What Happens When Authentic People Wish To Interview For Increasingly Bureaucratic Teaching Positions?

...OR, CAN YOU EVER REALLY GO HOME AGAIN?...

Though I've worked in some interesting, short-term contract teaching jobs since I returned to the U.S. last autumn, since this past spring I've turned my attention towards seeking long-term teaching employment. As an English teacher who is certified to teach at both the junior high and high school level in my home state of Minnesota, and as someone who has recently taught at various educational levels in the United Kingdom, I thought the job market would be seeking someone like me. Wow, was I ever wrong. After innumerable job interviews (at both public and private local high schools and junior high schools), I have been left without a single job offer, and will once again work short-term contract jobs and/or substitute teach until another round of prospective jobs opens up.

Truth be told, I'm probably being undersold by youngsters just now leaving their various universities, which I suppose is just a part of life these days. But I sense that, despite my best efforts at showing folks that I am a down-to-earth person, something else is at work, and that something is far more insidious and viral than simply being undersold by cheaper labor: the teaching profession is refusing to evolve from a provincial pursuit to a worldly one. I say this because my unsuccessful attempts to find full-time teaching employment seem to mirror those of other individuals I know whose lives have not been lived in one geographical area and whose experiences have been varied both culturally and intellectually.

Prospective employers--that is, the heads or head employment departments of local junior high schools and high schools--seem not only myopically dismissive of foreign teaching and living experiences, which is tragically counter-productive given this increasingly international world, but downright frightened of anyone whose life and career have been informed by more than stale, bureaucratic "rubrics" that have little or no basis in Socratic learning methods, and they seem even more frightened of self-actualized people who interview for teaching positions, because such people are not as impressionable and "moldable" as are newly qualified teachers. Self-actualized people, quite frankly, are what teachers used to be, and there is nothing that frightens entrenched educational bureaucrats as much as inventive, discerning, nuanced people who understand educational history. (Don't cheer, conservatives--George W. Bush's "No Child Left Behind" nonsense, though not initially responsible for this bureaucratic mess, has contributed to it greatly.)

It's extraordinary to me how little prospective employers care about one's foreign teaching and living experiences. (Some employers get bored with such discussion, while others are immediately suspicious of someone who has lived and worked abroad, as if the prospective employee has some weird form of "secret knowledge" he or she will use to take their jobs away and take over the school.) Rational people would think that in this increasingly international world, the best background a teacher could possibly have would be one in which he or she has lived and taught abroad (preferably for several years, so that an adoptive culture can be fully absorbed; if an adoptive culture is not fully absorbed, you're basically just a glorified tourist).

Several years of living and working abroad makes sense from the standpoint of being able to view things through different lenses in order to make proper comparisons and avoid being a one-trick-pony, culturally speaking. Such a mindset in a teacher would allow her or his students to have a jump-start on others who are taught to view things through one cultural lens or in one context only, particularly given the shifting nature of today's marketplace and the fact that workers are increasingly needing to be multi-faceted in order to evolve with the times. (And, no, local "diversity" lessons do not fully deliver to students other cultural lenses, because, though certain minority cultural strains are indeed present in American society, the majority culture is also always present and is often overriding in nature. Only foreign teaching immersion can properly equip a teacher to fully give students a taste of what the wider world is like.)

Yet American educational bureaucracy has created a scenario in which provincial teachers--those who start and stay in one district for the duration of their careers--are rewarded financially, while nomadic teachers--those who shift geographical locations and cultures in order to get a necessarily new perspective on things--are punished with lower pay and the suspicion of their provincial peers. Regardless of how hard nomadic teaching candidates work to show their prospective employers (and many of their prospective colleagues) how "normal" and "down-to-earth" they are, suspicions will likely remain as long as the system works to further provincialize people who, given the fact that they are educators, need to be the exact opposite.

This scenario has now become viral in that provincial attitudes are presently teaming up with new-wave bureaucratic attitudes, and the anti-innovative results are spreading rapidly. It seems to me that the first order of business is for national and state legislators (both Democrats and Republicans) to admit that they have very little idea how education works, and then admit that they will therefore stop trying to over-legislate what they often term "excellence." This so-called "excellence" inevitably ends up being little more than less-than-satisfactory bean counting in which exams are diluted in order to show what legislators and bureaucrats rather pathetically term "increased levels of learning," and the profession of teaching is reduced to delivering a few disjointed facts in flabby, corporate, rather self-aggrandizing (and almost always embarrassing) manners.

Removing excess legislative influence from the educational system, however, is not likely to happen anytime soon. So it's up to the rest of us to keep trying to acquire teaching jobs (otherwise, pre-packaged, rather vapid pseudo-"teachers" will step into jobs authentic teachers might otherwise acquire) and to remember what a teacher is supposed to be--intellectually curious, extemporaneous in delivery, and suspicious of just about anything that smacks of mediocre, creatively-deprived bureaucracy in the classroom. In other words, teachers are supposed to be what my favorite teachers always were: individuals for whom learning widely was a way of life, and for whom narrow and shallow directives from the powers that be were something to be mocked and dismissed. After all, you rarely need rubrics and directives when learning is already part of who you are.

Only when we reclaim and demand the more classical, adroit Socratic definition of a teacher and marry it to individuals who pursue modern, wide-ranging, geographically- and culturally-varied personal experiences will we be able to truly suggest that our students are being prepared properly for an ever-changing world.