{"id":9839,"date":"2015-01-13T12:40:41","date_gmt":"2015-01-13T17:40:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/?p=9839"},"modified":"2015-01-13T12:40:41","modified_gmt":"2015-01-13T17:40:41","slug":"some-follow-up-on-teaching","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2015\/01\/13\/some-follow-up-on-teaching\/","title":{"rendered":"Some Follow-Up on Teaching"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday’s Open Letter to Neil deGrasse Tyson<\/a> struck a chord with a lot of people, and has spread a good distance on social media, which is gratifying. Given the delocalized nature of modern social media, though, it means I’m having essentially the same argument in five different places via different platforms. In the interest of consolidating this a tiny bit, then, let me post some follow-up stuff here.<\/p>\n

— The most charitable interpretation of the tweet I objected to<\/a> is that it’s meant as praise for good students. The idea being that good students will learn in the absence of good teaching, and even in the face of bad teaching. Which, you know, is a nice idea, but I have a bunch of problems with it.<\/p>\n

The biggest problem I have is just the “not because… in spite of” format of the tweet, which is unnecessarily negative in my opinion. If I were to write, say, “Young astrophysicists don’t succeed because of good role models in the field, but in spite of bad ones,” I’d have a bunch of middle-aged astrophysicists in my face saying “What’d we ever do to you, man?” And they’d be right to be upset, because it highlights the bad side while minimizing the constructive efforts of good people. If you want to praise students, there are ways to do it directly, without pushing good people down.<\/p>\n

This phrasing also points up a problem with an alternate formulation of the same basic argument, namely that good students will be fine no matter what. Which is kind of implicitly ruled out by the “in spite of.” You don’t talk about things happening “in spite of” actions that have no power to effect them– I wouldn’t say that “In spite of bad weather in Central Europe, I managed to drive to my office today,” unless I was being obscurely ironic. Saying that A students learn in spite of<\/em> bad teachers grants that bad teachers have the power to stop<\/em> those students from learning. And talking up the ability of bad teaching to push students down while simultaneously waving off the ability of good<\/em> teachers to lift students up is insulting to the profession as a whole.<\/p>\n

— On a political level, there’s also a serious problem with the whole “Good students learn no matter what,” line, which is that it slides very easily into “These students who aren’t learning must have something wrong with them.” And in that direction, you find a vast, sucking swamp of noxious classism, sexism, and racism. Given the gross inequities of our educational system, and society in general, that’s not a good place to be going.<\/p>\n

— Sticking with a larger political level, I’m not really willing to “cut some slack” to a well-intentioned but badly executed attempt to praise the character and abilities of good students. There is a large and very active effort to denigrate teachers, particularly public school teachers, in this country, for a whole host of bad reasons. An inadvertently insulting remark by a person of Dr. Tyson’s stature (in a media sense, I mean, though I gather he is a fairly large man) contributes to this bad climate in a way that has a far greater impact than a stupid tweet from a lesser light.<\/p>\n

— There have also been a fair number of arguments that I have a skewed vision of the educational system thanks to a privileged upbringing. While I will stipulate that as a white male, I’m free from a lot of corrosive bullshit that afflicts students of color in inner-city schools, it’s not like I went to swanky elite private schools my whole live. I grew up and went to school in Whitney Point, NY<\/a> (of course it has a Wikipedia page), in northern Broome County, which is, shall we say, not one of the more high-end Zip codes in New York state. It’s a rural area, mostly dairy farms, with a smattering of people who commuted to Binghamton for white-collar jobs. My high school didn’t actually close on the first day of deer-hunting season, unlike many of the surrounding schools, but it was pretty sparsely populated on those days.<\/p>\n

So, while I didn’t suffer the worst of the disadvantages that our education system has to offer, I wasn’t in an area blessed with an overabundance of educational resources– I took three AP exams in high school, and for two of those I was the only student in the class. If I had to guess, I’d say it was probably pretty average, but that would be only a guess.<\/p>\n

And despite that not-so-elite location, the vast majority of the teachers at the school were dedicated, hard-working folks who genuinely cared about helping their students learn. So I’m fairly comfortable with applying that description to the teaching profession more broadly.<\/p>\n

