When I taught high school, I was allowed into a Friday afternoon club called “the short-timers,” so named because these men (sic) who frequented local taverns together at the end of the work week, were within 2-3 years of retirement. I was an honorary member, since I had no more than eight years of teaching behind me, while these gentlemen had taught at least 25 years apiece. They were slightly jaded, but every one of them cared about the students they taught, even in a brusque way.
I continued my high school teaching career for a total of twenty years, during which I earned my Ph.D. and went on to teach teachers at a public university. Twenty years later I am still learning to teach by teaching teachers. It is a profession that rewards a lifetime of practice and study.
I am disturbed by the article in the New York Times (Tuesday, August 28) “At Charter Schools, Short Careers by Choice” by Mokoto Rich, because it implies that the new trajectory for a teaching career is 5-7 years. From my experience that upper limit represents the flowering of a teacher’s skills, so such “short-timers” would be leaving the profession at the height of their development. To say, as KIPP director Wendy Kopp claims, that “The strongest schools develop their teachers tremendously so they become great in the classroom even in their first and second years ” is to severely limit what it means to teach. In 1-2 years you can learn about as much as an accomplished substitute teacher: how to engage students’ attention, how to manage discipline, how to execute a lesson plan, how to assess a unit, and how to talk to parents. This is not to underestimate what an experienced substitute teacher can become, should he or she remain for the long haul, but KIPP and Teach for America are only interested in the short haul.
If you think teaching amounts to mastering a few routines, you do not understand the depth of teaching. Only after the first two years of teaching do you really learn how one student differs from another in needs and capability, how to bring disengaged students back into the class, how to deal with chronically absent students, how to uncover hidden strengths, how to nurture independence and group inter-dependence, how and what to re-teach, how to challenge your own stereotypes and so on. Those who claim to have mastered these skills in two years are deluding themselves about the complexity teaching.
Instilling the “habits of mind” is another late-developing skill. Although teacher educators emphasize the so-called “critical” and “meta-cognitive” strategies in their pre-service classes, there is only so much about these habits you can internalize without watching students trying to operate without them. To truly get the meaning of “habits of mind” you need to see what happens in their absence, what is happening in many, if not most, high school classrooms today. This is usually a late-developing awareness for both teachers and students. To be honest, my own understanding of the significance of these habits came during my eighth and ninth years of teaching English. I knew the importance of “habits of mind,” but I didn’t recognize how much they enabled or disabled students until then. I was admittedly a late-bloomer in teaching.
When teaching is compacted into the mechanics of selling a prefabricated curriculum and grading the products, it may be mastered in 1-2 years, but this is not what we once considered a “master teacher.” Masterful teaching is about building trust and grading on successive approximation. It is about dealing with resistance of all kinds, in students, in colleagues, in administrators. It is about negotiating with principals and parents about what may be taught in your class and who may be given an alternative book to read or assigned a writing consultant to increase feedback. It is about relationships, fragile and durable. You can teach for thirty years and not understand it all.
We are making a virtue of necessity by claiming that teaching is a technical profession and teachers are easily replaced. Today teachers are burning out early from the unwieldy size of classes, from the pressure to raise test scores, from micro-managed, scripted and lockstep curricula, from the reduction of services to students with learning, language and behavioral constraints. Because teachers are treated like replaceable parts, they feel utterly dispensable. They lose hope during the second and third years, just when they should be developing more confidence, so they pass through a revolving door among disillusioned novices.
Will we ever again see “short-timers” like my erstwhile colleagues, who made a career of nurturing the full diversity of students? Teachers who could reflectively read a new class through the eyes of experience? Teachers who saw behind the bluster or feigned helplessness to the latent ability? Teachers who recognized the difference between arrogance and aptitude? Teachers like my veteran colleagues who had faced up to a succession of challenging students their whole lives?
No, the vintage teacher is becoming the freeze-dried technician. The whole profession is now regarded as an entry-level experience for young intellectuals with a higher calling, either in school administration or a more “respectable” career. The recognition of partial learning and the flexibility of alternative strategies are being lost to one-size-fits-all linear instruction. What can be learned in the latter half of a decade of teaching is being lost to the ages.
In the future when we refer to the “short-timers,” we will know the depth, as well as the length, of their careers.