I am so sick and tired of the overall abuse and lack of support that teachers receive in this province – especially after the winter that we have had. It is not the teachers’ fault that we have had so many storms, but they are the ones who suffer by having their marking day taken away from them. Everyone seems to have forgotten, but close to a decade ago, ten extra days were built into the school year to make up for missed time in the classroom, which is why school starts as early as can be in September, winter break is shorter than it used to be, and school ends as close to June 30th as possible. Have we exceeded those ten extra days this year? No, we have not. So there is no need to hit the panic button just yet. What many people do not seem to understand is that teachers only get paid for being at school twenty minutes before the first bell, and twenty minutes after the last bell. Marking is not usually feasible during those times because it is used for morning duty, lesson planning, or extra help. During the school day, it is naturally expected that class time be dedicated to the students themselves, so most teachers end up marking everything on their own time. So before you stop and criticize teachers, think about what our school system would look like if teachers only worked what they are paid to do: that would mean saying goodbye to teams, clubs, committees, dances, proms, trips, and absolutely anything extracurricular. —Annoyed
This article appears in Mar 26 – Apr 1, 2015.
No, they are paid a salary, not hourly.
And why then should the children suffer?
Maybe both students and teachers make up the lost time during the summer…
Cry me a river….
WHAT DO TEACHERS DO?
“So before you stop and criticize teachers, think about what our school system would look like if teachers only worked what they are paid to do.” Annoyed
To talk about what teachers are paid to do as well as talking about ten extra days, 20 minutes before and after the bell and so on is precisely the wrong approach to justify teaching in the eyes of many. It is irrelevant to the question of what teachers actually do where, by what they do, is to be understood what is involved in the activity of teaching itself. So what do teachers do?
The first step is to separate instruction from education properly conceived. Instruction takes place in the elementary grades and is largely concerned with the transmission of basic knowledge as contained in the curriculum. This can be done well or poorly depending in large part on the personality of the teacher. No great philosophical acumen is required.
Education properly conceived, on the other hand, involves the cultivation of critical thinking. Its object is not the transmission of basic knowledge which can be found in the text but rather the cultivation of the habit of questioning the text. It does not ask the question “what?” still less “who?” “when?” or “how?” Rather, the cultivation of critical thinking asks the question “why?”
Take History. The teacher does not simply re-capitulate the “facts” as found in the text but rather cultivates a critical perspective in relation to those “facts.” But what are the “facts” of history? The historical “fact” is not like the scientific fact (note the absence of quotation marks in the case of the latter). One would never encounter the historical fact as one took a walk along the street but one might well encounter the scientific fact, say that of warm weather caused by observable scientific factors. So what, then, is the historical “fact?”
The historical “fact” is not to be confused with the historical event. The historical event refers simply to what, in fact, happened in the past. Take Confederation when the four original provinces came together to form the Dominion of Canada in 1867. That’s a fact, but it is not the historical “fact.” The historical “fact” is the historical event as interpreted by the historian who writes about it. He is not concerned with the simple event but rather with the reason(s) why the event occurred and the reasons why the event occurred are open to interpretation. Some historians will place a political construction on the event, another an economic, still another an ideological construction and so on. In other words, one will not encounter the historical “fact” as one walks along the street because it is not on the street, it is in the mind of the historian who writes about it. So where does the teacher come in? What does the teacher do?
The teacher initiates the student into thinking historically, into the habit of reflective interpretation, of assessing the relative validity of the reasons the historian brings forward to support his interpretation. In effect, the teacher initiates the student into interpreting the historian’s interpretation. It is a “second order” activity. That is why education is to be distinguished from instruction. Teaching, properly conceived, ceases to be a mechanical exercise but rather becomes an art for which no artificial rules of procedure can meaningfully be applied. (We’re not talking about auto mechanics here.) So that is what (good) teachers do.
Thank you for your patience and understanding.
A pleasure as always,
Cheerio!
Hey, teachers, go fuck your hats!!! There is not one single person that is not a member of the NSTU that has even one shred of sympathy for your entitled asses. With your sick days, personal days, 9 weeks of vacation in the summer, 2 weeks at Christmas, And a week in March for no fucking reason at all and your “snow days” you only work a little over 6 months a year for 6 hours a day (if you are a teacher that does no extracurricular activities, which there are many) and make between 50-70 grand per year.
You had 9 days off prior to this “marking day” we, the people who pay your fucking salary, “stole” from you. Why didn’t you use that Monday you had off to mark your shit? Then, when your employer calls you on your bullshit, the first thing you do is whine that if you don’t get what you collectively bargained for you have the right to hold the children’s education and extracurricular activities hostage. Bravo!!! **SLOW CLAP** Here’s hoping you are teaching this year until mid-July.
