Duane Swacker is a retired teacher in Missouri. He shares his wisdom here.
“Anyone who has taught for a decent length of time, oh minimum 5-10 years understands this process and more likely than not has done something very similar. And it does mean taking the time to listen to the student on a one on one basis (somehow making time to do so without it being so intrusive as to turn off said student).
“One student, whom I still see in the local small town bar every couple of months, a certified heavy equipment operator, struggled with my class-Spanish as a freshman. His mom and I did all kinds of things to try to get him interested. I know, because he told me, that the reason he did any work at all was because I took the time to talk with him about. . . outdoors, fishing, hunting. See he was and still is a country boy through and through and I (who has a lot of country boy in me) enjoyed talking to him about his adventures out in the woods and on the farm.
“Every year I had the students prepare authentic type dishes from different Spanish speaking countries (no, not tacos, burritos and that stuff, food really good recipes). I let the students pick the recipes, with my approval. This student picked out a recipe for a braised saffron rabbit dish from Spain. I asked if he had the half dozen rabbits in the freezer and he said, “nah, I’ll go out and get em this weekend.” And he did and with his mom’s help (I supplied the saffron as it is more expensive than gold) they prepared the dish. And it was exquisite.
“He came back for level 2 after having gone from a low D in first semester and did a lot better in attempting to learn that second year.
“No doubt that the very basic human connection is one of the most important in the teaching and learning process and why smaller class sizes are the real, and perhaps only, reform that we really need.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Diane Duane’s particular story holds universal keys to the “how” of education.
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Dwayne, Thanks for this great example of the difference between personal learning and personalized–learning styled up to focus only on academics, no possibility of mutual learning from a braised saffron rabbit dish from Spain.
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Right on, Dwayne!
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“All you need is bots (dew dew dew dew dew)”
The “human” connection
Can happen with bots
Who have an affection
For taters and tots
A meal with a robot
Is lovely indeed
To dine with a know-bot
Is all that we need
A know-bot is a robotic teacher, of course
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In case you don’t get the song reference, here’s the rest
All you need is bots bots
Bots are all you need
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Thanks, Duane, great story.
The so-called reformers will never, ever understand that education is fundamentally about human contact and human relationships; their greed and will-to-power blind them.
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Yes yes yes. Bravo, Senor Swacker!
The biggest problem in teaching is that there is never enough time for precisely this sort of thing. If someone (uh, Bill Gates, say, or Mike Petrilli) tells you that class size doesn’t matter, that’s a clue that he or she is completely clueless about education, which is at root transactional.
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Bob, the two people you cited, Gates and Petrilli, were never teachers. Michael Bloomberg proposed raising the pay of the best teachers and doubling their class size. I never met a teacher who said class size doesn’t matter.
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Lisa Delpit said in one of her books that some children– when they feel listened to, valued, and respected– learn more FOR you, than FROM you.
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Like that thought.
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Love that way of putting it! Yes!
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Beautiful!
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..and when students feel ignored, devalued and/or disrespected, they learn to work AGAINST you.
And it often becomes a collaborative effort.
Who says bad teaching can’t be good?
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I had the same experience in my district as an ESL teacher. Years later when I ran into former students they would ask,”Do you still have the multi-cultural luncheon, or Thanksgiving feast? Do you still do the parade of flags or dye spring (Easter) eggs?” It is those special celebratory events they remember, not the academics or tests.
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To Duane – yes, human connection and smaller classes sizes ARE important and should be part of reforms. But if a teacher makes the connections, but the student doens’t learn any of the proper material (in part because the teacher doesn’t know how to teach, is that good?
To quote the movie Mr. Holland’s opus: “A teacher has two jobs; fill young minds with knowledge, yes, but more important, give those minds a compass so that that knowledge doesn’t go to waste.”
I am not sure I would agree the second part is MORE important – but I do agree that a teacher isn’t worth beans if her she isn’t doing the first part.
