Pa. teacher strikes nerve with ‘lazy whiners’ blog (AP via Bloomberg BusinessWeek)

I haven’t been paying much attention to news and politics lately, in part because I’m so busy with writing projects right now, and in part because I’m just getting so frustrated with it all.  For a while I seemed to have much more patience with those who disagreed with me, no matter how illogical or inhumane I considered their views, but over the past year it’s gotten a lot harder to do that.  Too often I’ll read something some politician said and I will get so angry that I just have to walk away, find a healthier way to channel that energy before the negativity gets to me.  This is one story I can’t walk away from.

I’ve written before that my teaching style derives from “critical pedagogy,” a philosophy that centralizes student experience and power and blurs the traditional teacher-student hierarchy and power dynamic.  Not only does critical pedagogy help me create classrooms that are more dynamic and active, but also gets students more involved in their own schooling process.  Too often students are expected to remain passive agents in the educational process, even when they get to college and are paying (sometimes extravagant amounts of) money to go there.  They hand their money over in the hopes of becoming more educated, but then nearly all the decisions of their educational experience are put in the hands of others because, in the eyes of the administration and faculty, they aren’t smart enough to make those decisions.

This isn’t to say that I don’t have sympathy for the teacher in this case, because I do.  Yes, there are those students who simply refuse to engage themselves in the classroom, who think that showing up and sitting in class is all that should be expected of them.  However, to pin that label on all students is the kind of stereotyping we were taught not to do all the way back in grade school.  It’s an easy out to say that “these young people today” just don’t “respect their elders” or whatever piffle these teachers may throw out, and more often than not it’s simply not true.

It has also been my experience that many students get into their later years of schooling without seeming to possess adequate critical thinking skills.  If you follow the nexus of politics and education, though, then it’s easy to see why this is: The business and political interests that have seized hold of so much of the educational system — often people with absolutely no training in the educational process, how students of different age levels learn best — don’t want students to think.  When students start to think for themselves, they quickly discover all the nonsense that’s in the world around them, usually starting at the place where they’re learning these things: The school.  People who can’t think for themselves are much easier to manipulate through commercials and baseless rhetoric, so many students get all the way through high school these days without learning to think.  They’re merely expected to memorize a given body of knowledge — again, picked by people who have no training in education, people who are more interested in breeding future consumers of their products than active, engaged citizens — and regurgitate the answers onto Scantron sheet after Scantron sheet.  (Paying someone to read essays and judge their rhetorical merit costs a lot more than running a piece of paper through a machine, too, so it saves these people money they use to give themselves huge raises for “improving” the educational system.)

I certainly have moments in the classroom where I discover my students don’t know something that I feel they should have learned earlier.  There are different ways of handling this, though.  I use it as an opportunity to teach them, add to their knowledge, and hopefully tie it in to material we’ve already covered in the class.  (The human brain is programmed to learn best by connecting new nuggets of knowledge to things it already knows, not rote memorization.  See Jonah Lehrer’s How We Decide for the science behind this.)  For too many teachers, though, they use these incidents as an excuse to treat their students even more poorly, label them a bunch of idiots and not even try to teach them this important information because, in the teachers’ minds, trying to teach their students has already been proven to be hopeless.  They assume that the students were already exposed to the information earlier and simply decided not to learn it, when quite often they weren’t exposed to it because businesses and politicians are warping our educational system so horribly.

Similarly, there are moments when I’m teaching when I realize I’m just not reaching one student, or several students, or sometimes even the whole class.  Whether it’s a student who starts texting during class, or a room full of “What are you talking about” faces, when I’m confronted with this, my first response is, “Okay, what can I do to better engage these students?”  Sometimes I just need to tie a concept into something the students understand better — popular music, sports, what have you — and sometimes I need to go over things again.  Again, though, too many teachers assume that their teaching is perfect, that if the students aren’t getting something or aren’t engaged in the class then there’s obviously something wrong with those students.

These teachers turn their classrooms into mini-dictatorships, a place where their rule is absolute and they are completely infallible.  They think that because they’ve lived for so long, or they’ve got however many degrees they have, this makes them inherently better than their students, that they’re entitled to do whatever they want with their classrooms, teach what they want and how they want, and treat their students like garbage.  It would be like going to an Italian restaurant, ordering a pizza, then having your waiter bring out a plate of spaghetti that he spits on in front of you, and have him tell you this is what you need and how dare you question his judgment, and by the way that’s twelve bucks and you’d better leave him a good tip.

These teachers — and there are far, far too many of them out there — are the real disengaged, disruptive, lazy whiners in our educational system.  These are the teachers who teach straight out of the instructors’ manual, never bothering to customize the material (or methods) to the needs of their students.  These are the teachers who respond to every question a student has about a concept with, “It’s in the book.”  These are the teachers who spend entire classes reading word-for-word the same reading assignment they gave their students the class before, as if repeating everything is supposed to help students learn better and coming up with new material for class is asking far too much of them.  These are the teachers who expect their students to spend tens of hours memorizing names and dates and formulas and all sorts of things that will have next to no value to them outside of the class, then don’t want to spend any more time to evaluate their students’ hard efforts than running a bunch of Scantron sheets through a machine.  After all, their time is obviously much more important than their students’.

The damage that these teachers do is profound, and we are already suffering greatly for it.  It would be bad enough if a student in one of these classes simply didn’t learn a given body of material as he or she would with a competent teacher.  Too often these teachers discourage students from the educational process so much that these students simply leave the educational system entirely, either because they’ve been made to feel like there’s something wrong with them or because they’re just sick and tired of putting up with these teachers.  If it’s the latter, I for one can’t blame them a bit.  On a personal level, that means fewer students still in the system for me to teach, fewer opportunities I have for work.  On a larger scale, our society becomes less and less intelligent because students aren’t learning from these teachers, or just stop learning altogether, coming to believe that ignorance truly is bliss.

Not all teachers are like this, of course, just like not all students are “lazy whiners.”  In both groups there are those who do their best every day, and those who try to slide by doing the bare minimum of work, no respect for anyone around them.  It is high time that we dismiss the notion that teachers are these perfect paragons of virtue, though, and point out when teachers are disrespectful to their students, when they won’t even try to develop their own classroom materials or lectures, when they fail as teachers but they put the blame on their students because they think that their positions as teachers give them the power to do that.  These teachers need to get out of the educational system now, before they do any more damage.