This was a letter to the editor of the Atlanta Journal Constitution. I don’t know how true this is, but if it is, then I continue to thank the Deities I have my children in private school. From the article:
Good grief. I thought the whole point of education was to better yourself, and what better way than to have a living example? I guess now we are supposed to strive to be average.
Well, I suppose that they were thinking of the fact that half of the population is below the median intelligence level and hired accordingly.
I don’t deny that’s what the letter they sent him said. But I’ll bet you a cheese sandwich that isn’t the real reason he wasn’t hired.
What is? I doubt it’s racial, since it’s Atlanta. But it could be.
My guess- HIGHLY educated kid fresh out of college, planning to Change The World Through Teaching, applying at an urban school. They’ve got a pretty high burnout rate once you put them in a classroom with real students. Tend to experience cognitive dissonance when they have to deal with students who lack any motivation whatsover to learn. The hiring people might have thought he fit the profile of someone who’ll give up after a year or two.
That guy sounds like a very inspirational individual and I think I would have liked to have had him for a teacher…but I too wonder if this is JUST about his intelligence. It seems weird that nobody hired him.
Maybe he came across as obnoxiously arrogant about his intelligence, or uses a lot of long-winded vocabulary that would be confusing to the average high school student.
When you’re trying to explain something to someone, even if they’re a smart person, you don’t want to make it more complicated than it has to be. Some intellectual types don’t seem to know how to simplify things to make it easier for others to understand.
I have seen teachers, even at the college level, who really knew their stuff but could not teach. Teaching is a skill of its own, and it is as unrealistic to expect every intellegent person to know how to teach as it is to expect each intellegent person to know how to play a musical instrument. He may have been not hired on the basis of a sample lesson he was asked to prepare, or his answers to the usual theoretical questions: “What would you do if a student did this?” “How would you explain this to a student?”
My first guess was that the school district went with candidates who had experience working with inner city kids, but if it were as simple as more qualified applicants, the email would be a little more encouraging- “We’ll keep your resume on file.” I believe that either that particular principal was stupid or that the candidate was, as FisherQueen and lavenderviolet say, a mix of arrogance and unrealistic idealism.
I find this a little crazy because one of the best teachers I ever had was incredibly intelligent. Dr. Landy was an excellent teacher. He headed the local chapter of MENSA and scored perfect on the SAT’s two consecutive times. I think its astonishing that someone could be too smart to teach Highschoolers. I believe this is part of the problem. School systems are going down the drain because of directing all the focus too much on the mediocre students and hardly focusing on the upper tiers. Tis a shame.
Telling someone “you’re too smart” is the equivalent of saying “you’re too nice”. It is a way of rejecting someone while trying to be nice, by appealing to their vanity.
It is unlikely that the person being rejected is really too nice or too smart, but rather just not a good fit for the position (be it a romantic partner or an employee).
It was stupid to put it in writing, though.
Reading between the lines a little, it sounds like the Principle is very carefully saying “you’re too stiff/intellectual/arrogant”. In other words, you won’t be able to connect with High School kids. And if you can’t connect, you can’t teach, no matter how much you know. I suspect the line about the young man’s “intellectual comportment” is a weasely but trying-to-be-nice way of saying this.
The truth is, despite what Woody Allen says, Teaching is indeed a discipline. Some folks can do it, others can’t. And teaching at the High School level has got to be one of the most challenging disciplines. There’s so much more to it than just knowing your subject matter. Being able to translate intellectual knowledge for a High-School audience, then “packaging” it, motivating students, etc., is an art. Some folks are just more artistic than others.
I was wondering if Mr. Harris submitted that glamour shot with the narcissistic description of himself.
I think the young man is more interested in being an intellectual celebrity than an educator.
I can type fast, use MS Office, and make coffee. Does that mean that if, for some reason, I decided to apply for a secretarial job even though I’m qualified as a researcher, a company who rejected me for being overqualified would be crazy? No, they would have correctly figured out that either I’d be bored, or leave after a few months to get a better job. Nobody should hire someone overqualified just so they “don’t look bad.”
My cousin teaches science/biology at a rural high school. One of the other science teachers at her school has been given many teaching awards by various organizations, up to and including “National Science Teacher of the Year” by one group. The guy is one of the smartest teachers you’ll ever find in a high-school classroom. And the sad thing is…almost nobody learns anything in his class. He’s teaching things that you almost need a college degree in physics to understand to high school students that have never taken a physics class. It’s been pointed out to him several times that he’s teaching way, way over the kids’ heads, but somehow it’s not getting through to him that not everybody is as smart as he is.
If this teacher were in a college setting, he’d be a perfect fit. (I have no idea why he hasn’t tried to do so–with his resume a lot of universities would be beating down his door.) Maybe the would-be teacher in Atlanta falls into the same category.
I just typed a giant post that was eaten by the hamsters. Feh.