Just go to fucking work, shut the fuck up and, live your privileged life in silence. People who actually work don’t give a flying fuck about your “troubles”!!!
OB, I would like to join SHITMD in inviting you and others like you to:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVYwVQ8huz…
This may seem harsh but it is based on my personal experience. In elementary school I had such an intense interest in learning that one of my teachers gave me a lofty nickname that reflected her expectations. However, beyond those first few years I was exposed to a steady stream of “teachers” who, with a few exceptions, were only there for the salary and perks. Their half-hearted, zombie-like delivery of information, as opposed to teaching and inspiring, slowly and inexorably eroded my interest in education and left me so dispirited that I finished high school feeling totally disillusioned.
Luckily, after a year off, I took a chance on university and was exposed to professors who, in majority, had a passion for their subject and really wanted to challenge and inspire their students. By the end of my bachelor degree their enthusiasm had restored my interest in learning.
The problem with the P-12 system is that the majority, not all, of teachers are either there for the perks (summers off, salary, pension, etc.) or because when they finished their bachelor degree they did not have good job prospects and did not have the desire and/or capacity to continue on with a masters degree. I can’t count the number of people who have said, “I can’t do much with my bachelors degree. I might as well do a B. Ed.”
The answer then, is that the process for gaining entry to education programs needs to be much more rigorous. It needs to be, similar to medicine, based on a desire to be in the profession of teaching and motivating – not a fall-back for otherwise unmotivated people looking for a good situation. There also needs to be a way of evaluating and getting rid of teachers who are not capable of or interested in doing their jobs.
Sorry for the long rant but this is one of my pet peeves. I strongly feel that teachers who do a poor job can very negatively affect many of their students – and potentially derail their lives if they cause them to prematurely lose interest in school.
WHAT DO TEACHERS DO? (II)
“The teacher initiates the student into thinking historically, into the habit of reflective interpretation, of assessing the relative validity of the various reasons the historian brings forward in support of his interpretation.” (Montrealman, 04/05, 9:56AM)
While this is a general account of what teachers do it does not explain how he does it. How does he initiate students into thinking historically, of assessing the relative validity of the various reasons the historian brings forward in support of his interpretation?
It is a simultaneous two-fold operation: While engaging the student in a respectful but also intellectually demanding dialogue, he models the activity of assessing the validity of reasons in the same way any intelligent interlocutor asses the validity of reasons given by another. There is both an intellectual and pedagogical component. The latter involves modelling the activity of an inquiring mind while the former involves the actual activity of his inquiring mind itself. These two components of
what the teacher does cannot, of course, be separated.
The activity of teaching is continuous with the functioning of consciousness itself and has application not just to history but to ordinary human relations. The functioning of consciousness involves attending FROM the words, whether written or spoken, by one’s interlocutor TO the mind of which those words are the reflection.
In the present case we can see the quality of the various minds at work on this thread itself. While the first two comments were irrelevant – they contained no reasons at all about anything – another’s amounted to little more than empty shouting and so can be immediately dismissed for what they are, just hot blow. The last, while moderately interesting, amounted only to an anecdotal biographical account which did not explore the reasons for his disenchantment with his teachers. More intellectual rigour was required if he were to attain pedagogical competency but he does show promise.
So there we are, a brief overview attempting to engage what it is that teachers actually do and how the do it.
A pleasure as always,
Cheerio!
There are a lot of people who have to go to work regardless of the weather and I don’t just mean minimum wage workers but professionals like doctors, nurses, firefighters, police officers and a host of others. Sorry but no sympathy from those of us who have to go no matter what the weather.
An outstanding comment, Dim Bro.
“… teachers only get paid for being at school twenty minutes before the first bell, and twenty minutes after the last bell.”
And they get paid well for this little work then. My kid’s school starts at 830, ends at 230, so you’re telling me their paid workday is only 6 hours 40 minutes? So teachers are part-timers then? Why are they paid 65k (on average) for a part time job? For that salary, with benefits, in a guaranteed job setting, they should have set office hours: 8 to 5 with the hour lunch/breaks. This way after the bell rings at 230-330, the teachers have ample time to get on with the marking or report card writing or whatever needs to be done.
Marking on their own time: No. The job description of a teacher is hardly a secret: teaching, marking, reporting, and making lesson plans (at first, usually same thing over after). It’s part of the job description, why you get such a good salary for 195 days.
Agree with BroTim: snowdays unless there is a blizzard, I see no reason for them to not go in to school and catch up on work the same way anyone else in the real world does.
WHAT DO TEACHERS DO? (III) WHAT IS A PROFESSIONAL?