THUS the reason that I advocate for some type of accountability…
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What kind of “knowledge” do you think teachers should fill kids’ heads with? 2+2=4? Springfield is the capital of Illinois? The Constitution was drafted in 1787?
Or more like how to find and evaluate sources, how to understand a writer’s perspective and agenda, how to recognize propaganda, how to separate fact and opinion, how to test/evaluate assertions and “facts”, how to understand events within their historical context, etc.?
The former kind of knowledge is relatively easy to test, but basically useless unless you happen to be playing Trivial Pursuit. Basic facts are easy to look up when you need them. The latter kind of knowledge is what people really need to be effective citizens of a democracy, though, but I’m baffled how we would ever go about testing that kind of knowledge for “accountability” purposes.
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Totally agree, Dienne. What you are talking about is, broadly speaking, critical thinking skills, and they are pretty much impossible to test for, but they are vitally important if you want a well-functioning, thoughtful member of society.
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The type of knowledge you describe is well tested in our political discourse.
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Knowing how to read and reason gives students the tools they need to achieve their dreams, and they will serve students if they have to change course and retrain for a new career during their working lives.
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It’s easy to analyze a writer’s perspective if one understands the writing. It’s the understanding that’s the hard part, not the analysis. To be a good, all-round understander one needs a good, all-round foundation of knowledge. No kid is born with knowledge; providing this should be the central mission of schooling. Sadly few teachers understand this.
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The “background” information is what is used to practice those skills. That background isn’t just noise. Yes, I can look it up, but that really does slow down having an intelligent conversation if I have to look up everything. You are right that I don’t have to have exact dates of events memorized although it sure helps to know they happened. I know you really don’t intend that kids should struggle with basic math any more than they should struggle to read. Perhaps it is more in how the information is delivered that you struggle with. None of those skills you mentioned are of any use if you don’t have something about which you care enough to know something. There is so much that I was introduced to in school that I never would have pursued on my own but has enriched or been important to me in my adult life. I look back on the person I was even in high school and am glad I was not let loose to study only what I wanted. Those skills are of no use to being an effective citizen of a democracy if I have no idea what an effective citizen looks like. Understanding propaganda makes no sense if you have no idea when and where it is/has been used and how it affects people’s thinking as well as the related events. If I am going to recognize fact vs. opinion, I had better know some facts. How do you understand events in their historical context if your study of those events has been limited? I have to go back and reread what you said. I think from reading your comments for a few years now that your objection is more in the how content is delivered than in the what. I imagine Duane had a hard time convincing that student that there was any reason to learn Spanish, and he certainly would have lost the battle if he had that young man memorizing vocabulary and reciting phrases by rote, but perhaps because Duane took the time to get to know that student, he might look at Latin Americans with more insight than the typical stereotypical response. I have said all of this quite poorly, and I am sorry if it comes across as criticism. I have a feeling we are probably on the same page.
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Spedktr: well said. For the first million years of our existence, humans thought education was about teaching knowledge. Suddenly it’s about skills, not knowledge. So for a million years we were all wrong about education? Or maybe our ancestors were on to something. Our brains are born to think, but they’re not born with knowledge, correct? Yet our schools foolishly try to teach brains to think and neglect to fill them with knowledge. There are billions of bits of knowledge that kids need to learn; this takes time and effort. We waste kids’ time with these incessant skill building exercises. We fundamentally misunderstand what school is about.
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I think we’re only a couple hundred thousand years old max. But the Trump administration has made it seem like at least a million.
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It’s a balancing act. As a special ed teacher, I was well aware that my students needed to practice tools for acquiring information and for analyzing it once it was internalized. I always had trouble teaching study skills in isolation. I found the lessons boring. The skills were best taught through authentic learning experiences. They were still taught but were ancillary to the knowledge to be acquired. The Socratic seminar is a good example of a skills based activity designed to teach critical thinking skills; however, its ultimate success is totally dependent on the payoff of a deep and lasting understanding of the content being discussed even though the discussion skills practiced have independent value.
