That’s what I get for transcribing from paper to screen on little sleep. The magazine has since been recycled.
IIRC the point was that people with PhDs in physics who for whatever reason wanted to teach high school students were avoiding public schools due to the certification requirements.
I had a number of professors in college with PhDs who could barely teach college-age kids. I would have hated to inflict them on high-school (or younger) children.
While I understand your point, people keep acting like teaching isn’t a skill/talent like any other. There is probably an argument to be made about what certifications you should have, but demonstrating some ability to do the job (which is not primarily knowing how quantum mechanics/special (or general) relativity/Newton’s Three Laws work, although it is certainly part of it) seems a reasonable ask before being hired.
Having a long relationship with Catholic schools at least, both as a student and as board member, there are a lot of teachers in Catholic schools that could only effectively teach a highly motivated and prepared student. And there are teachers who would be seriously constrained by non-discriminatory and DEI-type policies in public schools.
My cousin, a completely paranoid anti-Semitic loon, managed to hold down a teaching job in a Catholic middle school for over 20 years after becoming unemployable in the public schools because he kept ranting about Jewish conspiracies in class. He was excellent in Math, and could teach very, very well if you were motivated and talented. Full speed ahead and the devil take the hindmost doesn’t fly in the public school system, though.
This is a critical factor. It’s not so difficult to teach the motivated and prepared student. Teachers in public schools are also supposed to teach the dumb students, the unmotivated students, the unhealthy students, the unprepared students. That’s really hard, and requires much more than simply knowing the material.
Teaching is a talent like any other - but a certification test might not be the best or only way to determine who has the talent or skills. I had a number of teachers in public high school who took the courses and passed the tests to get licensed/certified but had no skill or interest in teaching* even motivated students while my kids had teachers in Catholic schools who probably weren’t licensed/certified but were gifted teachers.
* One in particular who I had in the second quarter of freshman year caused me to be put on a slower math track which in turn caused me to have to try to learn trigonometry as “independent study” ( didn’t work). The C or D I got in that class was the only math grade I had below an A in four years.
This is really important. I mentioned to my (former) teacher cousin that it might not be difficult for me to help out as a teacher, since I had so many years as a flight instructor. Her reply? “Oh you sweet summer child…” She explained to me the difference between a happy, enthusiastic class of 1, and a wildly diverse class of 30 – most of whom didn’t want to be there. I realize there’s a good reason for certification and training in instructing methods. I figure I should just drive a school bus if I want to help out. At least I have experience there.
So is the problem that we need a lot more discipline in the schools?
When I went to school it was really easy to get yourself suspended. Expulsion took more work, but something like threatening a teacher would do it. Lots of kids failed classes, and every year we would have some small number of kids held back to repeat a grade again. The fear of failing a grade was always there for most kids, and if you got expelled it was really hard on your parents so you were likely to have them punish you as well.
We still had rowdy kids and some who had to get kicked out of class from time to time, but nothing like the behavioural problems we see today.
To be honest, that would help a lot. While my wife was a teacher, practically every year a new rule came down from administration banning another form of discipline. The fundamental problem is that parents these days don’t want their child disciplined, not really. So they complain to the principal when it happens and the principal tells the teacher to stop.
Why aren’t school districts using technology to help solve the teacher shortage? Most districts seemed to use at least some online learning during Covid which should have given them a chance to identify effective applications/programs, help teachers learn to use those programs, introduce students to computer learning, and iron out other problems. If every student sits in front of a computer screen learning with a quality program, teachers could manage larger classes and it would actually help many students learn (an application can offer individualized elements a teacher can’t do with 30 students). But I don’t see any mentions of school systems even considering this.
Your help there would definitely be appreciated, too. I’ve spent the last several years looking for teaching jobs, a process that often involves going to school district websites for their job listings. I’ve never yet seen a district that didn’t have openings for bus drivers, starting immediately.
The problem is that neither suspensions nor expulsion are discipline. The kinds of students who get suspended or expelled are, by and large, the students who consider it a reward, not a punishment. Plus, if you do expel a student, what then? Ultimately, you need to just put them in some other school, and how does that school deal with them?