“profession, n., vocation, calling, esp. one that involves some branch of learning.” The Concise Oxford Dictionary
In “What Do Teachers Do?” (04/5, 9:56M) we saw that it is misconceived to understand teaching in terms of the “job description,” whether viewed in terms of hours on the job, holidays or other extrinsic criteria. To understand what teachers do requires grasping the nature of the teaching activity itself which involves the cultivation of critical thinking seen as the assessment of the validity of reasons given in support of knowledge claims. In “What Do Teachers Do?” (11) we saw that the teacher cultivates such critical thinking in a manner which mirrors the structure of consciousness itself in which he relies subsidiarily on his knowledge of his subject matter while directing his focal attention on the mind of the student to determine the degree to which he, the student, has mastered the concepts embodied in that subject matter in the course of developing his critical thinking. We have now reached the final point, the degree to which the teacher is properly conceived to be a professional. So, what is a professional?
Doing our usual Ordinary Language Philosophy (OLP) we see that a profession is a calling “which involves some branch of learning.” But what does that mean? It means two things. First it means that teaching is a calling. It is not taken up for extrinsic reasons such as holidays, hours on the job and so forth. To maintain that this is the case is as insulting to a teacher as it would be to a doctor or lawyer faced with the same absurd claim. Teachers are such not because of extrinsic factors such as those but rather for intrinsic factors found in the activity of teaching itself. It concerns the engagement of other minds. So what about the professional status of teaching. How is the teacher a professional?
A professional is a professional by virtue of professing fealty to some principles which govern his practice. For the doctor it is, “Do no harm.” For the lawyer it is, “Let justice prevail.” For the teacher it is, “Cultivate the mind.” But there is more. The professions are ranked hierarchically. In his focus on the bodily functions, the doctor is at the lowest rank of the professions. It is true that one cannot do much without one’s body but that does not change the focus of his profession. In his concern for justice the lawyer is one step above the doctor but his activity is embedded in the contest between the litigants in a particular case. He studies the decisions in previous cases to argue his own which lends a derivative quality to his professionalism.
The teacher, on the other hand, is at the highest level of the professionals since his focus is on the cultivation of the human mind which, in view of the current decline of organized religion, comes to stand in for the “soul.” Can there be a higher calling?
A pleasure as always,
Cheerio!
“The teacher, on the other hand, is at the highest level of the professionals since his focus is on the cultivation of the human mind which, in view of the current decline of organized religion, comes to stand in for the “soul.” Can there be a higher calling?”
Holy fucking “God complex”, Batman!!
I’ve had teachers like the ones you describe in your previous posts. The kind that pace their classes to those whom they “inspire”, alienating the “underclass” by forcing them to accept “extra help” or washing their hands completely of those that don’t fit into the mold they had fashioned for them. Teachers whose “inspiring” their favorites is more an exercise in having their ego stroked by the few than “molding the minds” of the masses.
And for the record, this bitch is a poorly composed and childish rebuttal to some of the public’s shock/anger toward teachers refusal to be gracious and flexible because of an unfounded sense of entitlement, not a “what teaching entails” seminar. We all have to prepare for our jobs, because it’s our job!!Threatening to punish the students you, in your own admission, have a responsibility to protect and nurture is, IMO, unconscionable. If teachers are looking for respect by acting the way some of them have acted, they have done the opposite and lost more than they have gained. I think peoples anger about an attitude that seems to be prevalent in public sector unions today is totally warranted and some serious thought should be put into reining in some of the control that unions have over their employers, us, John Q Public. If you are not able to keep the public’s interest in perspective then perhaps a life of PUBLIC SERVICE ain’t for you.
If teachers are cultivating minds, then Nova Scotia has been in a drought for a long time. If teachers were farmers, we’d all starve to death.
WHAT DO TEACHERS DO? (IV): WHAT IS CRITICAL THINKING?
We have seen that what teachers do is to cultivate the mind where, by “cultivating the mind” is to foster “critical thinking.” So what is critical thinking? According to Emma Williams’ “In Excess of Epistemology: Siegel, Taylor, Heidegger and the Conditions of Thought” in the current edition of “Journal of Philosophy of Education” (Vol. 49, Issue 1, February, 2015), the official publication of The Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain of which, of course, I am a member, the concept of critical thinking is contested.
Williams takes issue with the Harvey Siegel, the current American principal proponent of the centrality of critical thinking. For Siegel the exercise of critical thinking turns on the nature of truth which is independent of rational justification. In other words, one’s critical thinking might be internally coherent but one might just be wrong. Justification is a “fallible indicator or truth.” For Williams this “representational” account of thinking with its “realist/absolutist conception of truth” appears to echo the “old correspondence theory of truth” where any proposition, in order to be true, must correspond to the way things actually are but there is no independent way of establishing such correspondence. One can just seek to get an approximation between our knowledge claims and “a mind-independent order of reality.” Epistemology, according to Williams, therefore fails as a coherent account of critical thinking.
