Bad Teachers Teaching Badly

About a year ago, for reasons now lost, my students and I started a running list of things bad teachers do, or bad teaching techniques.

We have derived a lot of amusement from creating this list, although seeing it typed out gives me pause—I see my own imperfections and those of my colleagues. Although my students and I may have been chuckling as we added another item to the list, I also see how pernicious and destructive bad teaching can be.

(I remember Mrs. C, a 6th grade teacher in a public school I attended. She accused me of something I hadn't done and required me to stay after school to write 100 times that I wouldn't do it again--I don't remember what it was. When I tried to protest, she brow-beat a false confession out of me. I still can't believe how easily I capitulated. After school, while I was writing, she accused me of giggling when I sighed, and added another 100 repetitions. Almost 40 years later, I can't believe how worked up I can still get about all this.)

A list of things bad teachers do throws into relief what a decent, not to say, good, teacher might avoid and suggests what a decent, not to say, good, teacher might do.

Feel free to add to this list in Comments.

• Insult your students.
• Threaten your students.
• Use physical and psychological aggression to punish and humiliate your students.
• Show off in front of your students.
• Indulge any digression you feel like in front of your students; allow yourself to be continually distracted.
• Ignore student questions.
• Get angry when students ask questions.
• Repeat answers to questions even when it’s clear that they don’t understand the answer you are giving.
• Encourage students to bully and tease each other.
• Arrive late to class, or don’t come at all.
• Play favorites in a class and treat students unfairly.
• Compare one student with another, favorably and unfavorably, especially with regard to older siblings you have taught in the past.
• Punish a whole class when one student deserves discipline.
• Indulge horseplay.
• Teach wrong or outdated facts. Make up answers when you don’t know them.
• Spend the class talking about yourself and your conspiracy theories.
• Teach the same thing every day, day after day.
• Yell.
• Comment on your students in a way that will embarrass them.
• Give them nicknames that they don’t want and don’t appreciate.
• Show movies.
• Fall asleep in the back of the class during student presentations.
• Call students by the wrong names.
• Lose students' work after they hand it in, then claim you never received it and accuse them of lying if they insist that they handed it in.
• Don't return students' work.

Model Teachers

Our most highly paid, most highly regarded teachers have no training in education. None. They don’t have education degrees, teaching certificates, or even, at least at first, any teaching experience. They’re professionals in their fields, but amateurs in the field of education, even the best ones, and, for good reasons, no one seems to think this matters.

I’m talking, of course, about university professors.

What do they have going for them? They have great educations themselves—the hiring process ensures that those offered jobs and then tenure generally have the best credentials, have gone to the best schools—and they are experts in their fields.

But back up one year, from freshman year of college (where your teacher is likely to be a lowly Teaching Assistant, not a professor) to senior year of high school, and requirements and expectations alter radically. Your best high school teacher was likely a union member with a master’s degree in education and a teaching certificate, an amateur in the subject she taught but a professional teacher.

Should our goal in improving teaching then be to require more credentials and certifications, to professionalize something that we don’t really recognize as a profession? Or would we be better off if we figured out how to take what works in universities and make it work for younger students?

The Opposite of an Ancient Egyptian

Like many, I often go to bed too late, reading by the bedside lamp, then awake, groggy, to an alarm clock, drink too much coffee, eat too much sugar, and, during the day, pay too much attention to those athletes, movie stars, and musicians whom we pay tens and even hundreds of millions of dollars to distract us, for an hour or two, from our actual lives. And, like you, I live in a world that for the past hundred years or so has erected curtain-walled towers that reach toward the sky and that consist mostly of air, a world that has learned to fly and then raced to the moon.

Our feelings of heaviness, of tiredness, which we combat with levity, with stimulants, with distraction, and with structures and endeavors that soar (yes, the dream of flight is ages old, but not in the context in which we experience it now), present a configuration unique to our age. Undoubtedly those hundreds of historical generations that lived before the electric light, the professional musician, the can of caffeinated sugary soda, did not suffer as we do (not that they didn’t have suffering of their own).

Take the Egyptian pyramids, almost five thousand years old, built in a creative burst of no more than a couple of hundred years. They are virtually solid mountains of stone. Imagine standing in an inner chamber, any shaft to it sealed off, in the blackness. Above, below, and all around you are hundreds of feet of solid stone. Feel the weight, the claustrophobic pressure. This is not a modern structure.

Or look at an Egyptian sculpture or relief or painting of a pharaoh. Notice the too-large, flat feet, almost pyramid-shaped, loving attention given to each toe.

The Egyptians, too, created much of their artwork for the afterlife, to be sealed in tombs, not to be seen by human eyes again; they did not open museums and galleries and invite the public. They mummified bodies and sealed them away. (We, apparently, plasticize them for display and ship them around the world.)