— There have also been the regular assertions that arbitrary percentages of teachers are just horrible, generally with accompanying anecdotes. And while I don’t want to disparage the lived experience behind those anecdotes, I would also point out that measuring “bad teaching” is really hard to do. Even people who do this professionally– and I say this as someone whose current job responsibilities include evaluating the teaching performance of a number of my colleagues– generally do a very bad job of it. The easy methods of “evaluating” teaching are generally pretty terrible, and the ones people agree work reasonably well are impractically difficult.<\/p>\n

And on an anecdotal level, the situation is much, much worse, because education is a highly individual thing. Learning a new subject requires getting facts and procedures into the brain of a particular individual who does not already know that stuff, and everyone is different. While the oft-cited “learning styles” stuff is a little dubious, scientifically, it survives because there is an intuitive sense in which it seems true– what makes a particular subject “click” for a particular person won’t necessarily work for another. And that creates all sorts of problems when it comes to individual teachers– a lot of the “bad teaching” stories we hear about are at their core primarily personality conflicts. Somebody whose sense of humor just doesn’t mesh with that of their teacher can end up having a very bad time, while other students will absolutely love that same teacher.<\/p>\n

And there’s also a major “snapshot” problem with individual evaluations of teaching. Some of the teachers you think were terrible might in fact be very good at their job, but having a terrible day, or even a terrible year. If you happen to catch a particular teacher during the year he’s going through a nasty divorce, say, you might find him grumpy and irritable, while previous and future generations of students find him warm and caring. Because you’re only seeing a tiny snippet of what that person is really like.<\/p>\n

So I think most judgements of who is and isn’t a “bad teacher” need to be taken with a barrel of salt. I’m not claiming it’s impossible<\/em> to figure out who isn’t good at their job– as I said in a comment to yesterday’s post, if you want to know who the bad teachers are, ask the other teachers in that school, who work with them over a span of years and have to deal with the same students. But the perspective of a single student or parent based on a single small set of interactions just isn’t remotely sufficient to make that determination.<\/p>\n

— In the same vein, I’ve heard from a bunch of people who talk about how they spent their whole school career surrounded by incompetent teachers and learning in spite of them. Formal education is a giant waste of time, classes are pitched only to the mediocre students at the center of the bell curve, and Dr. Tyson is right that the truly exceptional gain nothing from teachers.<\/p>\n

My response to that starts with the point that I know exactly what that’s like. I spent my entire pre-college career holding down the far right edge of the grading curve, often to the active irritation of my classmates. I know exactly what it’s like to be bored in a class that’s pitched at students below my level.<\/p>\n

But at the same time, I can’t honestly say that I’ve ever taken a class where I learned nothing<\/em> from the formal instruction, or only learned in spite of the worst efforts of the teacher. Have I had classes where I learned less than I might’ve with a different teacher? You bet. Have I had classes where I probably could’ve learned more reading on my own? Sure. Have I had classes where I thought the teacher was holding me back with pointless drudge work? Yeah.<\/p>\n

But you know what? When I thought that, I was being an asshole. Because the fact is, I probably wouldn’t’ve bothered to do the drudge work necessary to learn the basics. And while I might’ve gone farther in some classes had I been pushed harder, getting those basics down is not nothing. Looking back from an adult perspective (and the perspective of someone currently charged with teaching intro physics on a regular basis), I can’t honestly say that even the worst of the teachers I ever endured was worse than no teacher at all. <\/p>\n

I can<\/em> honestly say that I was an insufferable little jackass for a few years there, though…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yesterday’s Open Letter to Neil deGrasse Tyson struck a chord with a lot of people, and has spread a good distance on social media, which is gratifying. Given the delocalized nature of modern social media, though, it means I’m having essentially the same argument in five different places via different platforms. In the interest of… Continue reading Some Follow-Up on Teaching<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,13,104,28,11,82,75],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9839","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","category-education","category-humanities","category-politics","category-science","category-socialscience","category-society","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9839","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9839"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9839\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9839"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9839"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9839"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}