Meanwhile, do you have an actual cite for the claim that student behavioral problems are worse now than in the “good old days”?
That’s a hard thing to quantify, but recent changes due to the school lockdowns seems to have made it worse:
This NEA teacher survey calls out student absenses and student behaviour in class as serioys issues:
76% of teachers said classroom behaviour was a serious issue, with 44% of teachers saying it was ‘very serious’.
How it compares to th3 70’s is a difficult thing to search for, and will be very dependent on where the schools are.
This is simply not true, or it’s true if you are talking about an isolated experiment of limited duration encompassing only part of a school day and only part of a year’s learning. Programs that will actually reduce the workloads on teachers to the extent that they make a difference for teach shortages simply do not exist, and nothing currently even comes close. Learning applications require integration into the larger syllabus, integration into the larger grading system, they have a learning curve all of their own, teacher’s need to be intimately familiar with them because they’ll be tech support for the students, and once the novelty wears off, which for some students is pretty much instantly if they’re not interested in the topic, you still need teachers to push students to make an effort.
Anyone who thinks discipline problems didn’t happen “back then” should watch this excellent documentary about one-room schoolhouses, which focuses on Wisconsin schools. As of the film’s release in 2010, there were still about 200 such public schools in the U.S., mostly in very remote areas.
Spoilered due to trigger warning: One of the interviewees described “an older boy who was a bully” who molested smaller children, presumably including him, at knifepoint, adding, “We didn’t have the courage to tell our parents, or the vocabulary to do so.”
Long-term suspension and expulsion, IMNSHO, actually helps students who WANT to be there, because they aren’t competing for the teachers’ time, or safety, with people who do not want to be there, or have issues incompatible with mainstream education.
Again, spoilered: My old city had an alternative “school” that was really nothing more than a warehouse for kids to “continue their education” until they were 16 years old; it did not have lesson plans or take attendance, and when it moved from a downtown office building to a shuttered elementary school in a quiet middle-class neighborhood, the neighbors successfully petitioned to have it moved back, mainly because of all the drug dealers who openly hung around all day. I knew several people who worked there, and had their own reasons for choosing to do so, and the one thing that never changed was that they believed in mandatory sterilization for all students on admission; girls who arrived pregnant who had their babies should have them taken away and adopted out immediately after birth. I told this to a woman I know who teaches at a regular HS in the city where I live now, and she told me that the alternative schools here have stricter rules than the mainstream schools, so kids won’t WANT to go there.
But such programs, and their integration into the larger system, could be developed, if they don’t already exist. It would certainly work better for some subjects than others – it’s ideal for math, for example, less so for music. Tech support could be provided by aides rather than teachers (less expensive, different skill set). The programs would relieve teachers of time-consuming admin tasks like attendance & grading. I actually think a program might do better at keeping students interested – it’s interactive, can offer different approaches to a problem giving the student trouble, allow the student to review a previous lesson they’ve forgotten, work at their own pace, and other individual elements that no live teacher can offer a classroom of 30 kids. The point isn’t to replace teachers entirely, but to relieve some of their workload. Yes, some students will need teacher effort, but that’s true now & this would give the teachers the opportunity to focus on those students, most of whom fall through the cracks now. Less teachers means bigger classes for those who remain. Technology could make that workable for both teacher & student.
Software for school is a massive industry. So far this industry has produced tons of programs, and none of them come close to what you suggest, even in math. To me this is evidence that creating such programs is really hard. Why do you think it is?
My experience as someone with experience actually using software in a teaching environment is that the students that are interested are mostly the ones that already where, and that the ones that stop being interested first are the ones that weren’t much into the subject in the first place. This means that as a school/teacher you are making a big investment in money, time to understand the system, time to implement it in the classroom, for, at best, a marginal gain, and you now either have to teach in two very different manners, to drag along the stragglers, or you are limited entirely to what you can do within this program.
I don’t disagree with you that technology could eventually reach the point where it reduces workload on teachers. But I don’t think we’re anywhere near to have such technology and getting to it might require going big and not try to integrate it with the current paradigm.
