Educator’s Digest: Volume 45

It’s been a while since I expected politics to make sense, but I’ve always been able to count on the education world to make even less sense.

That’s partly why I find the current occupant of the Oval Office so disorienting. When the President’s statements and antics are even more deranged and disingenuous than a teacher in-service meeting, the country’s in trouble.

Still, education experts soldier on. Here are several of their recent medal-winning contributions.

Experts often lambaste veteran teachers for our alleged unwillingness to try something new. If anything, I’ve found teachers too willing to embrace the next bright, shiny method or packaged program.

Additionally, the innovation that’s being billed as new is rarely new. When people like me point that out and dare to mention that it didn’t work the last few times schools tried it, our protests and evidence are met with condescending tut-tuts about how we need to accept the new paradigm.

I’ve even been to meetings where veterans’ objections met with reformers’ shrieks of “Killer phrase!”

Reformers favor “student-directed” progressivism, where teachers act as facilitators, and students “construct their own knowledge bases” and pursue “their own unique approach to learning.”

It sounds very freeing and creative, especially alongside school reform’s repressive bogeyman, direct instruction, where, according to reformers, teachers just tell students what they need to know and expect them to absorb it.

Predictably, things aren’t that simple. Direct Instruction sometimes comes with capital letters. The capitallettered variety rests on scripted, precisely paced lessons plotted by experts and expensively supplied by publishers.

These daily scripts specify “the exact wording and the examples the teacher is to present.” They’re enjoying a resurgence owing to the academic decline spawned by student-directed learning.

DI boosters insist that when a student doesn’t learn, “it doesn’t mean something is wrong with the student. … It means something is wrong with the instruction.”

Mandating instruction down to the last syllable supposedly guaranties student learning and success, provided the teacher is faithful to the script.

Excuse me while I watch a roomful of actual students prove how wrong and silly that is.

Its inherent flaws aside, the problem with capitalletter DI is the bad name it gives the kind of direct instruction teachers like me have delivered since before chalk was an innovation.

Contrary to charges leveled by new paradigm fans, lower-case direct instruction doesn’t preclude questions, opinions, student creativity or independent thought.

It also doesn’t preclude teacher creativity in preparing and conducting classroom activities. Unlike the scripted DI lessons publishers peddle, it permits a teacher to adapt to his class’s character and readiness for learning.

I spend a fair amount of class time directly telling my students what I know. That’s because I believe a large part of my job is passing along the knowledge that was passed along to me.

I can often explain things more clearly to some students than they can understand them from a book.

Sadly, schools are stuck on a pendulum that careens between straightjacket scripts and fanciful, student-led “discovery.” We need instead to settle in the commonsense middle ground where students can learn and teachers aren’t condemned for explicitly teaching them.

In addition to rocketing between extremes, education’s bright ideas aren’t always practical. Consider this NEA-touted discipline strategy.

When a student disrupts my eighth-grade class, I’m supposed to ask him to call his parents in front of me and explain what he did wrong. This allegedly forces students to “accept their behavior by stating what they did.”

First, students don’t always state their behavior the way I would. Second, this isn’t a one-time intervention. On the third call, students are directed to “instruct their parents to come to school and sit with them, as the teacher does not babysit.” Proponents claim this tactic “works every time.”

Halting instruction for a telephone intervention disrupts class even more than the initial disruption. If the call occurs within the classroom, confidentiality goes out the window. If the teacher leaves the room with the student, instruction goes out the door.

Effective classroom management conserves learning time. It doesn’t squander more time.

As for the adults on the other end of the line, one common response from parents who support their child’s teacher is, “You can’t keep calling me at work or I’ll lose my job.”

Then there are the less supportive parents. They often respond with an audible, “Let me talk to that teacher,” followed by an earful of condemnation and abuse.

Finally, here’s a published solution for fourth- graders who ask too many questions. Simply give each student three tickets. Every time a student asks a question, he turns in a ticket.

When his three tickets are gone, the student “may not ask another question that day.”

Proponents insist the point is “not to discourage questions.” Instead, it forces students to ask only “thoughtful questions.” This purportedly makes them “independent thinkers.”

Have you ever met a 9year-old with only three questions a day?

Me, either.