The royal road

By now teachers across the country have gotten their upbeat, big smile, “you won’t believe how we’ve rearranged the world over the summer” welcome back letters. In them administrators assure us they’ve perfected all the new philosophies, policies, and procedures that didn’t work last year. They also announce more new philosophies, policies, and procedures that undoubtedly won’t work this year.

We learn about the new stuff, including the new stuff that isn’t new, at meetings. These meetings feature PowerPoint presentations displayed on a 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. At some point one of them 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.

This summer I collected a pile of articles pumping teachers up for an “unsurpassed,” “brand new year filled with promise and opportunity.” I had 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 whipped up aboutmaking 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.” 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 children according to a schedule framed around dozens of teachers teaching hundreds of children.

Some tips attempt 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 days. Other platitudes, like “all children can learn,” are 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 when your doctor advised you to exercise and eat better. How about all his other patients?

Other tips promote reform orthodoxies, like schools should “focus on the whole child,” “put students in charge of their learning process,” and replace “punitive” discipline with student-directed “restorative approaches.” Of course, “if all else fails,” a desperate teacher can declare a “brain break.” This remedy formoments when “class chaos” is “about to erupt” gives high school students thirty seconds to race around the room, touch specified items, and toss off ten jumping jacks before they resettle in their seats, purportedly docile and chaos-free.

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 conduct and “get excited” about “the opportunity to learn.” But responsible students who want to learn aren’t the problem. It’s the irresponsible students who don’t care about learning, whose behavior is so disruptive, even dangerous, that we’d exclude them fromany otherworkplace — 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, or that my perspective is always accurate. 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 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 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 two thousand 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 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, sweat, and sometimes tears, there’s room on that road for any teacher or student willing to follow it.

That’s what schools need, and it’s what ourmeetings won’t talk about.

It is, though, what I’ll be thinking about as I wait for my students.

I’m lucky enough to enjoymy job, but I enjoy it because of my students, not because of the cheerleaders who sit behind desks and tellme how fulfilled I should feel.