Contrary to your earlier assertion, Covid reinforced our understanding of just how poorly students perform in virtual settings and just how much it increases the workload on teachers.
Remote education and all of its related fields (learning management systems, instructional delivery systems, monitoring and grading systems) are Big Money right now, and while the software is getting better it’s still garbage compared to learning from a human being. Many districts do have fully virtual settings, but they’re usually used as last resorts (remediation, credit recovery, etc) because they’re just not as good.
There are a hundred things - little and big - teachers do that computers can’t, and there are a hundred ways - little and big - our brains are wired to make it easier to learn from a flesh and blood human with a physical presence.
Your viewpoint is one widely shared among folks without classroom teaching experience. They tend to view teachers as mechanics with a set of binary problems to solve. Tighten this bolt, exchange this part, charge this battery. But they have to be psychologists, therapists, social workers, social engineers, field medics, and a dozen other things. Computers just can’t provide that kind of holistic support. Maybe one day, but right now we’re nowhere close.
Teaching is about much more than pouring facts into an empty brain. Depending on the grade level and population, it’s probably somewhere between #3 and #5 on the list of most important considerations for most teachers. As Einstein is often paraphrased, “education is not the learning of facts, but the training of the mind to think.”
I’ve never used them, but whenever I watch youtube videos from relatively respectable science communicators, I always hear them sponsoring Brilliant or Skillshare or other online learning tools of that sort. Do these actually have any value? Is it something that traditional schools could learn from and adopt, or are they just snake oil and best avoided?
I don’t know that a sudden and forced transition is a good indicator of how things shoulda coulda went if they were better thought out and gradual.
Personally, I think that there is a lot of “busy work” of a teacher that can be offloaded to a computer. There is also the fact that asking a teacher to repeat themselves is rude, but hitting “10 seconds back” on a video is not.
And can they be to 30 students at a time? One of the benefits, IMO, of computerized learning is to offload a fair amount of the lecture and repetition, leaving teachers able to have smaller classes for hands on work. I would think that one would learn better in a group of 6-8 than a class of 30.
I don’t think that we are anywhere close to computers replacing teachers, but acting as a force multiplication tool, to increase the effectiveness of teachers, should be our more immediate goal.
As someone who taught ten years and then just had to get out, I can say there are a plethora of reasons as to why this is happening.
The job is a pressure cooker. Government only knows one way to address any issue, and that is to create more and more rules and requirements, and they all drop on the teachers’ heads. Standardized testing is their god, and all teachers pretty much do is try to keep their jobs by getting the necessary results.
The paperwork, all digital actually, is prodigious and never ending. Administration is constantly making more more demands and giving less and less support because they’re trying to keep their jobs, too. Firing teachers for them is like firing coaches for team owners. It is something done to appease the “fans” but often doesn’t address the true problems that are really on their doorsteps.
Finally, if they can survive all of that, teachers walk into a classroom that has far too many disrespectful children who don’t want to learn and who constantly create disturbances and distractions in an effort to be the center of attention. Again, if administration would do more to put teeth in the rules, this could be alleviated at least to some extent, but they won’t. Instead, they blame the teachers for bad “classroom management” when, in fact, they don’t have any real power to do anything in terms of enforcing discipline. Usually, the parents of those children are completely unsupportive and blame the teachers instead of placing the responsibility on their wayward progeny.
A quick check with Google shows that 44% of teachers quit within the first 5 years. That’s almost half so, coupled with retirements, the replacement demand is very high.
I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure those are being pitched to people (mostly adults) who want to learn something.
I’ve never used them, but I listen to a lot of Great Courses. I assume the concept is the same: a skilled communicator presenting information to a willing vessel. Presumably there are no statutory responsibilities to the students, no assessments, no mandatory timeline, no ability to get clarification during a lecture, no homework, and no stakes. So there’s not much overlap, no.
Technology can be used to effectively support instruction, but not in the sense of requiring fewer teachers per student. The only way to solve the teacher shortage is to make the job appealing and survivable. It is currently neither of those things.