To briefly recap:
I write this from the perspective of someone who will receive an undergraduate degree in May; English is my major, secondary education is my minor (psychology would be another minor if I had time to take one more class). I’ll then go on to earn a Master’s degree in education.
I suspect, as do other Dopers, that one of the reasons that this guy wasn’t hired was that he failed to prove that he could help his students learn what they needed to, despite his vast intelligence & his credentials. Intelligence is a quality that a teacher must have, but an ability to communicate with teenagers is equally important to a teacher’s success.
That is, one can be incredibly intelligent & possess a vast repository of knowledge, yet have zero ability to impart that knowledge to students. If he’s failing to impart knowledge because he fails to take (for example) his students’ current abilities in the language arts into account, then he’s doing a disservice to them. The idea is to start out with the intent to help them rise up, not to assume that they should already be there.
I forgot to add that no matter whether I question this guy’s teaching abilities, I think that his rejection letter was very poorly worded.
Speaking as someone who considered teaching (I think almost every English major does at some point), I can say with some certainty that sometimes being extremely intelligent can be a teaching detriment.
I am extremely intelligent. No, I’m not blowing my own horn; I just am. Every teacher I’ve ever had–even the ones who hated me–has said this. I pick up most concepts extremely quickly, and can do mental tasks with a speed that amazes most people. That being said, I’d be a horrible teacher.
See, teaching takes other qualities that do not necessarily go hand in hand with intelligence; in fact, being extremely intelligent can make things worse. There are times when I honestly don’t understand why someone can’t grasp a concept. I am a very impatient person. Dealing with children who are average-to-below-average intellectually would likely push me to the point of snapping. As intelligent as I am, I’m not going to get anywhere if I’m yelling at kids because they can’t understand grammar or don’t know how to use an apostrophe. In fact, I’d be more likely to turn them off of reading and writing for the rest of their lives.
This side of my doesn’t show very much in my normal, everyday life. I’m a nice, likeable and downright cute person (the latter much to my eternal chagrin). Because of this, and because of my major, I always have people telling me that I should go into teaching. However, I recognized the impatient tendencies within myself, and therefore decided to pursue other career opportunities. It’s possible that, with this person, the situation was reversed. He might see himself as a very patient and instructive teacher, but the opposite could be obvious to those interacting with him.
If this teacher had the same basic demeanor as I do, I can see why a district–especially a city district like that in Atlanta which would have to deal with a large amount of disadvantaged children–would not want to hire him. That being said, that rejection letter is very, very badly worded.
That may well be in Atlanta, but he has also applied for positions in Gwinnett and Cobb counties, which are far from disadvantaged (I live in Gwinnett). It would be interesting to know which school sent that particular e-mail.
Ex Machina,I was going to comment on exactly the same thing! 
Ah, I see you’ve met Chris *****, and I suspect this committee did as well. I was spared his existence due to the fact that he thought, as a 16-year-old, that he was too good for prep school and went on to college after his junior year (he would have been a senior during my first year at that high school). The stories I’ve heard seem to indicate that, at best, he was a zealot for academic excellence, rigor and the results that are only possible if you do nothing else; at worst he was something the words for which are best left to the Pit (and I have, in my current sleep-deprived state, no desire to go there).
I actually can see him applying to be a teacher if for no other reason than to, from his perspective, save the grunts from their pathetic existences by gracing their academic careers with his vast and profound knowledge. This was a guy who strove to correct, among other people, his Latin teacher who’d been teaching more than 20 years and had his doctorate from Brown. Smart guy. Nice guy. Didn’t remember Chris fondly. But then part of that might be the fact that Chris was fond of knocking any translation that wasn’t his (and by association wasn’t perfect).
If he comes off in person the way he comes off in writing I can totally get why he wouldn’t be hired to work with high school kids. He writes like a stuck-up prig and had I had a teacher at the high school level who said things like “I would simply like some insight as to some possible answers to a seemingly unsolvable conundrum.” then I’d have made fun of him unmercifully.
Plus there’s that whole working for an asshole like Saxby Chambliss thing…
I will bet you he exhibited one (or a combination) of three things.
-
Arrogance, as if he walked in there and expected to be hired sinmply on the strength of his resume.
-
Indifference or lack of understanding about what he’d be required to teach, as opposed to what he wanted to do in the classroom.
-
Condescension toward kids, i.e., he expected them to flock to him because he was such a good role model, rather than wanting to reach out to them.
I can put a set of encyclopedias in the classroom that will “know” more than you or I or this guy ever would. That doesn’t make the encylopedias a good teacher, though.
The guy sounds like an asshole.
When he finally does get a job teaching high school somewhere, some student or parent is going to remember his name, google it, and find out all over again just how much of an asshole he is. I don’t think Mr. Harris is going to have his expected experience as a teacher.
I have nothing to add about his credentials, except that his lack of a Masters in Education couldn’t have helped.