We get better. If there’s nothing in our way, we improve; we naturally become more skilled, more compassionate, more humane, more rational, more aware. We mature.
As individuals improve during their lives, society improves over the course of history. African Americans officially won civil rights after a struggle. Women couldn’t vote legally, but now can, and do, in numbers. A bulletin board at a nearby high school displays the unequivocal anti-bullying message, "Your words can kill." As true as it was back then, would I have seen that in the 80s at my high school? Don’t bet on it. Diseases that once were fatal, we’ve learned to prevent and to cure. Overall, whatever horrendous problems remain, there is continual movement towards solving them, momentum we can’t just call random. It’s progress.
This brings me to my present situation. Last spring, I completed a year of schooling, beyond my bachelor’s degree, so that I could legally teach high-school math. I had substitute-taught for the local district on-and-off for years. I wanted something satisfying and decently paid and local. These were my chief requirements. I knew from substitute teaching that I worked best with high-school students. I wanted to be in demand as a teacher. For this and other reasons, I picked math as my emphasis. Since I hadn’t been a math major in college, or studied math in a classroom, to speak of, I had to adduce "subject-matter verification" by examination.
To make a grueling story short, I did. Today, I have what is probably a reasonable grasp of early-college-level math for engineering majors. I said, "reasonable;" I didn’t say, "fantastic." It’s like passing the test for your driver’s license, and you still can’t parallel park, and left-hand turns still scare the bejesus out of you. You earned your license, you’re deemed safe on the road, but the last thing you are is nonchalant behind the wheel.
As a new teacher, I will probably tell a student, "That’s a great question. Let me get back to you when I know the answer..." twenty times a day. When I’ve been teaching for years, maybe the frequency will drop off to ten times a week. That’s fine with me—great, in fact.
So there’s the content—and then there’s the practice of teaching, the pacing and timing, the organization, the skill of engaging students. Some lucky people, apparently, are born with this knack; most master teaching only through hard practice. It’s the whole reason school districts pay novice teachers well less than they pay experienced ones.
As of last July, I was legally able to teach basic high-school algebra, geometry, and statistics. But, in the present job market, in November, I still have no job. A refrain I keep hearing from principals is, "We’d love to be able to think about hiring, our math classes are over-full. But there’s no money."
So, students who sorely need a math teacher, at a decent student-teacher ratio, will instead languish in crammed math classes. And I’ll be without any way to improve my craft, to become other than a novice teacher.
Besides the terrible job market getting in the way of my using my training to make a living, there is an ideological assault on public education, making employment in this trade doubly uncertain. I don’t recognize a dime’s worth of difference between the defense of school administrators sacking teachers on whim, "to get rid of incompetents," and the political decision to starve schools willy-nilly, because "there is no money for more teachers." (The much-noted tendency at all levels of government these days is to cut social programs, rather than fairly taxing the wealthiest interests in society; that’s another discussion.) The failure to fund teaching, and the mass firing of teachers, no matter how they are justified, embody reactionary thinking.
Tellingly, there is an awful lot of thundering, even in this venue, about labor unions "sheltering incompetents," and not just in education. But this rhetoric doesn’t reflect honest reckoning with the other side. The positions of the thunderers never do evolve.
What do these people dread so? "Incompetence," supposedly. But let’s look at the word itself. "Competence" comes from the Latin, com, meaning "with," and petere, "to seek." "Seeking-with."
More than anything, the teacher-bashers—and I’m distinguishing these from people who want to have real conversations about improving teacher accountability—despise, not "incompetence," but its opposite.
They hate competence.
Society’s natural movement towards democratization sends these people into orbit. The political right has made inconsistent noises, but make no mistake: these people like a large, ill-educated underclass. Don’t pay attention to chirping about "improving public education through ‘accountability" and ‘choice;’" look at actions. Watch them firing teachers and not hiring, in a time of desperate need. They’re often coy about saying so, but they dislike the idea of numbers of people getting educated. They’d rather not envision scores of "uppity" kids, from working-class and immigrant homes, realizing they’re good at algebra, and getting big ideas about going to college to study economics or to become medical researchers. The haters will throw up all kinds of smokescreens, but they truly despise the idea of people coming together, using individual and collective faculties, to right wrongs created by ignorance and greed.
Our soon-to-be-former Governor Schwarzenegger has been relatively quiet lately, on the subject of "hahd choices" he has made, in favor of gutting education. I kinda wish he’d say more. If I have to be unemployed this fall, when students clearly need skills I’ve acquired by the sweat of my brow, and those I still want to develop, I at least want the satisfaction of hearing the muscle man justify his devastation of education in this state. Let him work to convince me of his "anguish." I’m listening.
Overall trends are in my favor, I hope. I’m in a high-demand specialty, and doing all the right things to land work. This hypocritical nuttery about education cannot continue unchecked. It’ll hit a wall, and a turning point, as American healthcare delivery has started to do. There has to be a reckoning of some kind. The question is, can I hold out until then? Can the students?
(Note: I tried linking to various sources attesting that "devastation" is an appropriate description of effects of spending cuts to education in this state. For some reason, today I'm unable to link to outside articles using the standard "href" tag.)