A reader, Karl Gabbey, has a proposal:
“MAD Magazine once had a page in each edition entitled, “Scenes We’d Like To See,” that depicted a bit of “Schadenfreude” about people who deserved it. It might be fun to see loudmouthed politicians and assorted corporate types who consider themselves “educational experts” teach for an extended period of time. I have a suggestion: They ought to teach high school academic subjects with a minimum of 125 students per day preferably in rural or inner city schools, carry a full class load each school day with a minimum of three daily preparations, plus coach after-school sports without additional compensation. They should be required on their own time to write college recommendations for any seniors. Let’s not forget cafeteria or hall supervision. They should communicate regularly by phone e-mail, or have conferences with all parents about their sons’ or daughters’ academic progress. Hopefully, they’ll also have the opportunity to attend in-service workshops. Throughout the year, they should supervise other school activities like debate tournaments, plays, concerts, and of course the junior/senior prom. As a crowning touch, their performance(s) for the year should be rated by parents and students. That would be truly a “scene that I’d like to see.”
“P.S. I could add some more items like paying for class supplies, arranging and supervising a field trip, chaperoning class trips, or taking additional post-graduate evening or summer classes at their own expense to upgrade knowledge in their fields or to improve their teaching methods but those could be a bit much for a rookie and may border on cruelty.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
It would be even better for them to do an urban middle school. 🙂
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Don’t forget to require them to write detailed lesson plans, listing all the instructional objectives from their particular curriculum as well as the standards under which those fall, for each course, for each day, including materials used, activities to assign, and evaluation manner for each objective, and to turn them in on the Friday prior to delivery. Oh, yes, and show in writing the developmental progression for each objective, from whence it came to where it will be terminating. That was one little piece of our requirements, and that was at the elementary level.
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Great suggestion.
I’ve done this many times. How about clean up puke and give a sick child some solace?
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Can we add that they must then take care of such things as laundry, food shopping, the bills, and so on, without professional help? Family assistance would be fine.
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And no air conditioning.
and exposure to TB, requiring 6 months of treatment.
And exposure to Parvo during the first tri-mester of pregnancy, requiring ultrasounds every two weeks and having an at-risk pregnancy for 29 weeks.
And maybe go where nobody else of your race is in the room, most of the time.
And the occasional bat that flies by when you are staying late for parent night.
Those are just a few things I’ve encountered on my teacher path that I would throw in.
I am not complaining, btw. I’m still at it 15 years later and I still love the children and I still love what I do. But those are realities I have dealt with as a result of public school teaching (maybe they are realities in a lot of professions? I don’t know).
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A kid who throws up on their shoes, and the school can’t contact the parents…A full range of exception needs kids, at least three with aides, and no desk for the aides. An emergency call from THEIR child’s school, telling them their own child is sick. No breaks to even go to the bathroom…This could be fun!
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A 6th graders starts a fire, burns down half the building, so the other half is filled with water and smoke. Then try having school in a church, or similar building where the classrooms are not close to the size you had, yet keeping the 30 kids you had before the fire. Then you stay there for two and a half years , depending on the building’s caretakers to make sure your teaching supplies and other “stuff” is not thrown away during Sunday activities. Then you find out the fire only covers 55% of what you lost and the insurance takes forever to get you that. Lastly, you must make sure the kids do not tear up the classrooms, which were remodeled right before the school moved in, or else the monthly room rental may be increased. Only real teachers could get through that nightmare, probably not TFA or their ilk.
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I think that the world has seen quite enough of Michelle Rhee teaching. And may the gods forbid that the likes of Rahm Emanuel and Arne Duncan ever got in front of a class.
Those who can, teach, and those who can’t tell teachers how they should do it.
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“Those who can, teach, and those who can’t tell teachers how they should do it.”
A nice twist to that stale old saying!
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Robert D. Shepherd and Lehrer: even without a “thousand data points of light” [aka Data Driven Decision-Making] seems those old Greek guys weren’t completely in the dark.
“Those that know, do. Those that understand, teach.” [Aristotle]
🙂
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And those that don’t know, make policy.
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… and disrespect from the principal because he/she isn’t young and willing to simply throw away all that works in favor of unproven ideas from someone who wrote a doctoral paper after 1-2 years of teaching. Oh, yes, and to have the pleasure of the stress from all sides, parents who support you or don’t, administrators, principals, testing advocates, tax payers, people who demand their views be taught, etc. etc. And, because of that stress, may the each develop heart issues, diabetes, and sleep disorders, as well as the need for tranquilizers.
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Let’s add a class of 25 first-graders, all of whom need help putting on their snowsuits and boots (during the teacher’s lunch time) so the last one is finished just as the end-of-recess bell rings; work orders for dripping sinks that take YEARS to be taken care of; no air conditioning (I know, already mentioned, but it bears repeating); kids taken out of school for days on end because they needed “mommy and me” time- usually the week of district assessments, btw; having to fix and paint your own furniture, cupboards, etc. with supplies you yourself bought (see “futility of work orders” above); and working a ten-hour day and weekends just to have someone tell you how easy your job is.
