A retired teacher on fads (Washington Post)

Dear Steve,

Thanks for this. Given the distractions that teachers and their students face, both those that come from students who misbehave, perhaps because they know no better, and from adults (like superintendent Sherman) who should know better but do even worse than those students, it is a miracle that teaching and learning continue in many of our classrooms -- or at home, where more distractions abound. 

What keeps teachers going?  For many high school regular ed. teachers, Patrick Welsh, the author of the Washington Post article you forwarded to me, sums it up. 

A passion for communicating one’s subject matter to the next generation isn’t among the 74 items on Alexandria’s Curriculum Implementation Walk-Through Data Collection list, which Sherman, who left Alexandria schools last month, used to evaluate faculty. But it’s what all great teachers have in abundance. And it’s what will keep them going when the next wave of reforms comes rolling through.

But then, he taught for over forty years. So he must be yet another know-nothing, as per Bloomberg, Klein, Rhee, Duncan et al.   

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/four-decades-of-failed-school-reform/2013/09/27/dc9f2f34-2561-11e3-b75d-5b7f66349852_story.html

Note added:

I only take issue with the adjective "great". The mythologies surrounding the "great teacher" are counterparts of that surrounding the "bad teacher".  There has been as much time wasted and chaos sown searching for the former as there has been in attempting to weed out the latter. Central to all of this is the idea that the "bad teachers" are the problem.  This assumption has never been challenged publicly by our teachers' unions, working with parents to draw attention to the real problems that plague the schools.

Those of us who have taught for a while in different circumstances have learned humility.  Our performance has varied widely, depending on a host of circumstances, which include:

•  the subjects and levels taught (often far from that for which we were certified);
•  the student body -- with all its varied strengths and deficiencies, including many with zero knowledge of English in language-intensive classes;
•  our administrators and the policies that were rammed through, often punitively, that we had to accommodate to varying degrees;
• the time available to teach the content;
• even the number and type of rooms we taught in -- often on different floors;
•  the resources available (including appropriate textbooks, review books, a sizable chalk or white-board , this being a threatened commodity in many schools of late, and the machines to print out the handouts that so many of us have to painfully create and self-publish, continually reworking them over the years, as what is available fails to meet the ever-changing needs of our students); 
• and our own personal lives, including caring for family members and being short of sleep -- the quantity and quality of sleep being, in my experience, often a better determinant of how the school day goes than any amount of lesson planning, matched only by the resources available. 

All of us have had "great teachers" and ones not so great when we were students.  But we realized that, given the resources made available traditionally to students (textbooks being the primary one), we were responsible for our own education, through our own work, in school and at home. So we learned not to wait for "great" teachers to get educated.  Provided the teacher knew his/her subject (which was usually the case) and cared, we were satisfied.  We regarded parents in the same light, cutting them some slack.  Were our parents "great"?  Some of them, some of the time.  But they mostly did what they had to do, often under difficult circumstances, and we were grateful for that.

Arjun

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/four-decades-of-failed-school-reform/2013/09/27/dc9f2f34-2561-11e3-b75d-5b7f66349852_story.html