Education

A few things before I get into the Rant Proper. First off, in the not too distant future I will be taking a trip to Japan, so you can look forward to an obligatory rant about that in, let's say two months. I also threw up a couple more of those political cartoons that went over so well earlier. Not like I was encouraged to make more or anything, I've just decided to add to that page whenever I end up having a political debate in the living room. Well, not EVERY time. I seem to have four or five of those a month for some reason. Anyway though, on with the rant.

When I was just a wee little nerd, people would ask me what I wanted to do when I grew up. At the time, it didn't occur to me that any of my interests were valid careers. While admittedly my current inability to receive payment for anything I do backs up the point, it still stands that back then I thought I was limited to a job off of the list people were showing me at the time. The most appealing thing to me off that list was teacher. Apart from the realization that one can actually make a living designing games and telling stories, the reason I never became a teacher was the very reason I wanted to be one. Becoming a teacher would require me to sit through several more years of classes.

You see, the reason I was willing to spend my life in a classroom was that I wanted future generations not to suffer as much as I did during school. I've always been told that the area where I grew up (Connecticut for what it's worth), has the best schools in the country. I seriously hope that isn't true. The best paid teachers in the country? I'm sure. The best budget for public schools? Perhaps, I know the schools I went to had enough money to do some major remodelling, inconveniencing students quite a bit as they went on. If I had the best teachers this country has to over though, we really need to get back to some sort of apprenticeship based system or something.

Some people can learn by reading a textbook. I'm one of them, odds are the bulk of my reader base can do it too, and hopefully anyone who ever becomes a teacher can. If you can learn that way, then quite frankly you don't need to go to school in the first place. Go get your hands on all the text books your district uses, read them, and take a GED. You'll save yourself years of boredom pain and humility. Schools don't exist for people like us. Schools exist for the people who need someone to sit down and explain things to them. Unfortunately, the system currently in place doesn't take this fact, hence our schools crank out jaded cynics like me, and total burnouts like those found in your local fast food establishments.

One of the biggest problems in schools is the degree to which students are judged. I don't believe that students should get grades. I know from personal experience that the grades students are given are completely meaningless. Teachers are allowed to give students whatever grades they want to, and every teacher grades differently. For example, I once had a teacher by the name of Cherryl Cassidy (more on her later), who failed me for the year despite my having the right answers on all her various tests and homework assignments. The next year, when I had to take this class over with a different teacher, I never opened the textbook, never did any of the homework, never paid attention to a word the teacher said. Every day I would walk into the classroom, pull out a sci-fi novel, and read until class was over or there was a test. My final grade? An A. If a single student in a single school can provide that extreme of an example, then there are only two conclusions one can draw. Either one of these teachers is a hideous anomaly in the system, or looking at a student's grades gives you no useful information about them whatsoever. I've discussed this matter with dozens of people from all over the country however, and this isn't an isolated case.

While the subjectivity of grades can force a student to repeat a class, keep them out of a respected college, or depict a drooling moron as a genius because someone thought they were cute, this concern is honestly of lesser importance than the education these students are actually receiving. Getting the occasional F has no effect on what kids are learning save for perpetuating the notion that you should pretend to understand the material that isn't sinking in to keep from looking stupid.

The average person judges whether someone is a "good teacher" or not based on pretty darn superficial terms. How many tests do they give? Do they seem to like me? Do I get good grades in their class? These are pretty subjective, and ultimately irrelevant. When judging whether someone is a good teacher, you should really go by how well they do their job. That job being of course, to transfer the information contained within a textbook into the minds of roughly 30 kids.

The second worst teacher I ever had was the above mentioned Ms. Cassidy, and I had the misfortune of having to deal with her as a physics teacher in addition to the above mentioned math debacle. She was the sort of teacher who would conduct her classes like this:

• Minutes 1-30: Go over the answers to the previous night's homework, periodically startling whichever student looks least attentive by barking an order at them to give the correct answer to a question.
• Minutes 31-50: Give a quiz on the previous night's homework.
• Minutes 51-60: Tell the class to read the next chapter of the book and solve 40 of the problems at the end for homework.

To be fair, the times given here are likely rather inaccurate. I seem to recall classes being 90 minutes long when I was in highschool, but this schedule had only recently been adapted, and when I graduated most teachers still hadn't gotten a handle on the pacing. In any case, the point still stands that all she really did was ensure that students were reading their textbooks. Her students would in fact be better off without a teacher, as we would have been able to do that reading in class, rather than wasting two hours after school writing out the solutions to problems in the most verbose manner possible to prove the answers weren't being pulled from the back of the book. Bottom line, she didn't actually teach anyone a darn thing.

At the other end of the spectrum, we have Jim Littlefield, my freshman history teacher. I don't recall him ever assigning any homework, which again I must stress is effectively just telling kids to go home and read their text book until they make sense of it, hence shirking their duties. More importantly, he bent over backwards to explain things to everyone. When talking about warfare in the middle ages, he would take his students on a field trip to a museum and then have them try to make their own chain mail. His main style of teaching was to just have an open discussion with the class. On occasion he'd show the class a Charleton Heston movie and point out the various historical inaccuracies therein. Every lesson sunk in for the whole class, and things were entertaining. Plus he actually enjoyed it when a student had something to teach him, like the proper pronunciation of the !kung bush tribe. For the record, the ! is a tongue-click.

There's some other examples of teachers I'm tempted to name here, but I'd be getting off topic, like the science teacher who encouraged students to read books by Larry Niven, or the worst teacher I ever had, but I'd rather not incriminate them.

Now then. What do I hope people will take from this essay? If you're an aspiring teacher, I hope you can take my lesson in how to conduct your lessons. If you're a good teacher, I hope you don't become jaded and slip into apathy. If you're involved in school administration, I hope you have the good sense to staff your classrooms with people who do more than read from a book. If you're a student, I hope you don't dismiss the notion that one of your teachers really MIGHT have it out for you.

Finally, if you are by some chance a former teacher of mine, I hope you forgive me for failing to mention you, getting your name wrong, or exaggerating your teaching methods if I did so. Oh, and could you drop me a line? I've always wanted to find out what my teachers thought of the fact I ended up pursuing a career as a writer.

Oh, and one last parting note. If for some reason you feel compelled to print this rant out and pass it around, would you mind cutting out the first paragraph and this one here? I hate the thought of subjecting people to such pointless asides when they're actually holding a piece of paper.