The Trouble with Teachers

When I first sat on a school board it didn't take long to understand that the whole education system is totally fucked up because of teachers and teachers federations. Sounds like an off the wall, don't give this guy a shred of credibility kind of statement, but when I explain some simple facts you will understand why its true.

Have you noticed how many times that whole industries have gone bankrupt because of employees unions. Have you noticed that militant unions are concerned with only one thing, themselves, and that they all operate from the same basic philosophy, get more for yourselves and do less for it. Something I have noticed about Buzz Hargrove, he isn't looking to do things better for the Company that is writing everyones paycheque, he's always looking at, more for less.
No different than any other labour leader, protect the interests of the membership at all costs. Union leaders don't give about a rats ass about the industry that supports them.

Take the case of the Teachers Federation in British Columbia, they have walked off the job and the issues are:
1. More money
2. Smaller class sizes
and at a news conference the Teachers federation leader stood up and with a straight face and declared, "we are doing this to take a stand for public education. What the fuck does that have to do about whats going on. Can't make the connection myself but then as my wife constantly reminds me, "I'm not all that smart".

But I have learned a few things from my love of the game of golf that I think apply, and they are simple truths.

The first is, "if you have a poor swing and don't correct it, you will never have a good golf game."

The second is " if you keep practicing your poor swing you will get better at doing something badly". Now how does this have anything to do with our education system, and here it comes.

First you have to accept a few things before we look to solve the education problem.

1. The primary responsibility being practiced by every Teachers Federation is to strengthen the postion of teachers within the education system, not to improve the education system itself. The question that is asked by every teachers representative about any proposed change is " what effect does this have on the teacher." If you accept that as reality then try this statement that comes from every teachers mouth , "all we care about are the children" That one wouldn't even fool Col Sherman T. Potter who when he heard it bellowed to radar O'Reilly "Horsehockey". Translation - Bullcrap, when it comes down to it they care about those paycheques and having to do less, wrapping it up in "what we really care about is a better education for the children" is a wonderful feely good statement that masks the way the are screwing up kids lives.

I remember in the small Saskatchewan Town of Nokomis in about 1963 or 4. There was a car accident and two young people from the Town were killed. The liquor was supplied by a guy who lived on the edge of town, can't remember his last name, Russian I think, but everyone knew him as CPR Joe. He bootlegged some booze to these kids and they got drunked up rolled a car and they died. I was underage at the time and was visiting with my two uncles. Somehow we ended up at a party and Joe was there, he was bemoaning the fact that it wasn't fair that he was being blamed for the kids death, after all he said through an alcohol fueled logic that " all he was trying to do was help them out". I guess somehow that made him feel better and he was probably working at believing it but if you are standing on the outside you realize how ridiculous it is. Same thing with teachers "its all about helping the children" Bullcrap "its all about helping the teachers get more and do less. But the real saddness of the whole situation is that a sytem that clearly is failing so many children is being perpetuated. Guess what the weak link in the system is "The Teachers Themselves" and here's why, because the system (designed by teachers - administered by teachers - evaluated by teachers ) depends upon teachers as the center of the system, around which everything revolves. And when the system doesn't work they blame the curricullum, the class size, the facilities, a lack of money, social situations everything but the teacher.

And the teachers federations have worked hard to remove themselves from ever being evaluated, remember when there were Provincial exams and every kid in the system wrote the same tests at the end of the year. Seems to me that it wouldn't be to hard to figure out that if every kid in Mrs Bullcraps class was 15 points behind the Provincial average that their might be a problem with Mrs Bullcrap. So they have removed themselves from ever being held responsible for failures. If I remember right their main argument was that it wouldn't be fair to compare teachers when some taught in uppercrustville elementary and others in dogpatch, something about stronger gene pools.

Now I want you to think how the system would be turned upside down if we make a simple shift in in our thinking about the rights of a student. Don't we base our existing thinking about schools place in society on this premise ' Every child has a right to an education". Doesn't hang anybody out to dry, its like saying Moms are great, on the surface its like, as American as apple pie. But use your imagination and base our system on this alternate statement. "Every child has the right to be in an environment where they can learn". Whoa now, half the kids I know of don't learn worth a shit when the sytem supports a dependancy upon Mrs Bullcrap as the centrepiece of the learning game. So if thats true then we have to look at alternatives where the prime factor in whether your child learns anything more than colouring inside the lines is not the teacher, its the system itself. The answer by the Teachers Federation is more professional development days, smaller class size and more resources, but don't change anything that diminshes the status of teachers. How innovative is that.

Everyone can remember back to their schooldays and I bet there is not one of us that can't name the good teachers and the bad ones. My list of good teachers is not that long and the ones on it could teach anything to anybody. But the others, man what a bunch of losers, uninteresting, unmotivating and unable to hold anyones interest. In fact with the bad ones if you weren't able to educate yourself you wouldn't make much progress in those classes. In todays classroom its compounded by the fact that if little Johnny doesn't want to pay attention but wants to talk and cause a disturbance all day long there is almost nothing that the teacher can do about it.

