“Comparison shopping” doesn’t always work out either. Yes, there are damned poor teachers out there. Some cannot handle the work (I’ve had a teacher who literally threw a chair). Some are simply not doing their job, because they are more interested in stuffing their pension. But no, rejecting a research report when a creative writing project was asked for does not make a teacher bad. In that case, they are just doing their job since the government says that have to teach expectations X, Y, and Z. And while I agree that having a teacher who won’t live up to their mistakes sucks, they will make mistakes because a lot of them are hired to teach stuff that is beyond their realm of expertise. That’s particularly true in elementary grades, where teachers are expected to teach a huge range of subjects based upon incorrect or biased resources, and are given no time to fact check.

So maybe they’re doing a flawless job of teaching math, science, and history but their language skills are sub-par. Maybe another teacher is good at history and language, but their math and science sucks. Who’s the worst teacher? If you were on a grammar rampage that year, you may think that the first teacher is bad and the second is good. Yet you’d probably be learning more nonsense from the second teacher. Yeah, the best teacher will be the one proficient in all four, but that’s going to be the very rare exception.

But the one thing that kids get when they go through the colon of the school system is a metric ton of comparison shopping: they get to see How It Is Done by teachers both talented and talentness. Some of these teachers, functioning under the same hothouse pressure as you just glowingly recounted, somehow find a way to teach students in a way that isn’t insulting, misleading, factually broken and worthless. Having now reached the age of nearly 40, I can now look back at those days through the eyes of the teachers themselves, eating meals in the teacher’s lounge, maybe a couple striking up conversations on how to improve the scores and quality of learning, while others just grumbled into their sandwiches and just wanted this fucking day to end. Forget the sob story about how it’s hard to teach kids; the parametric aspects of the educational prospect are well known and hundreds of years in the documenting. Alternate systems exist and some fail and some succeed, but in the aggregate, the whole of teaching, especially at the elementary school level, is a very big person telling a lot of little people what to do, and some do so with aplomb, skill and knowledge and others absolutely suck ass.

I’m sure you feel great that you were able to defend The Honor of Teaching in a weblog entry that appears to do nothing but insult it, but rest assured, I have seen the Good and that’s what makes the bad so much more reprehensible.

They are incredibly over-extended, and that is particularly true at the elementary grades. A teacher that is great in science may suck in language arts (i.e. english). A teacher who knows everything about the visual arts may know next to nothing about mathematics. But they are expected to teach anything that they are given to teach. In high school, in my jurisdiction, that’s true up to and including grade 10 (grades 11 and 12 require specialist certifications). In elementary, it’s part of the job since teachers are expected to teach a group of children everything except French, and maybe music, and maybe physical education. So if you judge a teacher based upon stupid comments in one subject that they have no experience with, then yeah the teacher is going to look stupid.

The second thing is that teachers have these things called “curriculum expectations” and the administration generally expects them to create lesson plans that show which curricular expectations are being met by a particular lesson. As such, they usually give out assignments with a particular vision of what the children are expected to accomplish and how they are supposed to reach that goal. Yeah, it sucks. On the other hand, it is also part of our education system.

Besides, following instructions on a project is an important real life skill. Imagine working for a newspaper and your boss asked for a public interest piece on Valentines day, but you wrote a critical essay on its history. Your boss probably wouldn’t be happy because you didn’t meet his expectations. Simply put, you can’t always do what you want to do. It’s an important life lesson. Though I do agree that it sucks when a teacher/instructor expects you to parrot their own opinions. But opinions are different than form.

The third thing that you should realise is that most teachers have to deal with “classroom management” issues. These range from behavioural problems to ensuring that everyone keeps up the pace. In the process of managing the classroom, teachers often say bone-headed things. Yeah, its a pretty lousy thing to do. Unfortunately, they are human just like you are. Because of that they often say spur-of-the-moment things when they are under pressure that just aren’t right (factually, or morally).

Her response? “Maybe that’s the way you learned it. But in this class, they’re adjectives.”

Thus I learned about subjective knowledge the hard way.