While I'm griping about my fellow citizens...
This blog is supposed to be the anti-gripe, but the last couple of weeks of work have affected the blog in not such a good way. I will mention a couple of good things first, both taken from recent newspaper clippings that I posted on my office door. Then I will gripe some more about my fellow citizens, in particular the attitude of our future teachers.
About two months ago, David Brooks wrote an interesting article for the NY Times (a copy of it is here) that summarized some good news (for a change). Domestic violence is down since 1993; violent crime is down (new article yesterday shows it's unchanged over the past year); drunken driving fatalities are down; consumption of hard liquor is down; teenage pregnancy is down; teenage births are down; teenage sex is down (or at least delayed a while); teenage suicide is down; elementary test scores are up; etc., etc.
Now, using statistics on such a large scale leaves me suspicious; it reminds me not a little of a pagan priest reading the augurs in a chicken's intestines. Yet the last few days have seen some news that all those stories coming out of the New Orleans Superdome and Convention Center about gangs, rapes, murder, and even cannibalism (yes, someone claimed it!) were, for the most part, little more than that: stories created by hysterical people (who had good reason to be hysterical), relayed uncritically by an eager news media that feeds on negative news (especially when the international media has to report on America), and swallowed credulously by a domestic and foreign audience that is all-too-eager to believe the worst about anything.
As I joked to my wife, it is quite possible that all this backpedaling on the part of the coroner is due to typical Louisiana corruption. But that sort of cynicism should end with jokes; something tells me that I should be grateful for the fact that Mayor Nagin's prediction of 10,000 dead citizens was just another in a long list of needless exaggerations.
Having said all this, of course, it's not hard to find reason for despair. Yesterday I was giving a mathematics review to some aspiring teachers, and I asked them why something worked the way it did. (I forget what exactly it was.)
No one knew. No big deal; I can sympathize. I forget things sometimes, too. But they weren't interested in knowing, either; they didn't even want to contemplate it... even though every one of them would probably have to teach it someday.
So I asked them, What will you do one day when a student asks why it works?
Most of them shrugged. That was appalling enough, but one of them laughed and said, I'll tell them to shut up.
Eh, what?
Ladies and gentlemen, these are our aspiring educators: having no interest in knowing why mathematics works the way it does, they become sullen or angry and tell you to shut up if you ask why.
I've been told by a number of my former students that this attitude is not uncommon among grade-school teachers, and even among secondary mathematics.
So, there's reason to be grateful about the present, and reason to worry about the future.
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1 comment:
However, if it is a mixed bag--if you do have real classroom teachers, just be aware of everything they go through.
These are up-and-coming teachers. They have to get a passing score on the Praxis exam before the college will admit them to its education program.
I am indeed aware of what they will have to go through. I was a high school teacher once, which means that I took the Praxis, passed it, met all the requirements for certification, and taught for two years as a licensed teacher in a rural high school.
When I met these students, the first thing I did was to congratulate and thank them for choosing teaching as a career. I pointed out that the State of North Carolina had to hire 11,000 teachers from out of state, and that the survival rate of a new teachers within the first five years is something like 50%. That is, 50% of school teachers choose to do something else within the first five years. Because of this, they had my respect.
You're absolutely right about all the pressures that schoolteachers are under, such as parents [who] are, at best, uninvolved and at worst actively hostile.
But, as you wrote, what was the case is that I was dealing with ... a 19=20 year old smart alec who already has all of the answers.
Has all the answers, yes, and none of the understanding. Been there myself :-)
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