Learning And Teaching Today

I am a teacher, but I most certainly did not start my professional career that way. I wanted to go into business, you see, and I loved books, so managing a bookstore seemed like a good idea to me. It is therefore the case that I co-managed a small bookstore after acquiring my Master's Degree in English, in the hopes of perhaps staying in the book business. But the pull of learning got to me after a year or so of managing, and I went back to school to become a teacher.

That's the point, you see--I have always felt, and continue to feel, that teachers are learners first (well, at least those who are worthy of the title "teacher" are learners first), and they are always cognizant of the fact that the more one learns, the more one needs to learn. They are naturally curious about things of which they are ignorant, and anxious to replace that ignorance with knowledge. They care about "connections" in life--what connects religion to history; politics to science; literature to life itself; and so on and so forth. Thus, teaching becomes a method of sharing what they've learned with others, and learning from those with whom they share--often, but not always, students--as well.

So I went back to acquire my secondary-level teaching certification, during which time I taught part-time at the university level, and, after acquiring my new degree, I split my time between the high school and university levels here in the U.S. But wanderlust (and a lovely English girlfriend) caught my attention and thankfully would not let go, and soon I was overseas, teaching at both the junior high and high school level in Great Britain for several years...during which time I was lucky enough to convince my girlfriend to marry me.

Now I'm back, rediscovering my native country, and thinking about these things because my wife--who has waited patiently for our incredibly slow-moving bureaucratic immigration system to determine that, yes, this university-educated woman who speaks three languages fluently is indeed "safe" to allow into the United States--is about to join me in the United States. It's all coming together now....

Except that I'm not certain I wish to be a teacher any longer. What I have encountered, in the general culture and in the teaching profession, since returning to the U.S. has both astonished and angered me. I have spoken with fellow teachers often, and found an alarmingly high percentage of them (particularly those who, like me, are under the age of forty or forty-five) to be mind-bogglingly bureaucratic pez-despensers of muddled, overstuffed jargon that is utilized in the attempt to mask the fact that they are tepid, mediocre thinkers armed with obvious "rubrics" anyone could come up with given five minutes, but not with an overarching understanding of the historical development of culture and learning.

It's also the case that so very few teachers I have met of late have a sense of intellectual adventurism; they seem desperate to be forced into teaching methods that are rigid and "set" for them, as if they can't (won't) engage in the type of creativity and improvisation of which intelligent people are capable while still focusing on one or two particular areas of study. And if they're afraid to do that, it's quite simply the case that they're afraid to, well, teach. They'd rather go through pre-provided structures that are often fully devoid of any semblance of learning as an adventure. Given the crushing boredom of such a scenario, no wonder so many students under-perform....

Yet before we blame the teaching profession for all of this, it should be pointed out that, at root, this is really due to a culture that sees learning as a product and not what it really is: a lifelong process, and, at root, a habit. Seeing learning as a product alone is depressingly reductive enough, but the product (test; assessment; whatever you wish to call it) is often so limp and silly that it is surely only through a process of self-forced cognitive dissonance that those teachers who do honor the history of their profession by going against the present grain of embarrassingly discordant teaching strategies can deliver these "products" while keeping a straight face.

Yes, there are wonderful teachers out there, but there are not enough of them, mostly, I think, because there is not a big enough demand for them. In an increasingly international, shrinking world, I've noticed that a lot of American institutions of learning are becoming more taciturn and stand-offish to teachers who have international experience. Surely it should be the opposite, but we've become a taciturn nation, often stubbornly refusing to engage the world in new and exciting ways--in creative ways, which have been a hallmark of our nation since its inception--and suspicious of those from our ranks who have not just traveled but lived and worked around the globe, and come home again to discover a sort of passive-aggression directed toward our experiences. (I am most certainly not the only individual who feels this way; many other folks I've spoken to feel likewise.) This seems wrong coming from the country that champions the use of its core values--hard work and creativity--to produce both innovation and ahead-of-the-curve standards of adaptation....

There are a few other countries with similar educational problems--among them Great Britain. (The difference is that the British are angry about the situation, whereas we often seem unwilling to hold strong opinions about it.) My wife's grandfather was a high school History teacher in England, and one day some of his students stopped by his house to chat about a recent lesson he delivered on World War II. He was working in his garage at the time, and after talking to them for a few minutes he opened up a trunk and allowed the students to sift through what was inside of it, and ask him questions about the various items, to which he would give full and frank replies. You see, he was not only a scholar of History, but also of literature, and (most important for this instance) he was also fluent in German. Because of his bi-lingual nature, he had been a German interpretor during World War II, helping to spy on German transmissions in the hopes that the Allied powers could stay one step ahead of their enemies during that war, and the trunk was filled with items of remembrance from his role during that awful time.

It was his ability to combine real world experiences with a vast supply of academic knowledge that led him to being a teacher in the first place--not "rubrics," not jargon, not empty bureaucratic paper-pushing, but experience and knowledge. He retired a beloved teacher, and died in 1997. His daughter, my mother in law, also became a teacher, but she retired earlier than she would have in part because the profession had become less about learning as her father knew it (which was learning that often led to far better reading, writing, and thinking skills than do many of today's methods) and more about creating a cult of teaching and learning mediocrity masquerading as "excellence."

That is what I see often (though, it must be said, not always) in today's American system, too, and in order to combat that I would humbly suggest that schools focus on hiring the following various types of people to be teachers: those with wide-ranging global experience (particularly those who have lived and worked for considerable periods of time outside of the U.S.) and not just culturally-specific experience; people who have not necessarily always been teachers (in fact, those who have worked for lengthy periods of time in other industries would most likely make wonderful teachers with eclectic life experiences); retired people who have a long back-history of personal experience and have seen the world change in more ways than, say, folks in their thirties like me; foreign teachers, whose contributions in this global age would be incalculable; and anyone from any background who refuses to buy wholesale into many of the silly, self-important teaching strategies (oh, sorry, "pedagogies") of the present era.

For the time being, this Democrat who dislikes both Republican simplistic educational reductivism and Democratic self-important educational bureaucracy, will remain a teacher. We'll see how long that lasts. To those teachers who feel the same as I do, and who are perhaps quite depressed about the present status of formal education, I simply say this: whether you remain a classroom teacher or not, please remember that as long as you remain curious, you're always a learner, which means that in the most essential way you will always be a teacher.

*Note: Hasslington will return sometime next week; he is taking a long weekend vacation from blogging due to the arrival of his wife in the United States.