Education is not really about teaching. I suppose, on a grand scale, it never was.
Sure, there are some people who teach because they want students to learn but the more and more you get drawn into things the more and more you get sucked into the politics and straight up nonsense that plagues the profession. I’ve practically gone into hiding in an effort to shift my focus back to the teaching and away from the nonsense that is education. Its working a bit–I’m rediscovering my love for the classroom one day at a time–but that doesn’t change the fact that nonsense hovers above me like one of those giant interplanetary ships from Independence Day.
This most recent rant on the topic is triggered by a ‘discussion’ taking place at the developmental education level about changing the competencies of a developmental english class to remove language that suggests we need to help students know how to actually understand what they read. This bit of hopefulness is possibly being replaced with a line about ‘analyzing evidence for its relevance to a specific writing task’ Can you guess what I think that line sounds like? Yep, bullshit.
All the wordsmithing in the world can only serve to distract people from the task and further distract us from the gigantic turf war that is education. One school (in our district of 10) wants to remove any reading-based competencies from writing, mainly because we are trained to teach writing and the reading instructors are trained to teach reading and there should be no overlap.
But there is overlap. Simply put, there is no reading without writing and vice versa. This nonsense about analyzing evidence for relevance borrows heavily from the language of the Toulmin model, which most dev educators don’t even want to teach to students because of how overtly and uselessly complex it tends to be.
The real issue here is that this is the bitter end of a two year fight over language about what we should call what we teach. I spent over a year as part of that conversation and I promise there wasn’t more than a few days of discussion about what actually benefited student learning. These academic conversations are always about the academics. It is politics–partisan at best–writ large on a tiny stage. Frankly, I’m done with all of it.
It is high past time to start calling things how I see them and quit being so politically correct with the world. Maybe there is a little Trump in me after all…
Some Thoughts:
- Had a student remind me today that bitterness is just anger with a heap of jealously mixed in. That being said, I remain somewhat bitter about my eldest son’s football experience last year. Dang near ruined him on the sport. Sad, because he was such a fan and becoming a breakout player in season 1. Season 2 ruined him. Season 3? Still not sure he is getting back on that horse. I wish he’d had a better friend-level experience, but the way things were structured he wound up an outsider and made absolutely no friends on that team. Lost some in fact. That is the anger part and the jealousy part as well. I can’t deny being jealous of the parents and kids that did form bonds while we did not. That lack of inclusivity was a problem and it played itself out on the field as well as on the sideline. In my role as a coach now I strive to avoid that situation and I will work my ass off to get every child incorporated into the fold.