Why Teachers Can’t Teach
Because they don’t know anything. Teacher education is a massive fraud. It drives out dedicated people, rewards incompetence, and wastes millions of dollars. Our taxes pay for it all, but our children pay the real price.
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Because the students on the tape were not real kids, but college students pretending to be kids, the whole exercise had an air of “let’s pretend,” like sorority sisters rehearsing a skit for rush week. In an attempt to overcome this problem, Blythe and Williamson sometimes distribute what they call “role-playing cards,” which direct the recipients to act up in a childlike manner (is there a card somewhere reading URINATE IN YOUR CHAIR?), a tactic that, although I did not see it used, would seem likely to make what is already a bit silly become downright absurd. As the spring term was nearly over, I took what I was seeing on the cassettes to be the result of an entire semester’s work—which, when I checked the course syllabus, turned out to be true.
I came away with two conclusions. One was that the course was clearly, if not intentionally, set up so that it required a minimum of outside work, kept professors off the griddle on the question of literacy, and was virtually impossible to fail. To give an F or even a C in such a course would be almost impossible without a display of obvious feeblemindedness or paralyzing stage fright on a prospective teacher’s part. Where there is no subject matter, only method, the bad news never gets delivered.
My second conclusion was that enormous amounts of money, energy, and time were wasted by forcing forty students to come to class a couple of times a week for four months. They go less individual guidance and useful experience than they could get in two weeks if, instead of being isolated on a small-town campus and working on their suntans (and the majority looked as if they had just returned from the Bahamas), they were apprenticed after securing honest college degrees to proven and experienced master teachers in actual classrooms with real kids. I asked Williamson if something like that would not make more sense. “You know how I’m going to react to that,” he said. “You’re talking about my job.”
Education 3330, “The Secondary School: Principles and Procedures,” is a methods course required for teaching above the elementary level. The dean the department head commended to me Professor Lowell Bynum, whose doctorate is in secondary education, and who has many years of experience as a band director and a principal at both the elementary and secondary levels. His class was conducted in a room equipped with two walls of one-way glass so observers could watch and listen without disturbing things inside.
On the day I visited his class, again toward the end of the semester, the atmosphere among Bynum’s ten or so students—he divides his sections into thirds and meets with them separately—was somewhere between manic and hilarious. Like their counterparts in elementary education, Bynum’s charges were spending the hour evaluating videotape cassettes of themselves and their classmates. The tool for this was a mimeographed handout obscurely titled “Refocusing Reteach.” Down the left side of the form Bynum had listed six of what he styled “Instructional Objectives for this Teach.” Four of those six categories used the word “unique” to describe the quality sought. Another had to do with observing time limits—secondary-school teachers are now advised to change their approach at least three, and preferably four, times each hour, like TV newsmen. The other category dealt with “specific refocusing skills.” Bynum seemed to be interested in originality. He certainly got it.
First up was a would-be English teacher who wished to discuss with her classmates the subject of legendary heroes. Or rather, she wished them to name a few. She offered as an example Odysseus. Somebody else mentioned Abraham Lincoln. Luckily for adherents of realism, these role players were not much removed in age or maturity from the adolescents they were supposed to portray, so as would no doubt happen just as quickly in most junior high school classrooms, someone mentioned Roger Staubach and basketball’s “Dr. J,” Julius Erving. One would hope that the teacher-to-be would have drawn the students out a bit on the difference between literary, historical, and “living” legends, but naming was as far as it got.
Next up was a tennis lesson. On tactics. In a classroom. The putative coach called to the front of the room two students, a man and a woman. The man was introduced as bad-tempered and impatient. She was a steady, dependable, low-key sort of person, good at restraining her emotions. How should she play him? “She should hit the ball real close to the lines to make him blow up,” a student volunteered. The coach allowed as how that made a lot of sense, proving not only that tennis cannot be taught in a classroom, but that he couldn’t teach it on a court either: the correct strategy in so paradigmatic a case is to imitate a backboard and let the impatient player make all the errors. I never did figure out what specific skills were being refocused by issuing the two students rackets and a ball and having them hit it back and forth at a distance of about four feet, but a good time, I can assure you, was had by all.
