Teachers and respect

[nancylebov]

NPR had a segment about teachers are wonderful, let's say nice things about and to teachers while Making Light is having Dysfunctional Family Day, and the result was a bit of an emotional collision.

The thing is, one of the things which amplifies damage from dysfunctional families is a cultural assumption that all families are wonderful. Some families are wonderful, a lot of families are pretty good. Some families do damage, and some are horrific.

I didn't have any astonishingly awful teachers, nor any who were so good they changed my life. I don't think school was very good for me-- a lot of what I learned there was how to kill time, and the harassment from other students and the fact that the adults didn't seem to care about it is something I'm still dealing with.

I'm also relatively self-taught-- I taught myself to read, and (rather later) how to do calligraphy. Just about all the math I know, I learned in school. I'm not sure how much about writing I learned in school-- it seems to me I pretty much learned by reading and writing.

It's possible that I overestimate other people's ability to teach themselves, but it's also plausible that a lot of people's ability to learn (whether on own or with help) is damaged by conventional schooling. If nothing else, people seem apt to leave school with a background message that if they couldn't learn something in school, they can't learn it at all.

In any case, there are teachers who are skillful and dedicated and occasionally inspiring. There are teachers who are quietly competent. There are teachers who are vaguely ok[1] and convey a reasonable amount of their subject matter. There are teachers who are just serving time. There are teachers who are abusive, and there are teachers who are so abusive that the cause students to give up on specific subjects or on learning in general. And it's plausible that there are teachers who are hitting different parts of the range for different students, perhaps even excellent for some students and long-term disastrous for others.

Good teachers need some respect to even get started, though evoking respect is part of being a good teacher. Still, it's better if they don't have to start with students who don't respect teachers.

So, any thoughts about what a realistic attitude about teachers might look like?

[1] I realize there are people who find 'ok' profoundly annoying because it looks like a word to them but it isn't a word. However, I find 'OK' profoundly annoying because it gives EMPHASIS to something that I want to be a neutral part of the sentence. For some reason, 'okay' just doesn't look right to me, even though my spell checker likes it. I'm not willing to give up the word or whatever it is entirely.

Comments

[eftychia]

"I didn't have any astonishingly awful teachers, nor any who were so good they changed my life."

I thought I had an awful teacher. After accumulating several years of hindsight, I came to realize that she really would have been a very good teacher in a different school. She wasn't a great fit for that school, we (students) never really gave her a chance to adapt, but the main reason she seemed awful was that we didn't realize how extraordinary every other teacher in our school was -- our "normal" that we compared her to was a really high bar.

"It's possible that I overestimate other people's ability to teach themselves, but it's also plausible that a lot of people's ability to learn (whether on own or with help) is damaged by conventional schooling."

Yes to both of those, I think. Ability to self-teach varies an awful lot. At the same time, whether it's an innate love of learning getting accidentally beaten out of students, or a love of learning it's the teachers' responsibility to instill that isn't being formed, it seems as though many students are losing out on that score ... Or maybe it's naturally just as variable as the ability to be an autodidact? Hmm. Need to think about that more.

"So, any thoughts about what a realistic attitude about teachers might look like?"

Nothing useful yet, but I'll be pondering it.

[brewsternorth]

And it's plausible that there are teachers who are hitting different parts of the range for different students, perhaps even excellent for some students and long-term disastrous for others.

I do wonder if I would have found maths easier if I'd been taught it differently? Some of my class responded very well to it; I didn't. I still have to resort to a calculator.

[twistedchick]

From what I've been seeing and hearing the past few years, what is asked of teachers now is a lot different from what was asked of them when we were in school. Because of NCLB, they are teaching to the test much more, not teaching in order to have children learn to think for themselves -- the 'right' answer is what's wanted. I realize this varies a lot, as do all statements made on assumptions, but I do think there is a vast difference among teachers working in private vs. public schools, dealing with different state/commonwealth education departments and requirements. Some are able to teach, to lead people of various ages into inquiry and learning and figuring out how to learn for themselves; some are stuck teaching by rote; some are more likely to be required to be keeping the peace in their school than to be able to actually teach much.

I think the ability to teach yourself starts with having other people around you who have done it, and with having access to books to do it with. I had both. I also had some appallingly poor teachers, as well as a very few brilliant ones -- a generous math teacher who stayed after school with me for two months to work on trigonometry, which drove me to tears and insanity when I tried to make it work by myself, and my 12th grade English teacher, who looked out at the crowd of us and said, "You're all good students. I think you'd be bored stiff if we did what the state requires on its schedule. Would you like to get through all of that early so we can do interesting things?" And we did -- we completed Senior English (including readiness to take the English Regents exam that is required to get out of high school) by February, and had the rest of the year to write plays and poetry, make movies, and do whatever we wanted within the realm of the subject.

[zenlizard]

Sturgeon's law.