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Don’t forget that the summer paycheck is payment for vacation. No matter how many times you tell people that they divide 10 months salary into 24 or 26 paychecks, they still view it as paid for not working.
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I did it. After my short stint at the Department of Education, and several years in education policy staffing the Senate, I got certified to teach in Texas, and taught high school.
I didn’t have 125 students a day — I’d have 150 students, but spread over two days.
Here’s why we shouldn’t insist on it: Teachers can carry arms in many states now, and many of these policy honchoes would be absolutely a danger to administrators and elected officials.
I don’t believe in guns in schools, but if any of them did, it would be trouble.
A second good reason, is it’s a waste of a good spot that someone who likes teaching can fill. (Yeah, maybe me included.)
A better idea: Take teachers as described above, and replace the superintendents, instructional “coaches,” state legislators, governors, and foundation wonks. That could produce positive change, quickly and with much less violence.
It would also create higher test scores and great savings of money — the teachers can lead and manage better than administrators and policy people can teach.
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Ed,
why is policy so detached from the real heart of what we are doing in the classroom? For example, I have longed for my district to set up a creative reuse facility whereby excess from businesses (anything from cardstock to elastic, or window displays etc) can be stored and utilized by teachers. Teachers know the expendables can make or break a lesson (more often making it because it engages the senses, which is very important in making an impact while teaching). I know of other communities who do this (I think Tallahassee does). I approached our state board chair (I actually didn’t realize he was chair, I just knew he was my rep and I saw him at an unrelated fundraiser). Anyway, I told him my idea and he told me the board deals strictly in policy.
So, why aren’t materials policy? To me materials are part of the big picture of education. I get what he’s saying, but obviously what has been the norm has not worked enough to keep everything strong and sound and too sacred to tear up, so maybe policy needs to have a broader scope?
Do you get what I’m saying?
Honestly, I feel like school could be greatly enhanced and stewardship better realized by cooperatively routing stuff that would otherwise end up in a dumpster towards the schools. Policy can make that happen.
And it should.
And it isn’t.
And that makes me sad and frustrated, and motivated.
Eventually, I will get that creative reuse facility established, somehow. But a change in how policy is viewed could sure speed things up.
Your thoughts?
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Oooh! My turn! My turn! While student teaching, their cooperating teacher commits suicide (happened to my husband). Or, first year teaching, go into early term labor and lose the baby (happened to me), while a student who threatened to kill your baby (not the reason for the labor, but still) comes back to school on the same day you return from the funeral.
Not completely sure how we survived either one, but here we are.
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I hope I am not redundant here but I would also like to see all “educational experts” and decision makers voluntarily take standardized tests in all grades and pass them. Follow the brave school board member from Florida – as widely reported in 2011! http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/revealed-school-board-member-who-took-standardized-test/2011/12/06/gIQAbIcxZO_blog.html
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Don’t forget to include coming in contact with lice and ringworm…
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STOP! Please.
I do not want unqualified monsters experimenting on my children in “teaching” spots.
Michelle Rhee? Not with my kids you don’t. We already know a thousand interesting uses for Duct Tape, and none of them are the one she tried during her experiment on human children.
Paul Vallas? What’s he going to impart? Resume padding? Babbling endlessly about his own accomplishments (so no one checks out the simplest fact)? Mendacity 101, 102, etc all the way up to post-graduate levels?
Arne Duncan? Back before Arne went national, I logged the dozens of times I asked him a specific question at a real time press conference and his answer always was, ‘I’ll get back to you on that’ That’s an Arne-ism for “F___ You and your question.” Without his scriptorium and scriptwriter guys like our former neighbor Peter Cunningham, Arne would be a mute. I don’t want my kids learning Civil Rights history from a guy who can say with a straight face that Common Core and charter schools and privatization are Rosa Parks things…
Thomas Friedman? Paul Tough… Long list, and growing.
The prospect of having these people preying on my kids in a Chicago public school classroom might even make me consider home schooling. We have great teachers now — except in the eyes of those who’ve never really taught and can’t… and their billionaire sponsors and amplifiers.
I have two sons still in public school (O.A. Thorp, Chicago) and one who graduated after 12 years in public schools in Chicago (Beaubien Elementary; Whitney Young magnet HS, Class of 2007). They’ve been getting (or “got”) a great education from great Chicago Public School veteran teachers.
The eldest, Dan, is now a computer professional (I don’t understand the complete job description, but he and his company work on Web sites for countries in the Persian Gulf and North Africa) working out of the Bay Area. At age 24, thanks to the education and training he got in Chicago’s public school classrooms from veteran teachers with hardly a problem — ever — he’s on his own, and without student debt.
