I began my Saturday like many others. McDonald’s breakfast and coffee with my wife. We were assessing how our week had gone and feeling a bit down. This has been an interesting journey. I moved to Prince Albert to follow a job while my wife remained in Big River. I went home on the weekends and rented a place in PA. In December we felt that this was making us crazy and with the help of our bank we purchased a place here in Prince Albert, while we rented our acreage in Big River.
Anyway, the change has been both great and terrible combined. My wife retired and did all the things you’re not supposed to in your first year after retirement. We moved. We bought a new house. She stopped working pretty much altogether and we shifted jobs. Crazy. However, we believe that we are being led on this journey and we haven’t lost sight of who is doing the leading.
Further to this is the feeling I’ve been having about education for quite some time. So, I tweeted out my thoughts for “the world”, or at least those that follow me and might actually read what I have to say.
Here’s the tweets:
We are at an interesting time in this education enterprise. While the wolves circle outside we are busy shooting at ourselves from within.
What if how we do things isn’t always so bad? What if we do a good job & we’re so busy wondering if we are doing a good job we miss it.
All I know is that each morning I try to do the best for my Ss to help them learn & grow. I may not always succeed, but I try.
Lately I have the distinct feeling I’m doing it all wrong – all the time. It’s hard to do ur best & then have to think maybe it wasn’t enuf.
@nathanghall I feel that we make a difference in our Ss lives through ours. Maybe there isn’t one specific “research approved” way 2 do that.
So what did I mean by “the wolves circling outside”? Well, I think education is under attack from governments that seek to justify the expenditure on education while not being actually sure of what they are getting. Governments seem to like nice round statistical numbers that are either “Yes students are being successful” or “No, they’re not and we’re all going to heck in a hand-cart, by the way, too.” Governments are pretty binary that way. Education being their second biggest expenditure, they’d like return for their money. And so would I. However, their alarm over value for money gets certain other groups excited about what’s going on in entirely the wrong way.
The groups of people who get excited about education tend to come from the ranks of business who because they went to school and subsequently did well, think they know everything that education needs to succeed. Another group seems to be companies that would be considered para-educational if their financial stakes weren’t so entwined with educational outcomes. The last group that circles us anyway are the pundits like John Gormley who lauds teachers when they are defending their children from gun-toting maniacs, but vilifies us when we ask for wages to be paid on par with the consumer price index as abusers of our power. Anyway, these are what I would consider to be the wolves. A motley crew if ever assembled in one place.
Meanwhile, within the ranks of educators we are constantly “improving”. Countless dollars of research are spent on new curriculum, new assessments, new ways of looking at problem solving, new teaching techniques, educational technology, tests, metrics, et cetera, et cetera. The list is endless. Now, I’m not knocking their very sincere desire that our students become successful in the classroom and in life. Of that I have no doubt. However, touting a method as THE method or the ONLY way to teach kind of rings hollow, especially if you seem to be having success with children with a method vilified by the research they are doing. My wife was a successful teacher for 30 years and countless students have reached out over the years to thank her for her kindness and how they look up to her in spite of her not, to my knowledge, being a particularly “trendy” teacher. That is, I think she and many other teachers have an intuitive sense of how to reach their students and simply do it. I don’t think there was a formula and I doubt she would agree with lots of “new” educational theory being trotted out today.
My point being this. Sometimes we are going to be successful teaching how we know how to teach. Other times we aren’t. I don’t want to get complacent and simply go through the motions of teaching, but I want to be me and believe that this is enough and that my evolution as a teacher is an organic process that aids my students and my teaching over time. I’m going to add some tools to my Teaching Swiss Army Knife, but I have some tried and true stuff FOR ME that I’m going to go back to from time to time. At the same time, I need room to do this. I need the people outside of the teaching profession howling for my hide to back off and wait for children to become who they are going to be because of, and in spite of me. I also need time for those within the education establishment to recognize that despite our best efforts, some children aren’t going to be successful in school, but that they will become successful at life. The two are not mutually exclusive.
Let’s not be so enamored with change that we miss what is going on right in front of us. Schools are beautiful, fun, vibrant and incredibly frustrating places. “Stuff” is going on all the time that we can’t quantify really well. It’s almost like determining the speed or the position of an electron. I can’t know both. I can only know one, and in simply measuring I am altering the outcome. Education is messy. It’s emotional. It belongs to all of us and sometimes I think in our effort to “fix” it, we miss the awesome things that ARE going on despite of how, as we’re reminded so often, broken education is.
That’s just where my brain was on a Saturday morning. Thoughts?
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