The GOP hates teachers. Teachers are smart, thus they have a Union and mostly vote Democratic.
Thus they cut pay, impose stupid standards, and etc.
Difficult to say, since there are so many more wrong ways to do things than right ways, and it’s been nearly a decade. I do remember that circuits were a rich source of misconceptions, things like mixing up voltage, current, power, and energy.
I suppose it depends on how thinly you slice the job description. If you don’t know calculus, then no matter how good a teacher you are, you’re going to do a lousy job as a calculus teacher. So if the job description is “calculus teacher”, then content knowledge is the #1 requirement. But if the job description is just “teacher”, then the good teacher with poor content knowledge is going to be able to find some subject that they can teach.
Which job description is more relevant here? Is the shortage of teachers in general, or is it a shortage of teachers for specific subjects? I suspect the latter: Districts that can’t find enough high school math teachers, but which are still turning away more qualified elementary teachers than they can hire. And they can’t hire those elementary teachers they’re turning away as high school math teachers, because they don’t have the subject matter knowledge.
But, again, I emphasize that I am not saying that teaching skills are unnecessary or unimportant. They are, very much so. Just slightly less so than content knowledge.
'round these parts, an undergraduate who knows they want to be a teacher enters a program which essentially gets them a masters degree after a 5th year of college. The program includes an active teaching internship and when they finish it, they have an MA and their teaching certificate. But it’s not required.
The great majority of teachers are either liberal or liberal-leaning, but the problem for the GOP is that even many conservative teachers are - understandably - opposed to the boneheaded anti-education policies that the GOP champions.
Conservative public school teachers are still public school teachers, and the ones who aren’t MAGA lunatics still care about kids. If you care about your students, you’re going to be opposed to legislation designed to erode the quality and integrity of the system.
The Democrats aren’t much better when it comes to supporting public education, truth be told, but they aren’t anti-education. They don’t represent an active existential threat to the entire concept of an educated populace. So they get the votes. The GOP could’ve chosen to lionize public educators the same way they do soldiers and firefighters and police, and they’d get the votes. But at this point that would mean sacrificing the lunatic vote.
I guess it feels a little bit like asking which organ is more important, the heart or the lungs.
I have no doubt that here in Texas, Republicans will use the teacher shortage as an excuse to gut the public school system. For years they’ve been trying to enact school vouchers to allow public funds to follow students to private, often religious, schools (not to be confused with charters and magnets, which we already have). It’s failed through a combination of Democrats and rural Republicans for whom the local public school is often the center of the community.
But Abbott’s recently voiced support for vouchers, and Republicans have become so radicalized that they may well vote ideology over the interest of their own district. I’m sure the teacher shortage will be portrayed as another symptom of our “failing public schools” (along with rampant “wokeness” and insidious critical race theory) that only the blessed private sector can remedy.
A stack of books sitting on a desk is content knowledge in pure form. If it were the most important component of education, teaching would look markedly different than it does in reality.
In David McCullough’s John Adams (I think), he describes Adams’s law education as essentially being given a list of books to study. Every now and then, he’d go to his mentor to discuss what he’d learned. That’s what a “content is the most important thing” education looks like.
One of the many roles of a teacher is to be a bridge between the content and the student. Building and maintaining that bridge is an artform comprised of many disciplines, and a teacher who knows how to do that is going to be much, much, much more effective than a content-area genius who doesn’t.
Surely we all had at least one of “those” college professors who just stood in front of the classroom and taught directly from the book? Or a high school teacher who had a stack of projector transparencies and droned endlessly from them? That’s what it looks like when a teacher doesn’t know how to teach. It’s awful and ineffective, even if the teacher in question knows the material inside and out on an intellectual level.
I taught 15-19 year olds math and science in Norway for ten years at a semi-selective college prep school. I dipped my feet in the pool of teaching in the US in the first three years of being here and decided to work on switching career tracks again.
The US system just has so many challenges it’s ridiculous and while I expect the current crisis will lead to a temporary bounce and some fixes, the basic structure of school funding and governance in the US will let the crazies bork it all up again sooner rather than later.
As to what is the most important qualification for a teacher I agree that it isn’t subject understanding. That doesn’t mean it isn’t important, but a great teacher without subject understanding will let their lack of understanding inform their teaching. Even if they end up with some misguided understanding in math and science, the student of such a teacher will be inquisitive, independent and able to reassess their knowledge and understanding in light of new information.
A mediocre teacher with no subject understanding (or with subject understanding) will, on the other hand, produce students who work hard at learning by rote whatever they are presented with and who have no meta-cognition around their learning.
Exactly how good or bad either kind of teacher will be depends both on grade level and the type of student, but it’s my impression that students could do with a lot more “learning about learning” than they get now. Although politicians into that have a tendency to want to throw learning by rote out entirely, which is going too far.
