Just Waiting for Recess, Mostly

Bad teachers just now are very much in the media. I've watched and listened to quite a bit of the promotion for a new feature documentary on the subject, though I have no plans to see the film. To summarize the hoopla, for any who've missed it:

A rich, middle aged filmmaker, who matriculated at the Sidwell Friends School and Brown, who's children likewise attend private school, has made a new movie that asks the burning question, why aren't American public schools just as good as the ones to which the right people go? (One wonders he didn't just ask the maid, but then I haven't seen the film, so perhaps he did.) The answer, as I understand it, turns out to be, in large part, those damned unions. Shocking. That anyone working in the United States still has a union, I grant you, is unexpected. It seems, good or bad, teachers in America's public schools are still entitled to collective bargaining, seniority and the like. This revelation has, unsurprisingly, been loudly and roundly condemned by those champions of the common people, Oprah Winfrey & Bill Gates, among other billionaires. (You have to watch for the moment someone tells Oprah that there might be someone in America she couldn't fire. Priceless.)

Imagine. You see, while those damned unions are busy protecting the bad teachers, the good ones go unrewarded, even as they try so very much harder than the rest. While the bad'uns go home after only working a single shift, the good'uns seem to be available twenty-four-seven; happy to give out their private phone numbers to any ten-year-old with a question about their homework, or have a chat with your mum after bedtime. The good'uns, you see, never stop. That's what makes 'em so damned good. Public school teachers then should be more like, well, one's dear old Nanny, or a proper governess or private tutor, for the older nippers; always ready with a bit of French, or the odd square root, or a comforting word, that sort of thing, as needed. Simple. And when the old thing gets a bit unsteady on her pins or goes a bit dotty, well, then the family really ought to find her a room somewhere. Least they could do for dear old party, no?

(So why has nobody thought of this before?!)

The most amusing aspect of this "crisis," at least as portrayed in the popular media, has been the reflexive insistence with which everyone: billionaire and union rep, talk show host and street interview, upper and lower, has hastened to concede that many, if not most public school teachers are really just grand; selfless, devoted, effective, -- under appreciated, etc., but really, just swell, for the most part. Wouldn't want anyone to think anyone was suggesting otherwise. Ever.

That, to my mind, was the most interesting point inadvertently made in the whole gassy chat on education just now. Now, I had some bad teachers in my time. Had a few good ones too. On balance? More bad than good, though mostly not so bad as all that. Now, can my experience really have been so very different from the rest of America's?

I grew up in a rather old fashioned small town, quite some time ago. I don't say my experience speaks to much, but I should think it was more typical than not.

How harshly then can I really judge the majority of the people who ostensibly taught me whatever it was I learned in school? Who doesn't remember fondly most of the dear old mother-substitutes of of elementary school days? Those who nursed one through simple sentences and the times-tables? True, some showed a prettier cursive at the blackboard than others, and some were perhaps less kind or encouraging than they might have been, but not a bad lot by and large. Some did their hair more carefully than they did their lesson-plans, but I don't remember most as being anything much but neither better nor worse than they should have been. Truth be told, I don't remember most of them at all. (Who was that woman that taught my third grade? Name escapes me now, but she was alright.)

And later? In what's now called middle school, and later still in high school, there was the battalion of simple souls, men and women, tenured and tired, who taught just to the edge of their competence, relying on the printed questions in their threadbare textbooks, on film-strips, and faded mimeos that dated to their apprentice days, to see them through to their pensions. Pitiable examples of pedagogy, no doubt, but then I don't know that Socrates could have made me pay attention to some of that stuff, on a brisk Autumn day, with the sun blazing away, just the other side of the window. As the town I grew up in was rather at an apex of a number of small local colleges of various Protestant affiliation, these teachers were often aided by various exhausted and or ill-prepared graduate students, like the relentlessly cheerful gals just out of the Presbyterian teachers' college who rather mindlessly distributed stickers like confetti at a perpetual birthday party, or the great, oafish Methodist boys who still blushed when asked a direct question by a girl. (Now and again, one of the latter, I remember, would get himself in trouble paying too much attention of just the wrong kind to some high school sophomore girl, and not be asked back.)

Mustn't forget a mention for the largely anonymous substitutes who, when called on, taught auto-mechanics on Monday, English composition on Tuesday, and sex ed. on Wednesday, all with an equal and undisguised despair.

Now none of the above were necessarily bad people, or very good teachers. They just did their jobs, as best they could, which wasn't always very well. The suggestion that each and every one ought to have been better isn't without merit, but it does strike me as statistically unlikely. Largely unexceptional teachers teaching largely unexceptionable children sounds, to me, about the likeliest outcome of mandatory eduction in any roughly democratic society, no?

What then could be sillier than suggesting that these people, teachers and students, parents and neighbors, all ought to have been somehow better than they were ever likely to be? But then, I grew up in the days before every child was thought to be "exceptional" and every teacher "great." What balls.

