The Teaching Profession as Phoenix

2.22.10 – Ron Isaac- Imagine that you have been a successful practicing pediatrician for many years and have retained your original idealism and smarts over all that time. You're a great diagnostician with a "bedside manner" to match. You've sharpened your skills,

The Teaching Profession as Phoenix

Imagine that you have been a successful practicing pediatrician for many years and have retained your original idealism and smarts over all that time. You’re a great diagnostician with a “bedside manner” to match. You’ve sharpened your skills, deployed your intuition, kept up to speed on research and treatments, dog-eared your much-consulted Physicians Desk Reference, tapped the fruits of your experience, balanced empathy with detachment and volunteered “pro bono” to heal indigent patients who lack the means to fund the bi-annual new Lexus your peers expect you to drive. There have been no complaints and two generations of community residents swear by you.

Enter the inquisitors.

A pair of uninvited strangers possessing clipboards but not necessarily any scientific background, opens the door to your examination room while you’re pacifying a non-compliant infant. These visitors are there to check you out. It’s not unheard-of but rare that they introduce themselves. They take notes as you swab the babe’s cheek. At some point they leave. There’s something vaguely inconclusive and unsettling about their departure. You know you’ll hear from them again soon and you sense you’d rather not.

Days later you receive a letter containing some heavy evidence of your inadequacy:

1) The wallpaper in your examination room was not sufficiently picturesque, lacking the regulation blue/red/green balloon motif.
2) Your jar of tongue-depressors was not in its designated corner.
3) You violated Doctors College dictum by saying “Ah” when you should have said “Oh” upon discovering a rash.

This scenario is of course silly and unreal. It could never happen to doctors because they have reasonable autonomy in setting the conditions and direction of their livelihood. There’s is a profession not in name only. They are the acknowledged experts in their field and they police themselves. That’s also true of civil engineers. They design bridges and judge their structural integrity. Nobody would expert bakers to replace, much less supervise them.

Education is, alas, different, especially in this era of mal-reform. Teachers have relatively little control over their lives in the classroom, despite their impressive credentials. Despite this, most teachers have a “professional attitude” on the job, but that’s not the same as equating their job with a profession. One can have a”professional attitude” in one’s approach to stir-frying vegetables at a restaurant.

When the new breed of school managers and the think-tank pundits who love them say, “Act like a professional,” what they usually mean is that a teacher should abrogate their contractual right, such as due process, or a work rule, such as a duty-free lunch period. If they balk at being an “at-will employee,” it means they’re “unprofessional.” At least according to some ( though not all) the twenty-somethings from the Leadership Infirmary.

Teachers are, on the whole, as diligent, creative, energetic and unselfish as any group of workers anywhere. But all of society would be better off if they were in overwhelming charge of the educational establishment on every level. Then the teaching profession would be born again.

Comments

Murph Shapiro

February 22, 2010 at 9:52 am

Imagine that in this same medical practice is a pediatrician who has ben practicing for just as many years who is ignoring the crying baby while he checks his computer for info on the NYSE; tells the mother he can't check the child until she gets him to calm down; and leaves to look at the patient next door. Maybe he should be in charge Does he need supervision? Now extend your analogy

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Texas Mom

February 22, 2010 at 1:44 pm

Would you ignore the parents and their concerns rather relying totally on your own "professionalism?" Would you send the child home with all kinds of "exercises" which are in essence, busy work or even worse a substitute for your professional evaluation because you can't or won't decide what the child needs and are unable to determine what's best for the child? That's what happens in the "best" of public schools. As a parent of an exceptionally intelligent and well performing Senior in a school which has been highly rated by the state, why must I essentially "home school" my child? Why won't the teacher "teach?" And why are the parents of the top students constantly at odds with the teachers and administration of this school? It's because the teachers and the administrators are NOT professionals! If a business responded like these educators do, their "customer service" or rather lack thereof, would put them out of business in the blink of an eye! Parents are only welcome to bring cupcakes and provide money! The best students are either assisted continually (home schooled while in a public school) by their parents or tutored at significant cost to the parents. Now if the child is in a district where the parents cannot afford to tutor or the parents themselves don't have the education, those kids are at a significant disadvantage. God forbid these incompetents have no oversight and be put in charge!

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- tired teacher
  
  May 7, 2011 at 4:09 pm
  
  the simple fact is, you are not a trained educator, you do not know how to best “teach” your child content.
  
  it is your child, you definitely know best how to raise them, how to guide them into adulthood.
  
  you do not know how to teach them (unless you happen to be a trained teacher)
  
  you are biased in favor of your child (which you should be) you tend not to see the good or the bad clearly.
  
  you have no training on instructional techniques, no idea how to manage the presence needs and requirements of your child in addition to 20-24 others.
  
  but you think you do, and you think you are qualified to tell us how to do our job.
  
  you don’t, and you could not do it, nor could you do it well. and the problem is no one wants to see that.
  
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Concerned Teacher

February 22, 2010 at 2:22 pm

There are many factors, a few of which include:

teachers have no autonomy
teachers do not determine class sizes
teachers do not determine class make-up
teachers have limited, or zero, input into committees that make important instructional decisions

A doctor may tell patients his practice is full and he is not accepting new patients (I have encountered this more than once), a doctor may send a patient he cannot treat on to another doctor.

A teacher has no control over the number and make-up of students in her classroom. A teacher may believe she can effectively teach 20 or 25 students at a time, yet a district may place 36 in her class. A doctor may treat patients individually, a teacher may be required to teach a vast (8-10 year) range of skill and ability levels within that single class of 36 because people in power (who are not teachers) have determined that all students are college material and that all students can succeed in the same course on the same standards.

There is no reasonable comparison between doctors and teachers. Doctors are treated like professionls (though there are some bad ones), teachers are usually professionals, too, but are stripped of virtually all important power and control over their own jobs by people who do not do their jobs and frequently do not understand at the experiential level what doing a teacher's job looks and feels like. Doctors treat 1:1, teachers teach increasingly huge and diverse groups.

There is almost no group with which to compare teachers, above average educated individuals who are paid below average (professional) wages to do jobs that are under the complete control of people outside the classroom in terms of making all essential decisions and policies.

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Anne V

February 26, 2010 at 6:35 pm

The comparison between a doctor's work and a teacher's is not quite as strong as the scenario above (though I love the wallpaper "observation"!). Doctors see patients one at a time, and though they have appointments, often are allowed to go "past the bell" if necessary.

Teachers see 15-30 students at a time, are expected to know as much about their learning as a doctor does about their health, and have to follow a strict course of treatment even when it doesn't seem like the best idea (same tests for gifted as for learning needs students?) in a proscribed 45 minute period.

I love my job, I love inspiring students to love math and science, I spend a lot of time working to design lessons that will bring out their best learning. My students do well on their (ridiculous) standardized tests. But I'm most proud that my students will leave school with the ability to reason mathematically, read graphs and charts, look for evidence in scientific discussions, and wonder at the world around them. Is that testable?

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Carter

May 7, 2011 at 1:21 pm

Happy Mothers Day to all of the moms in the world! Tomorrow is Mothering Sunday and I know that eventhough it is celebrated on a different dates depending on your location, I just wanted to greet our mothers on this day!

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Joe Nathan

May 8, 2011 at 3:27 pm

Glad to hear from Anne V. Some of what she teaches is testable via traditional tests, some not.

Teachers are treated various ways in various places, although it’s clear “concerned” and “tired” teacher don’t like the way they and others they know have been treated.

All over the nation, young people are entering the profession, some by alt routes such as Teach for America, some by traditional routes. Many of them believe deeply they can make a huge difference. They are right.

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