After years of the lack of respect, political baloney, and low pay, I’m shocke, SHOCKED, to find us suddenly with a shortage of teachers! Nobody could have predicted this.
I suspect something in the opposite direction: The labor market is pretty tight, and schools are just one small slice of the overall employment picture. The same article could be written about any number of professions right now.
I think that the question probably isn’t whether teaching skills or content knowledge is more important but rather which is easier to teach/learn . I had a job that combined law enforcement aspects with social work aspects. The qualifications to be hired included a certain amount of professional experience in casework but no law enforcement experience was required. We were explicitly told that the reason was because it was easier to teach the law enforcement aspect to people with casework experience than it was to teach the social work aspect to people with law enforcement experience. And I think to some extent, at least for certain subjects and grade levels , the same is probably true for teaching. If you have someone who knows how to teach but hasn’t looked at third grade math since they were in third grade they will be able to “learn as they go”* by reviewing and staying a couple of chapters ahead of the class. If they start off being experts in third grade math but without teaching skills, I don’t think they will be able to pick up the teaching skills as they go.
|* although it’s really not “learning” as much as “refreshing”
And it’s important for that bridge to reach the student. But it’s also important for the bridge to reach the content.
I would contend that a stack of books is not content knowledge in its purest form, because knowledge consists not only of knowing what, but also of knowing how. When a student tells me a wrong answer, I can often say right away what their likely mistake was, and almost always with a glance at their scratch paper. That sort of knowledge is very difficult to distill into a book.
Even there, though, education in the form of “here’s a list of books to read” can work. It doesn’t work for all students, and it often doesn’t work very well, but it’s not completely useless.
Did it work?
That’s not content knowledge, my dude. That’s teaching knowledge you’ve internalized over years of kids making the same mistakes. That’s your classroom experience talking, and it’s part of what makes you an effective teacher.
As an effective teacher, you can glance at the scratch paper and determine the best course of action for the student. Do you:
- Tell the student to redo the equation and be more careful this time?
- Point out where the student made a mistake and then tell them to redo the equation?
- Point out where the student made the mistake, sit down with them, and work through it together?
- Pair the student with somebody else and have them work through it together?
- etc etc etc etc?
None of that is content knowledge. Content knowledge begins and ends at knowing how to do the math yourself. Everything else is the bridge. An ineffective teacher is going to default to #1 most of the time, and is never going to progress past #2.
Short term? No. The other part I remember from that day is that the music teacher, in the room adjoining the gym, was having a meltdown, banging on the piano keys as loudly as she could and singing in this unhinged rage voice “THE-STU-DENTS-WILL-BE-QUIET” to the tune of Frere Jacques or some such, and since we were supposed to be totally silent it was hilarious and we were giggling and the PE teacher was infuriated.
Long term? I mean, maybe, since the PE teacher left soon thereafter (resigned or fired I don’t know) and was replaced by a lovely new teacher who was funny and compassionate and told jokes and made up good games and in general work with our childhood tendencies rather than fighting them. If his unsuccessful military discipline strategy got him fired and replaced by a teacher who knew how to manage a classroom of children, maybe it worked?
Your posts indicate that you are a skilled and dedicated educator.
Is it your job to provide instruction or to motivate the student?
And in thinking about what I said earlier, I realize I’m pretty biased toward the elementary end of things, where the content knowledge is relatively easy for an intelligent adult to acquire. Even if you’ve forgotten how to do long division (admit it, it’s been awhile), you can sit down with a decent teacher and re-learn how to do it in twenty minutes. There’s some science that I’ve come to these boards to brush up on, e.g., magnetism and forces, but that’s because I want to be a stickler; I could give a broadly-correct lesson without much research. When I’m teaching social studies, I may need to look up whether the jails are part of the executive or judicial branch, but I can look that up pretty quickly. So when I prioritize pedagogy over content knowledge, it’s because I can acquire my content knowledge fairly easily.
I recognize that that’s going to be different in the upper grades. I also recognize that as my daughter rises through the grades, I’m hearing more stories about teachers who presumably have good content knowledge but whose pedagogy is lacking.
Yes?
My job is multifaceted. I have succeeded at my job if my students leave my classroom knowing more stuff, knowing how to do more stuff, knowing how to learn more stuff, and enthusiastic about learning new stuff and using the stuff they learn.
I’m not a faucet that succeeds if there’s enough knowledge-flow out of me, no matter whether the students catch the knowledge or it spills down the drain. I’m not a theme park that succeeds if the students have fun, no matter whether they learn anything. My success is predicated on student learning and affect.
It’s sort of both, I guess? But you can’t do it at all without the content knowledge.
Then isn’t it reasonable for you to expect orderly and respectful classes?
It seems that school administration should be responsible for student behavior.