Who remembers much of what was taught in school days, anyway?

The best teachers I had, all had something to say that may or may not have had anything much to do with the curriculum. Some, like Miss Joan Stuck, gave me genuinely useful information, like how a sentence might be made, and why it mattered. A few others directed me to books I might like, though these weren't the ones required. Some of the best teachers I saw in my day, weren't necessarily mine. I remember the patience with which some of them helped kids who were struggling. I struggled too, of course, but usually with what I would never need again, could not be made to see the point of, or was quite rightly convinced, even then, they'd somehow got wrong. I'd hazard a guess, for example, if I'm to be generous, and say half of the history I was taught was true. Not entirely the teachers' fault, I should think, as they may not have known any better themselves. Mr. Flynn introduced William Manchester at one one. That was rather a surprise.

It isn't really the well-intentioned or the competent though that I remember best. Who does? Other than the ones who actually made something memorable, like Ms. K. Gilliland, in her whirling peasant skirts, whirling her way through Shakespeare's tragedies as if, from somewhere, she heard a lute, mostly who one remembers are the cranks and the loonies, and the bullies, of course, can't forget them. Like the 9th grade science teacher and religious fanatic who "skipped" human evolution, and once told me, "privately," that Catholics went to Hell, or the mad war veteran who might forget a scheduled quiz and instead demonstrate between the rows of desks how to escape a submarine filled with smoke, or the militant Libertarian who taught the Civil War as the "War of Northern Aggression," and called Social Security, "a tragedy."

I don't know that any of those last three deserved employment in a public or any other kind of school, but realistically, they were rather a cross section of the community. I doubt it was their union cards alone that kept them on the payroll.

Now that this fascinating media "discussion" is underway, I find myself almost sentimentally defensive of the general run of my school teachers. Most were no better, and no worse, than most of the adults I encountered as a kid. Strikes me as both hypocritical and frankly more than a little ridiculous -- to say nothing of the underlying political agenda involved -- to hold teachers to a standard higher than that to which any or all of the ministers and priests I ever met subscribed, to say nothing of the scout leaders, the school administrators, the PTA, or most of the parents I've ever known, other than my own of course. I was lucky there.

And it must be a specially thankless job, teaching. Oh, I know, it is now the rule evidently that teachers must all be either great or nothing, but while that's obvious nonsense, I wonder how most people do it. I, for one, would be an awful teacher. Shiver to think. Never contemplated even the possibility. I've know some of my contemporaries who did, and then thought better of it. I know more than one brilliant student, now my age, who once taught for a bit, usually in graduate school, and then had the sense to become a librarian.

But I don't mean to defend the worst, either. I'm thinking of the truly memorable villains, not just the drunks and depressives, the dogmatists and the fanatics, but the real monsters. Everybody remembers the villain, no? The truly bad teachers I have in mind, were, quite frankly, just awful people.

All my monsters, or most of them, I should think, are dead. I can think of few human beings better remembered, or ironically enough, likely to be less lightly mourned, than one's worst teachers. Bad bosses, bad lovers, bad roommates, none but bad parents, I should think, come quite so quickly back to mind, or haunt whole areas of enquiry or endeavor so effectively, down even into the dignity of an otherwise contented middle age. I know many a competent, confident matron who can still be made blush passing a mirror by some thoughtless cruelty tossed off as a joke by some lumpen, hormonal lady-coach, and many a strong man who still can't figure a fraction without remembering the sting of a ruler across his palm. Literature is full of heartless masters thrashing their pupils into unconsciousness, wicked marms humiliating their tearful charges... worse. That my eighth grade algebra teacher has long since salted whatever sorry plot of earth into which she was finally felled, does not mean I can keep from still catching an echo of her insufferable rasp in every old woman who questions my competence to calculate the tax on a special order at the bookstore where I work. "What are you, stupid?" That my junior high school gym coach should by now at least be beyond the vengeance of any but the nursing home orderlies who -- one can only pray -- he also pinched and mocked in "special" gym, does not compensate me for my irrational horror of locker-rooms, communal showers and anyone for whom "fitness" may best be judged by completed laps and a stop-watch. (I suppose I might be grateful for the traumatic distrust of even the most seemingly safe and clean bath-houses he unwittingly instilled in me, as this may have inadvertently saved my life at the dawn of the dangerous eighties, but no, even that I refuse to put to the old brute's credit. May he rot.)

Had I the time, or was it my purpose tonight to call out all the martinets and bullies that ruled and ruined for me so many of the schoolrooms in that little town I've tried to forget, I could go on. If called on, I could provide a list. But I'm already weary of the topic, so perhaps another time.

Meanwhile, anyone with children really needn't pay any attention to me on this subject at all. I'm sure it matters very much, to you. Perhaps, given the publicity generated by this new film, something might actually be done to get the worst of them gone, but as for making all that great majority "great," well... I'm sure your children deserve no less. Good luck with that.