I was saying good-bye to the students and parents of my first teaching class in May of 1978. Suddenly, I felt a tug on my pants leg. Little Jessica motioned for me to bend over so she could whisper in my ear.
“Study hard in ‘callyidg’ so you can teach third grade next year,” she told me.
“I promise to study hard in college this summer and upgrade my teacher skills,” I said.
I didn’t try to explain to her how teaching assignments actually work. In an interesting bit of irony, though, four years later, I was switched to sixth grade. Jessica was happy to be in my class again. She thanked me for working hard in “Callyidg” so I could move up the academic ladder with her.
Colorado has pretty good laws when it comes to teacher certification. Exhibit A is that first of all, one has to have the equivalent of a degree in a specific academic subject. That eliminates people getting “teaching degrees” that are all process based without any content. Second, there is no teacher tenure in Colorado. Any teacher, after a three year probationary period, can be fired with documentation. And last, every teacher has to take classes and recertify every five years.
When I first started teaching, I thought the five year requirement was just a way for the state and colleges to make more money. But over time, I saw something different. Students tend to undergo cultural changes that proceed in roughly five year cycles. Forcing teachers to go back to school and interact with other educators helps them recognize and develop strategies to deal with a changing population. I think we should have a similar requirement for school administrators. They should have to teach a class once every five years to understand changing student/parent dynamics. The best administrators I ever worked with taught classes regularly. It helped keep them humble and grounded in reality.
My college classes do the same thing. I am currently enrolled in two classes at Pikes Peak Community College, where I am also an adjunct professor. Now, I rub shoulders with freshman straight out of high school, military personnel, and workers trying to upgrade their own job skills. I even have a former undergrad in class with me. Doing the academic dance alongside students who have various backgrounds, skill levels, and goals helps me be a better instructor. I am reminded of simple things like how frustrating an online syllabus can be. Or how hard it is to get things in the right format when formatting rules change annually.
Instructions for assignments, which seem perfectly clear to the professor, are as opaque as Darth Vader’s helmet to a student struggling to do homework after a full day on the job.
A reality show called Undercover Boss puts CEOs into entry level positions in the companies they run. The fun, if it can be called that, is in seeing just how out of touch many powerful people are when it comes to what they ask underlings to do. It is safe to say that most people have had at least one, if not more than one, boss like that. People get satisfaction from seeing the mighty humbled by simple repetitive tasks that workers have to perform to put food on the table.
As a lifelong learner, I stay pretty close to my students and their emotional needs. I elicit feedback from them every class and adjust my teaching accordingly. With younger students, I try to allay their fears about school. Older students also have fears, but they tend to be different. In each case, I let them know what my expectations are both in terms of academics and behavior. College students especially want to know what they need to do to get whatever grade they feel they need in the class.
They also want to know if their professor is a jerk or not. This isn’t an easy question to answer. Certainly, my wife would nod “yes” at times. And, as I noted in the essay “The Reason There are so Many A******s in the World,” being a jerk is more common than most of us will admit to. Based on forty years of observation, I can attest to the fact that roughly 90% of my students like me as a teacher. The remaining 10% think quite the opposite. At the beginning of each semester, I show new students the percentages and encourage them to think about which group they fit into.
As much as I dread taking classes, it’s like regular exercise. It’s good for you in spite of any pain or discomfort. In England, there used to be a tradition that on one day each year, the master and servant traded places. In a school I worked in, we had one day of the year in which everybody traded jobs. Most teachers agreed publicly that it was a good idea. Privately, though, they hated it and worked behind the scenes until they successfully killed it off. It’s a pity.
The world would be a better place if we all had to trade places regularly with people above us and below us on life’s ladder. At the very least, every educator should have to be a student on a regular basis. It might not cure what wrong with education in this country. But it’s a lot better than what we’ve been doing. Just ask the CEOs on Undercover Boss.