A social-studies teaching prospect bunched the entire class into a corner to demonstrate the presumed discomforts of overcrowding. “People in Harris County are getting uneasy” seemed to be the point. More hilarity. Another social-studies trainee did a reasonably funny impersonation of the first woman president holding a press conference. The rest of the class imitated the press corps and asked questions about her private life, most of them containing the kind of guffawing sexual innuendo familiar to watchers of Johnny Carson. A “creative-writing teacher” stressed creativity by spreading out on a desk a collection of small items, most of them from the supermarket, and asking each student to combine any two to make a new product. Thus were invented “coach’s liquid pizza” (by the tennis instructor), “spray-on peanut butter,” and “condensed water.” What these students were good at, I began to see, was imitating television skits, since that is where they are getting the bulk of their real education. I began to wonder if I had not wandered into a class for stand-up comedians. Everybody was having a grand time, and why not? Everybody was getting an A, or at worst a B.
One student with hopes of teaching journalism passed around blank sheets of paper accompanied by a list of news stories ranging from ax murders to international treaties and invited her classmates to cooperate in laying out the first two pages of a “conservative” and a “sensational” newspaper, which struck me as the most, and indeed only, useful idea I had heard. It seemed to provoke fewer laughs than the others, however, so I feared for the poor woman’s grade. The most appalling example from my point of view as a former literature teacher, however, was the TV College Bowl quiz format invented by another would-be English teacher—appalling not only in its reliance on the tube but also for its revelations about unlettered students. For a five-point toss-up, nobody could name a single work by either Tolstoy or Stendhal. The quiz-master knew one, Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, but had not read it herself and conceded to her groaning classmates that “it’s not well known.” For another five-pointer nobody could summon the name of the man who wrote Lord Jim. Remember now, we are not talking about real high school students but college seniors, and about college seniors, moreover, who will be in Texas high schools as teachers by the time you read this article, none of whom knew who wrote War and Peace or the name Joseph Conrad.
Back to the quiz. William F. Buckley was identified without demur as a senator from New York, not as the brother of James, the real former senator. Apparently the editorial page of the daily newspaper is as remote from the students’ consciousness as Napoleonic France. But all is not lost. “Name a novel by Jacqueline Susann” brought a cascade of shouted responses: “Valley of the Dolls, Once Is Not Enough…” Those are all I know. Several of the students at Southwest Texas State were four titles deep.
Afterward, Professor Bynum got up for a brief set of closing remarks. He stressed the artificial nature of teaching one’s peers in front of a television camera, a small group with no discipline problems. He categorized most of what he had seen as “teacher-centered learning” and hoped they would remember there are other methods. “If you end up as one of those teachers who comes in and says, ‘Read chapter three and answer the question,’” he said as a parting shot, “that noise you hear at the window will be me. I’ll be back to haunt you.” God forbid, I thought, that they should ever ask anybody to read and write. Anything but Jacqueline Susann, that is.
If schools of education were in the business of producing fully literate adult professionals, such nonsense as I have described above would be hooted out of the catalog. Instead, gifted students are forced to choose between certifying to teach and getting a decent education. Who can say how many potentially fine young teachers are lost to public education each year because they have too much self-respect to submit themselves to such play-acting? When both the ambitious and the idealistic are eliminated in large numbers, the incompetent fill the gap. But who is going to change the system? Not the Educationists: “You’re talking about my job.”
If anything, the impetus is moving the other way, toward more specialization and more education courses, away from basic knowledge. The going thing these days, if you’re thinking about getting into teacher, is bilingual education. Accordingly a clamor is rising in the education schools to “upgrade” the degree required from a BEd (or MEd) with bilingual specialization to a degree in bilingual education itself. This will have the dual effect not only of providing yet more courses for an expanded faculty to teach, but of rendering obsolete the credentials of teachers in the field, whose job mobility will be threatened unless they return to school to secure the new degree. And so on. The same “upgrading” has already occurred in such growth areas as special education, learning disabilities, and reading.
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