Perhaps the Egyptians, like young children, felt, relative to grown-ups of today, too light, too disincarnated, too disconnected from the world around them. Not too heavy and tired, but buoyant. So, rather, than seeking levity and stimulants, they sought gravity and weight. Rather than a focus on the here-and-now, a focus on the hereafter.

The Egyptian experience, I propose, was the opposite of our levity, our tiredness, our materialism and our concern for this life, now.

Perhaps it’s no accident that, a short while later, Greek drama was born as tragedy.

Waldorf Schools and Political Bent

A friend of mine in liberal Massachusetts recently asked his fiscally conservative Republican father (who lives in a different state) to support his grandchild's Waldorf school. My friend described the school and the exchange as follows (I’m quoting him but I’ve changed things a bit to make them more generic):

“There is a strict dress code—no logos or camouflage. Not too much skin. There are haircut rules. Good manners and respectful behavior are taught and expected. Mornings begin with handshakes and eye contact. The day ends the same way. Cell phones are prohibited. Personal music devices are prohibited. Don’t even ask about computer games. Preschoolers cook or bake their own natural snacks daily, and say a blessing before lunch. All children bring lunch. There is no cafeteria. There are no vending machines. There is no soda or junk food. Students spend eight years with the same teacher. The curriculum includes Bible stories (Old and New Testament) in grades 2 and 3. Security measures at the school consist of the front desk. The front desk is also the infirmary. There is no teachers' union. Teachers work there because they love to. There is no state testing. There is no standardized testing. The curriculum is not determined by the government. (Neither is the lunch menu.) Full tuition is about $14,000 per year. About 70% of students receive tuition assistance. The average expenditure per student is about $9,000 per year (vs. $15,000 at public school). Parents pay for the school for the same reason teachers teach there. Parents also pay for public school through income and property taxes.

When I was through, my father said: ‘Sounds like a truly great school. What kind of school is it?’

A Waldorf school.

Clearly the values and practices of the school support responsible parenting, teaching, and learning, regardless of lifestyle or politics.”

It may be tempting, based on stereotypes, to categorize all those associated with Waldorf schools as politically, socially, and fiscally liberal, but this would be a mistake.

And, at least in the United States, what we mean by these things has changed significantly over the past decades, both within Waldorf schools and out in the wider world. For those old enough to remember, don't you now find John F. Kennedy, the Cold Warrior, a Democrat, more conservative than your may have believed at the time? And doesn't that old conservative Republican Richard Nixon appear more liberal than he used to? Socially? Economically? Opening China?

In the 1940s and 50s, many of those in American Waldorf schools supported the American consensus--anti-communist (although not rabid McCarthyists), pro-capitalist, and even pro-Vietnam. They also lobbied--quietly and ineffectively--for the separation of school and state. After all, the longest running socialist program in the U.S. is our system of public education.

Small School, Big World

A smaller world threatens to be a more provincial world. For all that the Internet and the century of technology behind it have shrunk the world, if my “experience” of those around the globe comes through a glowing screen—images and sounds, but no real contact—and I never leave the comfort of my study, I may never really be touched or reached by those far away.

Lowell Monke (author of Breaking Down the Digital Walls: Learning to Teach in a Post-Modem World), then teaching in an urban high school in Iowa, describes his AP students leaving a computer lab—this was the 1990s, before laptops and wireless Internet—after “conversing” with students around the world. The door across the hall opened, and international students poured out of an English as a second language class. Monke watched in disbelief as his engaged, intelligent, sensitive, worldly students ignored every one of the living, breathing foreign students who were now walking down the hall with them, side by side. Monke, a believer in the educational power of technology, became older and wiser in that instant.

If the real world is a butcher, the Internet gives us plastic-wrapped, bloodless, odorless fillets with all the fat trimmed off.

The students at the high school at which I teach have spent three weeks every other year in Peru or Germany—our small size allows us to fundraise effectively so that the whole school can do this.

Travelers to Peru visited Machu Picchu; a women’s shelter in Cuzco, where they made adobe bricks for new construction; and the Waldorf school in Lima. Students got lost and were confronted by armed guards; they got sick and rode in taxis through foreign cities to seek treatment; they helped those who live happy lives that are far different from our lives in the wealthiest nation the world has seen; they formed friendships with those they hope to see again on exchange next year or the year after. Travelers to Germany saw the Bavarian alps, Munich, Salzburg, and Berlin, three centers of world culture that make the oldest buildings in North America look new. They played in the English Garden, saw remnants of the Berlin Wall, and lived and traveled with Germans whom they hope to see again, here or there, in the next few years.

Our students returned full of stories and enthusiasm—all have stories to last a long time. You can imagine it took a couple of days for everyone to settle down to the routine of school. For some, this travel and a view of the world and people outside the United States will change the course of their lives. They will choose different majors in college than they might have done, they will volunteer to help those less privileged, they will travel with confidence, or they will simply conduct themselves with greater empathy and humility. The Internet is a great tool and resource, but there’s no substitute for actual experience.