. How about all his patients?
Other tips promote contemporary reform orthodoxies, like schools should “focus on the whole child,” “put students in charge of their learning process,” and replace “punitive” classroom discipline with student-directed “restorative approaches.” Of course, in place of restorative justice, “if all else fails,” a desperate teacher can “turn out the lights” or declare a “brain break.” This novel remedy for those difficult times when teachers sense that “class chaos” is “about to erupt” gives high school students thirty seconds to race around the room, touch specified items, and loosen up with 10 jumping jacks before they resettle back in their seats, purportedly docile and chaos-free.
To put the efficacy of all these tips and prescriptions in context, the number one “stress buster” in an online NEA Today teacher survey was “Dream of summer vacation!”
The truth is that some of what we’re told in September is nonsense, and some is common sense. It sounds great to say that students should “take responsibility” for their own conduct and “get excited about having the opportunity to learn.” But responsible students who want to learn aren’t the problem at school. It’s the irresponsible students who don’t care about learning, whose behavior is so disruptive, even dangerous, that we’d exclude them from any other workplace – these are the students who obstruct education. And they typically don’t respond to September pep rallies.
This isn’t to say that I can’t be a better teacher, or that I know every instructional trick in the book, or that my perspective is always accurate. I can, I don’t, and it isn’t. But too often schools spend their time and resources talking to and about the students who aren’t listening. In the process we shortchange and even ignore the students who are.
The solution doesn’t lie in “cool icebreakers” where classes “get creative with lining up.” You won’t find it in a “template” for the perfect “back-to-school celebratory op-ed” where all you have to do is fill in the name of your school. It isn’t a matter of ostentatiously “celebrating the great things happening in our school,” especially when those things are canned and superficial.
More than 2,000 years ago a frustrated King Ptolemy asked Euclid if there were some easier way to learn geometry. “No, Sire,” Euclid replied. “There is no royal road to learning.”
The stylus, the printing press, and the laptop have in their turn been new, but teaching and learning haven’t fundamentally changed down through the millennia. Moses taught the children to memorize. The prophets sang and acted their truths out. Socrates asked questions, and Jesus told stories.
Teaching is the same art and craft it always was. It doesn’t change over the summer. It doesn’t perpetually shape-shift into the latest recycled initiative.
If by “royal” you mean easy, if you’re looking for a gimmick or a package or guaranteed “success for all students,” there’s still no royal road to learning. But if you mean the best virtues of a true king – valor, humility, dedication, perseverance, decency, sweat and sometimes tears – then there’s room on that road for any teacher or student willing to follow it.
That’s what schools need, and it’s what our meetings won’t talk about.
It is, though, what I’ll be thinking about as I wait for my students.
Read the story on VTDigger here: Peter Berger: The royal road to learning.