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I think Lucy dates back about 3 million years and she already knew how to snatch the football away at the last second and if I am not mistaken, she passed that piece of knowledge down thru the generations to The Donald.
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Poet: Ha!
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“. . . (in part because the teacher doesn’t know how to teach. . .THUS the reason that I advocate for some type of accountability…”
You keep coming back to that “bad teacher” concept. Are there some teachers that struggle? No doubt. That doesn’t mean that there has never been accountability. There always has been accountability. Whether that accountability has been adequate or not for the individual situation at a specific site can only be determined by those involved at the local level.
You, jlsteach, obviously have believed that that accountability has not been there on occasion in your work in schools. And your solution has been to look to/use some sort of supposedly “objective” mechanism to determine that accountability. I’ve shown how using testing cannot be that mechanism and you’ve not refuted nor rebutted my (via Wilson) contentions. But you want to keep using such inane falsehoods of malpractice that is using test scores for teacher evaluation. That makes absolutely no sense to me and I find your position ludicrous and risible.
and
I can’t agree with the quote from the movie (which I have not seen) about the two jobs of teaching. The banking method of education has long been discredited as being stultifying, not that students do not somehow need to learn certain facts, whether in math, history, geography, language arts, art etc. . . for without those facts one cannot adequately communicate with our fellow humans. But as a teacher I am not there to just supply the list of facts and have the students memorize them (and I am not against rote memorization as it has its place in the teaching and learning process).
Teaching is the art of human interaction that allows one person, the student to utilize and learn from another, the teacher and/or other students, those things that are considered necessary to know and do in our society. My job as a teacher is to rationally and logically present the subject matter in such a fashion that the students can, if they choose (and the vast majority do choose to learn), learn as much as they are capable at the time. I can cajole, I can attempt to connect in a truly human fashion (not using tricks or legerdemain in the process) that allows for the individual to comprehend for themselves the subject matter. But I cannot force them to learn.
Thhe saying “You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink” certainly applies to the teaching and learning process. And I never felt it was my job as a teacher to, as a country boy biology teacher colleague put it, “suck on the back end to make it drink” (which is the not so subtle undertone to your accountability obloquy).
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NICE! Thanks.
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I just got back from a district meeting where one of their power points highlighted research identifying the two most important factors as teacher quality and student teacher relationships.
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And the bugaboo then is in the details. What is/How can we recognize “teacher quality”? Did they give you any definition as to what constitutes “teacher quality”?
My guess is, as with so much having to do with the teaching and learning process as “developed” in these district type meetings, that the phrase was thrown out there, hell, everyone can agree that the ever elusive “teacher quality” is important, right? Just like how can anyone be against “high standards”?
I’d be interested to read what you were told is “teacher quality”, speduktr. Please expand and explain. Thanks!!
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Teach society to blame the teachers, blame the teachers, blame the teachers. Or, How To Kill A Functioning System 101.
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I had that same question as did others, and, of course, it was not well answered. I got the distinct impression that the district is very aware that the teacher evaluation system is not well received by the teachers. I live In Illinois, so that may give you some idea of some of the state level mandates that get in the way. It will take probably several years of pushback to get rid of the micromanagement disaster of Charlotte Danielson and the role of standardized test scores in evaluation. My sense is that the district is well aware that they have a talented and hardworking staff and only use the evaluation system to rid themselves of staff they want gone for whatever reason. The most recent example I have of that kind of manipulation is a couple of years old and before some major changes in administration, but knowing human nature, I doubt that there aren’t those who would take advantage of their power.
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The human connection is the secret sauce of teaching. I clearly remember my teachers who took a personal interest in me. Conversations I held with my students infiltrated the fiber of my being and linger longer than content, or pedagogy.
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Nice story, Duane.
