Education As A Profession (1)

I never cease to be amazed at the effontery of people who will demurely defer to the perceived omniscience of doctors or lawyers or engineers or successful businessmen...yet will show little respect for the knowledge, dedication, and experience of a professional teacher. This is especially true when a teacher, student, family, and school are struggling to help a student who is floundering with a difficult or awkward academic or school related social issue. "Those who can, do; those who can't, teach" goes the old mot we all heard while growing up...the less than subtle message being that if one cannot make it in the real world (whatever that is), then they can always resort to teaching as a lesser but readily available profession for anyone to earn a living.

This patently erroneous concept of what is required of good teaching reminds me of the story of the blind men who were positioned around an elephant and, after each touched a portion of the animal that was nearest to them, were then asked to describe what an elephant is like. And of course, each had a different perspective: one touched the tail and described a rope; one touched a leg and described a large, sturdy pillar or tree; one touched the trunk and described a snake; and one touched an ear and described a large, flat animal of incredible flexibility. They were all basically right--and they were all a little wrong.

In my opinion and based upon my experience, that's the way it is whenever anyone attempts to describe the profession of teaching. Each of us has a different perspective on the matter, often depending on what portion of the profession we know and even when we knew it. Change is constant in vibrant institutions and professions, and it's fair to say that if you haven't seen the phenomenal changes taking place in the world of education and the science of learning over the last decade, you know much less of the profession of teaching than you think you do!

As the school year and this web log progress and grow over the next nine months or so, I will return to this topic again and again to add relevant points for discussion. I also plan to discuss current successful teaching strategies and practices, and to offer up experiences of life as an educator among today's teenagers, their often overly anxious parents (described by Hara Estroff Marano in "A Nation of Wimps" and Dr. Mel Levine in "Ready or Not, Here Life Comes"), and legislative bodies composed--for the most part--of lawyers and businessmen who are wont to pass laws to assauge parental angst and gain voter support without fully understanding their full impact on teaching, teachers, and student learning.