Posted by Rick Denney on September 09, 2002 at 09:57:03:
In Reply to: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Why should we have to defend teachers? posted by Kenneth Sloan on September 08, 2002 at 22:36:08:
With all due respect, I think it is possible to teach one-on-one even in a classroom. Those who teach beginning band do it all the time. They explain a few basics to the class, and then they work with individuals, more as a mentor than as a classroom teacher, leading them through the steps the same as they would if it was just the two of them. The other students look on, and learn much from doing so. My best core subject teachers used similar techniques. I'd bet they didn't learn them in school, judging from the fact that other teachers (also certified and chock-full of continuing education credits) didn't use those techniques.
I have no problem with teachers being taught teaching methods, as long as they are directed to sensible educational goals, and as long as they are not considered a replacement for the personal characteristics all teachers need that are displayed by good teachers, and as long as they are not a replacement for knowing the material. Not all technique can be taught, as anyone who taught me tuba can attest. There is still a talent issue.
I also don't think that any amount of educational technique will overcome poorly defined needs and requirements in the educational process, because those techniques will be attacked by the educational establishment.
But my big problem is the fiction that these educational methods are so complex that otherwise educated people can't understand them, and that only professional teachers can hold the keys to their application. This turns the teaching profession into an exclusionary priesthood. At the political level, I don't think it's done for individual teachers, but for those who make their (comfortable) living representing them as a group. The same is true for many other professions--physicians, for example, are notorious for it. I spent 13 years in the public sector, and during that time wrote thousands of letters to citizens, in addition to talking with them on the telephone about three hours out of every day. Had I told them traffic engineering was too complicated for them to understand, they would have had my head in a minute. No, it was my job to make sure the complex things I did were explainable and therefore accountable to non-experts. I think the same request could reasonably be made of the education establishment.
Rick "who doesn't have to have kids in school to see this up close" Denney