Sunday October 2, 2005
Teachers are our collective future
Last Wednesday, parents had to start looking after their own kids for an extra 15 minutes a day.
This was “the first phase of work stoppage by the B.C. Teachers\’ Federation,” said a letter sent home to parents. During this initial phase, the letter continued, “Teachers will [still] be in classrooms, providing instruction, assessing student progress, and taking attendance.”
But rotating strikes could start as early as October 11. A province-wide walkout could start October 24.
Teachers have taught for more than a year without a contract.
The last time teachers attempted to strike, the Gordon Campbell government in Victoria forced them back to work by ruling them an “essential service.”
On that, I agree with him. But it\’s a different kind of essential service. As someone named Ernest Boyer commented: “A poor surgeon hurts one person at a time. A poor teacher hurts 30.”
Firefighters, police, doctors and nurses deal with the present. Teachers deal with the future.
The future never seems as urgent as the present. If I have a fire, a break-in, a broken bone, I want action right now. But a student could, and some do, miss school for a few months, even year, without serious loss.
Euphemisms for education
In this dispute, my sympathies are all with the teachers.
I doubt if many people enter teaching these days because they can\’t do anything else. That may have been true when one could go from Grade 12 through a few months of training and get sent to a one-room school in Aspen Narrows or Crooked Eyebrow as a qualified teacher.
Between educational hurdles and vocational obstacles, people have to really want to teach to make it into a classroom today.
Unfortunately, the educational system soon makes them wonder why they went to all that effort.
In Britain, for example, a group of educators wants to improve education by replacing “failure” with “deferred success,” to avoid demoralizing pupils.
“Many kids today could do with a little more carefully placed demoralizing,” fellow-editor James Harbeck ranted. “I find that awful feeling you get when you know you didn\’t do well enough is an excellent motivator to do better next time around. I appreciate the desire not to see kids scarred for life, but I think kids will be ruined in a very fundamental way if they don\’t come to value good work and avoid bad work.”
I agree. I failed only two courses in my life. Both failures forced me to take a serious look at my own behaviour. Given a second chance, I buckled down and did much better.
In Montreal, a correspondent wrote, the education system requires high school teachers and even university professors not to upset their students and thus lower their self-esteem. “An English professor I know at McGill is not allowed to make too many style and grammar corrections, because apparently too many red marks on students\’ papers makes them feel horrible and squashes their confidence,” she wrote.
Assembly line education
Despite my support for teachers, I disagree with the Teachers\’ Federation\’s claims that teachers need a 15 per cent raise to attract and retain more qualified teachers. The Campbell government uses the same argument to boost salaries for deputy ministers and hospital administrators, while screwing social workers and nurses.
Money alone will not attract better teachers. Indeed, one iconoclastic friend suggested that the best way to improve the quality of teaching was to reduce salaries. Those who taught merely for the money would quit, rather than face what Mark Twain once described as “trying to hold 35 corks under water at the same time!” Only those who can\’t NOT teach would continue.
Unfortunately, his solution would reduce the number of teachers without reducing the numbers of students. Inevitably, class sizes and teacher workloads would increase.
I suspect — my own iconoclastic streak — that we need to trash the mindset that treats education as a business operation, and replace it with one that sees teaching as a ministry, a service.
If teachers are an essential service, we should focus on teachers, not facilities. On skills, not budgets. On merit, not seniority. On communication, not curriculum.
Unfortunately, skills and merit are much harder to measure than budgets and seniority.
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Administrators and bureaucrats should supply the services that let teachers teach. Where school districts have that vision, teachers clamour to get in. But wherever education is modelled on an assembly line, teachers can\’t wait to qualify for early retirement.
Take Tom, Dick, and Mary (real people, but names invented to protect the innocent). Tom is just 40. He used to teach chemistry and physics at a Calgary high school. A year ago, he quit in frustration, fed up with trying to get through to bored affluent kids who were in school only because they had to be.
“I\’ve got better things to do with my life,” he shrugged.
Dick is 59. He\’s literally counting days until his age and his years of teaching add up to the magic number that will enable him to retire on full pension.
Mary left last year. “I loved teaching,” she said. “I just couldn\’t stand the system. You have no idea how much paperwork we have to do – how many reports we have to fill out, how many documents we have to be aware of – just to keep going.”
With the world in crisis, we need good teaching. Education is, it seems to me, the only way of breaking the cycle of pigheaded errors that plagues us. Like hamsters on a treadmill, we go around and around, making the same mistakes as our parents.
As Ralph Waldo Emerson put it: “What is done in the classrooms today will decide civilization\’s survival tomorrow.”
This dispute is not really about money. It\’s about the quality of teaching. That\’s what\’s essential. For us. For our children. For our future.
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Copyright © 2002 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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