And, given that words are only stand-ins for some abstract concept, "ok" is a perfectly resonable word.

Dolores Umbridge

[siderea]

I'm glad you brought this up. Something very frustrating to me about discussion on this topic is the conflation of being a good teacher with teaching well.

The issue of whether or not a teacher does a good job imparting their subject matter to their students -- that is, how well they teach -- is not the issue. It's analogous to whether or not a parent does a good job "raising" their kids.

Some teachers are abusive. I have a patient, right now, who was taken from his home as a child (ironically because he was being abused) and sent to a religiously-run orphanage, where the staff, including school teachers, used "physical" discipline: beat the children when the children displeased them. Additionally, one of teachers was raping students.

And in the same way as parental child abuse works, those extremes mark the far end (one hopes) of a spectrum. There are teachers who mock, humiliate, harass, manipulate, and disparage students of theirs. There are teachers who decide students aren't worthy of their attention or are a fortiori less capable because of those students' race, gender, ethnicity, socioeconomic class, parentage, siblings, track, etc. There are teachers who withhold or thwart resources and opportunities as power plays.

Being a good teacher is more than teaching well. It also entails keeping the trust given one, in the power over one's students one assumes stepping into the role of teacher.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

I think the entire concept of respect has so eroded that it's difficult for me to single out "shoulds" in regard to teachers. Our attitudes toward authority have eroded to the extent that (it seems to me) that people are resorting more and more to violence, either the obvious or mental violence to enforce their authority.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

You might be interested in The Leaderless Revolution for an optimistic look at the possibilities of bottom-up structure.

As for resorting to violence-- it's not that long ago that teachers were permitted to use corporal punishment on students.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Oh yes. I am NOT arguing from the "these kids these days" standpoint, but from the fact that the democratization of authority, in effect, means that, for example, white men can't stride to the front of the room and take the best seats anymore, everyone else deferring. It's a widespread dynamic.

I will look at that. (My own view, when I was a teacher, was to try to teach the kids to respect everyone, included everyone, but you know how that goes!)

[schemingreader.livejournal.com]

Teachers can have the good kind of authority--the kind that comes from knowing something! That's a type of authority that we should always respect. The other kind, the authority that derives from position, I can't respect.

When I don't know the things my son wants to know, I seek out other teachers for him, both in the context of public school and in more informal ways. There are all kinds of things about which teachers can bring knowledge. Even just knowing how to behave in the classroom so that there is order and peace between the students is something that deserves respect. I'm always on the hunt for people to help my mathy kid learn more math--but so is he!

There's always a tricky balance that a student has to achieve between self-respect and the kind of attentive good manners we associate with respect for authority.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

I spell it "okay." Putting an expression all in upper case signals to me that you read it out letter by letter: "oh, kay." Putting it in lower case signals that you read it as a word: "ock." But I read the word "okay" the same as "OK."

[richardthinks.livejournal.com]

I write OK because I actually do quietly think "Old Kinderhook" (or -hoek) to myself.

I was going to post something on autodidacticism and claims to universal authority a while back. I met a man whose claim to it was that he had been a Jeopardy finalist 3 times and had won twice. You could not tell him anything. At all.

One thing my own education failed on was providing any social cues on how to deal with it - knowing what you know and don't know, understanding how to address anyone who hadn't gone through the same mill you did. Politics, in short: it was profoundly apolitical, in any sense that was legible outside the school. And that was a gap.

But I did have brilliant English and History teachers and mediocre sciences and abysmal physical ed., and the school as a whole taught me how to survive in violent systems (without myself becoming violent).

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

I am considerably self-taught, as well. I had teachers who were wonder, adequate, mediocre, and awful, and every gradation in between. One--my English prof at Santa Ana College--contributed greatly to my ability to think rationally and analyze. A couple of others were supportive when my family situation was not. None did me any lasting damage, but one of my cousins was so mistreated (emotionally) by a particular sister (Catholic) in grade school that she 50 years later she cannot let go of the bad feelings against the sister, which my cousin feels to be a moral failing.

[calimac.livejournal.com]

I too was mostly self-taught, though some teachers were encouraging and some didn't have it. The teacher who most profoundly affected me was the one who read us The Hobbit, though she was not otherwise a good teacher.

When I see "ok" in print I pronounce it "awk". (I also cannot prevent myself from pronouncing the now-common "mic" for microphone as "mick".) To get the proper pronunciation without the spellings you dislike, how about "o.k."? That's the original spelling anyway.

[cathyr19355.livejournal.com]

I knew how to read and write by the time I entered 1st grade (I didn't attend kindergarten, by the way). In fact, I don't remember a time in my life when I didn't know how to read--and my memories start at age 4.


I didn't get much from any of my teachers, many of whom cared. All of them were no better than "vaguely okay" to use Nancy's phrase (but not her spelling--despite the etmology, I think "ok" looks too weird.)