My kids all went a small school after we moved to PEI and how their education went was dependant on two things down at the school, who was in the class and who the teacher was. for those that started grade one with a juvenile delinquent or two in the class they had to endure their constant disrupting of the classs for nine years. That problem child robbed the other 25 of an education at the same level as those in a class where there was no class clown, and no Mrs Bullcrap. I wonder if I could start a class action lawsuit, not to get anything but to get the issue of the negative effect of having a bad apple in a class on the public agenda. You see, having discipline in a classrom goes against the new premise I introduced about being in an environment in which they can learn.

The behaviour problem in the class can't learn in that open environment because it gives them a forum to act out all the fucked up stuff stuff they have inside and it doesn't place the student who wants to learn in the ideal situation because they are constantly being distracted by little Johnny screw up and not being motivated by Mrs Bullcrap who is the center of the learning experience, the environment isn't there for anyone.

So what do we do about it, first we look at how classrooms are set up and look at alternatives to rows, big rooms and teacher at the front, then establish the different ways in which the curriculum can be presented to each student, then we take a look at what is the best way to create an environment where everyone can thrive academically.

Let me give you an example of a system we used when we started a private school and I am sure there are additional innovative methods being used that cut to the heart of the education dilemna.

In a square room face all the kids towards and outside wall with stations(desks) having about 4 feet of room. Then put up a wall divider between each desk so that each child has about a 4 x 4 space that is theirs, they can't see or disturb the child on either side of them. This is an important step because it creates an environment where the class clown is out of site, he no longer has a stage. When the teacher is talking they turn their chairs around and face the centre of the room where the teacher is.

Instead of having large textbooks, have small ones that each contain about three weeks of material that is contained in a workbook that the kids can write in do their assignments. That puts the information and the exercises in the same book. When the child has completed the workbook they take a test on the three weeks of work in the book. If they pass with 80% they get the next book , if they don't they get the same book again and they repeat it until they know the work well enough to move on. If you keep moving kids ahead when they don' understand the work that future lessons are built on how can they do well. That why we have kids in Grade 9 who can hardly read or understand basic math.

Using workbooks many children are able to learn by themselves with minimal interaction with a teacher. This frees the teachers time to spend more one on one time with those that need extra help or to conduct small sessions at a table for small groups while others work away by themselves. This is possible because when each child has their own workspace they are free from distractions.

By breaking the learning experience into a series of three week modules and removing the teacher from being the center of learning and relying more on a system, it is possible to keep children in a classroom setting where they remain in an age group, but each child can be at a different place in their learning journey because the idea of grades has been abandoned. It is not uncommon to have a two year spread in the progress of students using this system and it is no ones business but the childs, the parents and the teacher where each child is at.

Our experience with this caused some problems but not with what you would expect. Some of the teachers had difficulty adapting at first because they suddenly realized that these kids were succeeding and the teachers role had changed to being a facilitator rather than the leader.
The second problem we encountered in the second year of operation was that many of the kids were moving to far ahead of what would be expected at a grade level so we had to expand the curricullum horizontally and offer more subjects.

The third problem we had was that even by expanding to offer more subjects the kids were still progressing to fast so we had to reduce the school week to 4 days. This was done by having school finish at 12 noon on Wednesdays and by having every Friday afternoon as a school activity day where the kids just had fun. The Wednesday afternoon off each week meant parents could schedule any appointments involving children on that day and it gave the teachers a midweek break to evaluate the students, discuss any issues they had or search for more effective ways to run things.

Some of the other innovations we used was that on Monday mornings each child set a goal for work during the week and had control over which subjects they were going to work in. So long as they met the minimum amount of work for the week. This is possible because most of the learning is done from the workbooks and teaching is done mostly one to one or in small groups.

Because we determined that in order to join the learning experiance a child had to read it was mandatory for children once they reached grade 7 to have scheduled time with students in the Grade 1 and 2 classes to work with them in developing their reading skills as well as with kids up to grade 4 with math.

Once a child had completed a years worth of work it was up to the parent to decide if they wanted the child to continue attending every day so many kids could have a summer holiday of 4 months rather than 2, its called giving a reward if you do well at something.

Another thing we discovered was that there was no need for homework because the kids did so much work in school. In order to document that standards were being met we had the kids do the California Achievement Tests to establish at what Grade level they were at every six months. What we found was that when a child first entered the school they were all either at the expected level or below it. After six months most kids had dropped a little because of the repeated work they had to do to get up to speed. This was expected because of the 80% requirement to move on and many of the kids had advanced in the public school system without mastering previous work they had done. By the beginning of the next school year the majority of students were ahead of the expected Grade level and later were considerably ahead.

It is really hard for a teacher benefit and status building organization like a Teachers Federation to endorse a system like this because it reduces their role so much. Now what do you think about that