By contrast, Williams draws on the current Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor who, in his “Overcoming Epistemology,” drew on the early 20th. century German philosopher Martin Heidegger, in particular on his concept of “Being-in-the World,” to challenge Siegel’s autonomous critical thinker. For Heidegger we are never apart from the world from our first conscious hours. Our world, in effect, constructs our minds by means of the forces of acculturation. This would appear to mirror the old “coherence theory of truth” where any proposition, in order to be true, must “cohere” with my other beliefs also held to be true. This, of course, raises the question of the very possibility of critical thinking understood as the product of a conceptual distance between the agent and the object of his thought since, in the Heideggerian account, there is no such distance. Williams appears to accept the Hedeggerian account of critical thinking but Montealman takes issue with such a view
He sees the critical thinker as an autonomous agent to the extent that, if thinking itself is held to exist at all, he must be capable of gaining some conceptual distance from the object of his scrutiny. At the same time he sees the concept of truth not as corresponding to some transcendental realm of what “actually is” but rather as a regulative concept, one which supervenes on his attempts to attain truth but with the knowledge that he might be wrong. In other words, critical thinking is the outcome of the assessment of reasons, not seen in the form of deterministic causes as Williams appears to caricature Siegel, but rather as tentative conclusions which are the outcomes of reasoned reflection.
So that is what teachers do when they think critically.
A pleasure as always,
Cheerio!
Dear OB…my cousin, a young teacher starting in the late 90’s at a time when the Teachers’ Union successfully lobbied to have any extra curricular sports and pass-times removed from their responsibility, (sports and dances etc cancelled until volunteers from the community stepped up), was shocked and dismayed when speaking to other teachers who would sit in the break room for the majority of the day when they werent teaching a class. Considering that each teacher only had a few classes of 45 min/class to teach per day, it was shocking to him when the other teachers complained that they HAD to mark the student assignments for hours at home. 20 years later, my cousin, STILL has never had to bring his work home because he makes the most of every day. Hell, they have marking formats for a reason. A checklist so to speak in order to quickly mark and correct any assignments. Piss poor planning on the teachers part should be a lesson in life for the students in how NOT to work….class dismissed.
AN “OBJECTVE” APPRAISAL
RSVP: Cuja 04/08, 8:20AM)
But why did the Teacher’s Union lobby successfully to have any extracurricular sports and pass-times removed from their responsibility? Just because they were nasty people? Or were they in negotiations at that time and such extra-curricular activities were the only non-contractual area they could legally pressure th government? No empty smears, please.
But “marking formats?” A “checklist” to quickly mark and correct any assignment? Any chance of seeing that? It doesn’t sound like your cousin was teaching his students to think critically. In fact it doesn’t sound like your cousin was teaching his students to think at all. Sounds a lot like you.
A pleasure as always,
Cheerio!
WHAT DO TEACHERS DO? (V): A HETEROGENEOUS CONCEPT
To speak of “teaching” is not to speak of an homogenous activity but rather a heterogeneous one which can be distinguished on the basis of the level taught. At the elementary level the activity can best be described as instructing, at the university level (excepting graduate-level seminars) lecturing, and at the upper secondary level, teaching.
Instruction is not primarily an intellectual activity or knowledge-based activity but rather one relating to the qualities of character possessed by the teacher. These involve, in one form or another, a caring , nurturing disposition in relation to young children. An elementary school teacher can be a wonderful teacher without possessing deep subject knowledge or philosophical perspective. It is purely activity-based.
While requiring considerable subject knowledge, lecturing at the university level is also activity-based but without particular concern for the individual student. Particularly in large undergraduate classes numbering 100 students and more – I have had this distasteful experience – the university lecturer primarily delivers a set speech in which the student is expected to take good notes. Other than that the student is a passive observer. At the graduate-level seminar consisting of only five or six students, however, a greater dialogical encounter between professor and student occurs but with the difference that the graduate student, in giving his paper to the group, models the professor. He is expected to have mastered the activity of critical thinking but the methodology employed is still that of the lecture even though a (hopefully) lively discussion follows its presentation.
At the upper secondary level teaching takes on its proper form, the dialogical encounter between teacher and student with the object of cultivating in the latter the habit of reflective critical thinking. It is, from the perspective of the teacher, a knowledge-based activity but having the mind of the student as its primary concern. Ideally, the teacher’s knowledge base is philosophically informed so that his teaching does not consist simply of the transfer of information. Even in the “hard” sciences this ought to be the case. Thinking, reflection and judgement are the primary concern. It is here that we find the activity of “teaching” in its purest form.
So there we have it. Teaching is not to be conceived as an undifferentiated homogenous activity but rather a radically differentiated heterogeneous one to the point that its manifestations at the elementary, secondary and university levels scarcely resemble one another.
A pleasure as always,
Cheerio!