Remember the arcade game you played as a kid, before everything was digital? Plastic moles pop up from apertures in the play surface and, armed with a foam mallet, the player is tasked with quickly smacking each mole as it appears before it can retreat unharmed.
Some days, teaching reminds me of whack-a-mole. Johnny, get quiet. Sally, sit down, please. Javier, get to work. Louise, don’t punch your neighbor. Paul, raise your hand. Beth, please write on paper instead of the desk. Johnny, get quiet. Sally, sit down, please. . .
I don’t think I’ve seen whack-a-mole in an arcade for a long time. I guess it must not be a big money-maker. Perhaps some people think it’s stupid and futile. Maybe they just tire of the monotony and wish that damned moles would stay where they belong and cooperate long enough to actually learn something.
Those of you who know something of pedagogy may now be foolishly shouting at your computer screens. If so, stop. I can’t hear you. I know that teaching doesn’t have to be futile – that if students are engaged, they will learn and they will be eager to do so. They will be eager to come to school and eager to work hard toward a real goal.
The difficulty in this is teaching engaging lessons – teaching creatively – while adhering to rigid, often arbitrary, standards designed to demand (but not support) mastery of increasingly outmoded skills of the lowest cognitive order. Our current system, overly scripted and nit-picky, often does only a mediocre job of preparing students for late-nineteenth-century factory work, and almost never does a good job of preparing them for the ever-changing challenges of the early-to-mid twenty-first century.
I don't claim to have all the answers, but I do know that No Child Left Behind is not the solution. Moreover, I believe that tighter regulation is not the answer. The best parents want the best education for their children and will insist on it. Teachers are creatures of conscience and work hard to do everything they can for their charges.
I know that not every teacher is great. I know that not every parent tracks their kids' education as they should. I also know that this is a reasonably self-policed system and that the money spent on enforcing NCLB would do more good spent in the classrooms.
The number one change needed: smaller class sizes - fewer students per teacher. Every student needs one-on-one time with an adult every day. They need someone they respect to listen to what they say.
Students don't need me scolding them for talking out of turn. They need a turn to talk.
Granted, it wouldn't hurt kids to have enough books for each of them. Furniture with surfaces
unmarred by graffiti would be okay. If we actually aspired to prepare kids for tomorrow, we could integrate computers into all of their work, and be sure that they each have free access to a computer at home and at school.We could give kids responsibility for work that really needs doing and the recognition that they have done it.
Rumor has it that some children can see the bare breasts of the Venus de Milo or hear the words "shit" and "damn" without their heads exploding. We don't need to Nerf the world. Kids will punch each other. They will call each other names. They will learn that there are better alternatives and they will grow.
We don't give our children enough credit. We don't give them enough time. We don't afford them the resources they deserve. They don't get what they need because we don't have the time right now, or we don't want to spend the money.
Guess what: when they rob a liquor store, we'll find the time, won't we? We'll send them to court and appoint an attorney and we'll prosecute them and send them to jail where they'll be supervised and fed and sent to bed until they can be paroled, supervised, work at a job which does not satisfy so they can buy things they don't need, go broke, run out of options, and go rob a liquor store.
Coddling, scolding, insulating, berating - we've tried these tactics and demonstrated that they don't work.
Now, let's try teaching.
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