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I’d bet that any teacher worth his/her salt that has taught for any decent length of time (at least 10 years) has many such stories.
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We do!
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I think that there should be four “r”s. Reading, Writing, Rithmetic, and REASONING. Education should include the ability to reason and find solutions.
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Can you further explain what the “ability to reason” and “find solutions” means as many people reason in a non-rationo-logical fashion to come up with very bad and harmful solutions (see the whole edudeformer movement as an example).
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Thanks, Diane for reposting this. And thanks to all who comment!
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I am proud to know you and be part of the conversation.
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Well considering that post was part of a “conversation” we (and a few others) had on another, allow me to link that dialogue: https://dianeravitch.net/2018/01/16/a-proposal-what-to-do-about-testing-so-it-is-used-appropriately/comment-page-1/#comment-2776964
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Deeply appreciated.
Go Dodgers!
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Now this “Go Dodgers” stuff has to go. Redbirds in ’18!
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Duane, listen, you’re going to have me rooting for the Cards this year if you’re not careful. Go baseball! Go saffron rabbits! Go public education!
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I would like to point out that my now moribund Braves are still the ones to root for. I can recall when Henry Aaron withstood the hate mail and the pitchers to smash the Ruth record. And he did it all when the substance that enhanced performance was made in St Louis where them big horses are.
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Just perfect! Thank you, Duane. Thank you, Diane.
So glad I opened my computer.
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One of the first students I taught was a country boy who shared with me his dish of saffron dove. He had made it for the annual shop class hunter’s meal. Nobody else liked it, but I loved it. He was a great kid whose kids were in our school later.
The personal connection makes the community, over and above what it might do for learning in general. Just let some computer do that for a community.
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Love it, Roy!
The student must have been a good wing shot, eh! What’s the average, something like 6 shots per dove killed?
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at the rate I would hit them, the price per ounce of dove would eclipse both gold and saffron. My student must have done well, I do not recall any shot in the dish.
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Just wait.
Bill Gates will probably read this and immediately instruct his engineers at Microsoft to build a “Rabbitstation 1” that can bake Safron rabbit, since that’s what makes a good teacher, right?
He’ll prolly have Nathan Myhrvold head up the project, since he’s a master of both tech and cooking.
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Rabbitstation 1 made me giggle.
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Like!
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I got way more than a giggle out of that one. Move over E. A. Robinson. Here comes SDP.
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I LOVE THIS ONE!!!
I did after-school programs in elementary schools for 12 years and saw the simple things we did change kids’ lives.
Thanks for sharing, Kas Winters, The Sneaky Mom (who knows that kids learn best when they think they are playing and having a good time.)
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As usual, thanks, Duane. You are what my father (o.b.m.*) would call a “gentleman & a scholar.” (His highest form of praise!)
My daughter had many wonderful teachers, but wish she’d had you for Spanish…she would have been fluent! (She knows enough to get by {she has been in Spain & Mexico}, but just barely.)
Muchas gracias for the post, for all your wonderful comments & for your Wilson rant!!
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Thanks rbmtk, for the kind words.
But I doubt that I would have had that much influence on your daughter’s learning of Spanish as there is only a limited amount of time to learn in the high school foreign language class. The amount of time spent in the classroom in a year of study is the equivalent of being in a target language country for 10 days. Yep, only 10 days. How much can one learn in 10 days. Well, for the average adult they might know how to say (if we’re talking about Spanish) “¿Cuánto cuesta una cerveza?” and the corresponding, necessary question “¿Dónde está el baño?”
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In the late 80’s i took a trip to Ecuador and Peru.
Before leaving, having never taken Spanish in school, I decided to take some “teach yourself Spanish” tapes out of the library from which (thank goodness) i learned
Una mas cerveza por favor!
It was so cheap down there, I didn’t even need to know cuanto cuesta.
My friends and i stayed in a really nice hotel in Banos, Ecuador (a resort town) for about $3 a night.
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