The elder of the younger guys, Sam, going into seventh grade, is currently at Purdue for a week in one of those summer programs doing “Crime Scenes Investigations” (one of the one-week course choices they offered). I’ve told him Purdue should move its “Crime Scenes” course to Chicago, where our neighbors and friends (many of whom are public servants: police and firefighters) could help his professors, but there is something nice about studying crime scenes in Lafayette, Indiana for a kid from Chicago…
And of course both our younger sons were on last September’s picket line for the Chicago Teachers Strike of 2012. They were first with their teachers (unanimous picket line at their elementary school) and for most of the strike with their mother (a union delegate and striker leader nearby at Steinmetz High School). By the strike’s second day, as everyone paying attention knows, there were more children on the picket lines with the striking Chicago Teachers Union members than in those Scab Schools established expensively on orders from Mayor Rahm Emanuel and his (then) schools “Chief Executive Officer” Jean-Claude Brizard (where is that guy now for all his proclamations of love for (a) Chicago, (b) Chicago’s schools and children and … Oh, yes, his own children were just about ready to attend Chicago’s public schools. Until after less than two years at a quarter million dollars a year he — POOFFFF — joined those of the Disappeared.
Next thing you know, you’ll suggest that my kids have to endure instruction from Brizard’s quarter million dollar successor, Barbara Byrd Bennett, another outsider who can’t find her way from Bowen to Bogan high schools in Chicago without a GPS and a guide.
So…
No.
While this experiment in punditracious pillorying sounds at first like a great idea, in the abstract, let’s make sure these creeps and their avatars are never allowed to be in our children’s classrooms without veteran teachers to provide adult supervision.
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Come on George, the Rheeject didn’t use duct tape, it was masking tape. Oh so better, eh!
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George, I just had tears in my eyes from reading your comments. As a Chicagoarian (resident NEAR Chicago), knowing so many CPS teachers, faculty & graduates of, I have to thoroughly agree with you as to the great education. However, from what I know of you and your wife, you have been/are PRETTY wonderful educators
(& parents!) yourselves. So–take a bow & pat yourselves on the back. Also–thanks for Substance, all the news we need, and then some (especially prior to Ben Joravsky!)
BTW–In case anyone is worried–J.C. Brizard is comfortably ensconced in his cushy D.C. job as Senior Adviser at…the College Board. And–I might add–as worried as he was about the CPS finances “for the kids,” he STILL got his $250K salary, for way less than a year’s worth of work. (Hmmm…if he lasts in D.C., wonder if he’ll send his kids to DCPS? Nah!)
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Let’s not forget the elementary schools! How about weekends devoted to lesson planning (Don’t forget to include Danielson and the CCS!) and notifying parents of missed hw/projects. What about 8 hours of PTC? Let’s not forget teaching in NYC in late May and June w/o benefit of A/C! Then we have setting up an elementary classroom the last weeks of August (still no A/C) in order to pass inspection! Oh I could go on and on, but I’m trying to decompress!
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I actually had a principal who checked to see if our bulletin boards were being changed monthly. Incomplete boards needed to have an “under construction” sign on them. You can’t make this stuff up.
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Amazingly ignorant, many of the current batch of administrators, eh! And no, Lehrer’s administrator is not the outlier. Heard/Seen much of the same crap come out of many an administrator’s brain (and I’m being generous in allowing that they even have a brain).
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Ah, Duane, the stories we could tell! One of my favorites illustrating how out of touch administrators can be: my principal and assistant superintendent were observing me teaching the aforementioned large first-grade class. I was teaching a small group. They sat at the snack table near several first-graders who were clearly struggling to open their milk cartons. Not once did they offer to assist these children. A few of them came over to me while I was teaching to get help. Did they realize then that they should help these kids? Nooooo. After my principal gave me feedback on my lesson, I gave my feedback on how nice it would have been if they had helped my students.
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I think this is a tremendous idea. As I recall MAD cartoonists drew these scenes. This could be a great visual site to accompany the Badass Teachers site. Each of them I’m sure has a similar desire to have critics experience their reality.
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I’d like to hear some instances of reformers actually demonstrating their expertise, although I have a sense that there’s likely a dearth of such stories. Why muddy their “frothy eloquence” with wildcards like students and learning?
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While, in theory, putting these out of touch evaluators on the job is a good idea to teach them a lesson or two, no one would want them dealing with ttheir children. They might be able to come in and present a lesson. But to actually teach a month, a week, or even a day would be an insurmountable task for most of them. They don’t have a clue. Just like “Undercover Bosses”… they don’t grasp reality.
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A bit much for a rookie? Yet rookie teachers must do this. They should be doing this with NO breaks that the average teacher doesn’t get – cannot use more than the average teacher to buy supplies, cannot hire help either in or outside of the classroom, etc. And they should have to make it through an entire school year. They would have to be subject to the same faculty meetings, directives, and evaluations as everyone else. They should not be able to hire help for those things for which most teachers cannot, such as yard work. In short, they should not just teach for a year, but live the average American teacher’s life for a year. Etc.
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