The 20 Minute Column

I am attempting a new form this morning, what I am calling the 20 minute column. U2 has a song called 40, which they explained at the end of their concert when I saw them at the LA Sports Arena back in 1989, got its name because they were needing one more track for their album, so they put together this song and laid it all down in 40 minutes. If you're not familiar with the tune, the lyrics are "I will sing a new song/How long to sing a song" and if it sounds simple it is but that is also its beauty. I'll try to be a little more intricate than to simply write that I will write, but the point of this exercise for me is to see what I can put together in a short time in a relatively few amount of words.

One reason for this is because this week on my break I am going to try my hand at blogging on other sites besides my own, and my understanding is that short and sweet, which are not necessarily my strong points, are what is required in that medium. The topic today is teaching, and it is inspired by an article in the most recent issue of the New Yorker magazine by noted author Malcolm Gladwell, of The Tipping Point fame, on the issue of what makes for a good teacher and how we can possibly scout them out so that we hire the best people for one of our societies' most important tasks.

As a veteran high school teacher with well over a decade plying my craft, I have a few opinions on the matter. The first premise that I will make is that a quality school starts and ends with quality teachers, plain and simple. You can have all the discussions about technology and resources, class sizes, strong administrators, and things like all day kindergarten, which our own soon to be ex-governor here in Arizona is enamored with, but all that, as they say, doesn't amount to a hill of beans if you don't have quality educators working directly with the kids on a daily basis.

Gladwell cited research suggesting that in a classroom with a poor teacher, students generally learn a half of a year's material in a school year, while those with an excellent teacher learn a year and a half's worth of material. It is easy to see how students in what are referred to as under performing schools can fall behind pretty quickly. I can attest to this, having taught in one such school in urban and poor South Phoenix for six years before recently moving to a performing arts school with rigorous academic standards chock full of mostly middle and upper middle class strivers.

The students at my old school were on average reading at a 6th grade level, some much lower, and those high school juniors and seniors that were actually reading at an 8th or 9th grade level were the more advanced kids. Suffice to say, the obstacles to teaching were great, I did the best I could certainly and I like to think that I helped my students to move along, but I'm under no illusion that one or two good teachers at that stage of the game are going to move the needle drastically in the upward direction. You would probably need kids who have been held back by poor primary and middle school environments to take 6-8 years of quality high school instruction if they were to ever catch up to their peers who have had quality teachers all along.

So what makes a good teacher? In Gladwell's article he makes the comparison to the difficulty an NFL scout has in determining which college quarterback is poised for pro greatness and which is the next Ryan Leaf. Teaching is like many talents, much more of an art than a science. Education courses taught to prospective teachers are by and large a waste of time at best, and a complete joke at worst, with a very few exceptions. Teaching isn't about mastering content, although that is certainly an important element of success, yet it is much more than that. We've all had college professors that seemed very knowledgeable on their subject matter but that nonetheless never got through to us.

Teaching is the art of taking knowledge and utilizing it in a way that reaches people, in a way that cuts through the layers of the inconsequential and gets to the heart of the matter. It is about relationships, balancing compassion and caring for students with the need to provide a positive role model and authority figure. It requires a blend of inspiration, motivation, and the demands of a task master to get kids to do more and learn more and understand more than they ever imagined that they could. And then to inspire them to want to learn and know even more.

Teaching is a constant challenge and an opportunity, and while I wish the pay was better, it is still something that I enjoy immensely and appreciate having the chance to do every day, which is also how I feel about writing. And my 20 minutes is up so I will bid you adieu for now. I will close with a thought that is fundamental to good teaching and to reaching students. Referring to those students, it is often said that they don't care what you know until they know that you care. Once they do however, and kids are very adept and recognizing genuineness, they will go to the wall for you, which makes teaching such a pleasure and a passion for me.