A reader comments in response to a post complaining about the quality of teachers:
I am one of those people with an elite STEM degree.
I have volunteered at school as a guest speaker, a parent-chaperone, and occasionally given a lesson in an afterschool program.
I am nowhere near as good as the professional teachers, and nowhere near skilled enough to be more than an occasional Other Interesting Adult. It would be a travesty to put me in a classroom.
I’ve been a ‘rocket scientist’ and I find that to be quite a bit easier.
I support our teachers: they do a job I do not have the skills to do.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I am not quite a rocket scientist, but I do have degrees in nuclear engineering. And now I am National Board Certified Teacher and have been full time in the classroom for almost 20 years. I started out exactly like this reader with volunteering in classrooms. And then I decided to take the plunge into full time teaching. Teaching has a lot in common with engineering. Both require creative solutions to problems where you begin with basic theories and then look at your constraints to design workable solutions. However, teaching is much tougher because the variables are constantly changing. We know a lot about how people learn and what we know tells us that learning is contextual. No situation is ever the same, not year to year, not day to day and some days not even class period to class period. Physics assumes that the basic causal models apply regardless of context. Neutrons do not have days where their parents let them stay up all night. They do not fight with their best friend right before my class. Neutrons do not have hopes and dreams and fears. Teaching is incredibly dynamic and complex. It is so much more intellectually and emotionally challenging than simple observation and test scores can reveal.
I love this line:
“Neutrons do not have days where their parents let them stay up all night.”
I second that notion.
Public education struggles with the same aspects of “rocket science” that kills astronauts: bureaupathic behavior–negative effects of bureaucratic leadership.
In The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA, Diane Vaughan writes of the “normalization of deviance.” The late Roger Boisjoly (whom nobel laureate Richard Feynman insisted on calling “Dr. Boisjoly” during the Challenger investigation) would have been a great speaker for ethics in education.
Teachers have a hard job. Poor school leadership and central office mismanagement can make it impossible. But when we ask taxpayers to pick up the tab, we should expect they ask why unions haven’t followed through on promises like “new unionism.” As Dr. Deming noted, “No one has to change. Survival is optional.”
Interestingly, Dr. Laura C. Moats (graduate of your alma mater, Diane) in 1999 wrote, “Teaching Reading IS Rocket Science.” It was referred to often in our resource room. Whether it’s rocket science or not, it is certainly not something that can be given the attention it requires, in a 5 week prep period before taking over a classroom.
Too funny. I tell students in my pre-service teacher education classes: Education isn’t rocket science. It’s harder than rocket science. They don’t believe me until they try it.
I too started with degrees in physics and engineering (and later an M.Ed. that you will hear about). By choice, I walked out of an engineering job, and a few days later into a high-school classroom several hundred miles away as a full-time science teacher (they probably wouldn’t let me do that nowadays). I never found the job hard, just fun and exhausting. That first year they gave me five classes and four preparations. The other teachers in the science department looked at me strangely when I told them that – I was the new guy, I had never taught before: two preps were desirable, three was considered the maximum and difficult, four was tantamount to suicide. They waited for me to collapse. It took until February. And I was designing the curriculum for each course that I taught on a day-to-day basis: Physics Level I, Physics Level II, Chemistry Level I, and Chemistry Level II. I was out for a week with flu probably brought on by exhaustion. After that I learned to pace myself a little better. You see I was also taking a course at night toward earning my M.Ed., which was a requirement in my contract, and when spring semester had started at the University I was hosting student interns into my classes so they could earn their teaching certificates! I did that because I could earn enough tuition credits to pay for my M.Ed. I continued teaching for another 15 years at all levels (elementary through college), including teaching a graduate-level course to elementary school teachers at the University on how to make computer-based instructional videos with software I developed on the fly. This was about 35 or 40 years before Khan Academy… there’s more, but you get the picture. Now, I have some advice for people who want a single-point statistic to measure teacher performance …………. I’m sorry, they won’t let me print that in a nice blog like this.
I’ll add my vote here. Former engineer, now a teacher for 17 years. Teaching is much harder work. It takes a really long time to get very good at it (which TFA and other organizations like it don’t seem to grasp). It also takes a unique blend of patience, thick-skinned tolerance of minor (and sometimes major) injustices, humility and hopefulness that might be thought of as love.
I work with teenagers and I think the hardest thing I do is walk that constant, minute-by-minute tightrope walk of trusting in the goodness of kids while maintaining the integrity of everything you and every other adult in the school has worked so long and hard to build. You have to believe in the kids, or you might as well not even be there. But then again, they will often let you down.
I think the only people who think teaching is easier than working a “real” job are those who have never taught. I have watched a half-dozen smart, confident people come from highly successful careers outside teaching and get chewed up and spit out in less than a semester. I wonder, if the deformers get their way and we end up with a teaching profession that makes 40-50% less than it does now, where they are ever going to find people to do this very difficult job.
Just today, I got an email from a former student who I convinced to try my AP Chemistry class when he thought he wasn’t “smart enough”. I worked my tail off helping him convince himself he could succeed at that level and he gained enough confidence that he changed his future plans and enrolled in college. He earned his engineering degree and was proudly informing me that he had just taken his first job. He is just one in a thousand kids that have passed through my classroom, and I hadn’t thought about him since he graduated and the next batch of diamonds in the rough came through my door and began consuming my time and energy. But he said in his email, “There have been four distinct times when I have consciously made a decision that has forever changed the course of my life and you were involved in one of them . . . Your class changed my life . . . I can definitely say I would not be where I am today if you had not been my teacher.” That’s what keeps us going, right? But in this brave new world of VAM we’re entering, what teacher will ever have time to waste on changing someone’s life?
Dave – It’s telling that you wrote this at 3:05 am! Your story was so typical of good teachers – and so touching! Thanks for sharing it.
Teaching is one of the most difficult jobs I know. The mental and physical of being in front of the classroom for 7+ hours a day is worse.
I want to give a special “Nod” to the early education teachers. How they control the madness of 5 and 6 year olds I will never understand.
I stand with all teachers and especially the teachers in Chicago who are fighting for all our children. This fight will determine if we can stop this outrageous lie that private schools and charter schools are better than public schools. They fight for the opportunity to make CPS a better school district. They want all children (rich and poor) to have a quality education and have the chance to move up in our society. Just because a child was born into a low income family in Chicago does not mean they cannot be the next President. The only way that child has a chance at that dream is through a good public education. The same public education that has been teaching our children for generations.
Matt
UGH! In my previous post I should have written: “I note that the URL’s failed to appear, probably because they were bracketed by angle brackets. Here the same post WITHOUT the brackets:
“In my opinion, next to effective teaching, probably the next hardest thing to do is substantive educational research. According to David Berliner http://bit.ly/fMb4r1
“. . . . the important distinction is really not between the hard and the soft sciences. Rather, it is between the hard and the easy sciences. Easy-to-do science is what those in physics, chemistry, geology, and some other fields do. Hard-to-do science is what the social scientists do and, in particular, it is what we educational researchers do. In my estimation, we have the hardest-to-do science of them all! We do our science under conditions that physical scientists find intolerable.”
– David Berliner (2002)
Berliner, D. 2002. “Educational research: The hardest science of all,” Educational Researcher 31(8): 18-20; online as a 70 kB pdf at http://bit.ly/Spi59l.
I was an engineer for 13 years before I became a teacher. I’ve been teaching 9 years now. It’s no contest: teaching is, by far, the single most complex, multi-variable challenge I’ve ever faced.