Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/208500
Member Talk, cont. from page 5 the human species, we will keep failing kids up, and that's a hard fact. Second is the passion problem. Everyone knows passion is the greatest element in good teaching – and we do next to nothing about it. We don't talk about passion except in vague or platitudinous terms. Not only are we overtesting and under-teaching, in so doing, we increasingly wring the joy from education. Academic passion and consequent delight, true enough, are difficult to measure, but they are authentic values, easily recognized, and warrant real and practical support. We must regularly begin asking in faculty and department meetings, "What makes it fun to teach?" and "When do you learn the most? How does that happen?" Unless we answer such important questions, then we will continue with our current, destructive, and delusional belief that we exist to measure, as opposed to the better and bigger picture, that people live to learn and learn in order to really live. In short, it's the "fun" problem and it pervades, or evades, what we call education today. Third is the politics problem. By this, I do not mean the mournful mantra that education has become too political. I mean that too many of us fail to realize that education has always been political and always will be. Consider the following: •Educators' due process rights, which is won, virtually always, via political strength; •Textbook adoption; economic, ethnic and cultural dimensions of public education realities; district "grades;" teacher evaluations, assessment, and accountability driven by legislation; and much, much more are all played out on political fields; •Students' rights to honest, up-to-date, factual, challenging curricula, and universal academic freedom are always political footballs. •Funding for schools as politically realized and/ or politically undermined and occasionally redressed by citizen's political action; •The ability to belong to an association and benefit from collective bargaining are the results of years of political struggle. This list could go on much longer. The odd thing is that so many educators say they don't like politics, even though it's pretty much the atmosphere that permeates their work, happily Winter.13advo.indd 31 or unhappily. Many teachers don't even bother to vote, despite urging the values of citizenship upon their pupils. Instead, we could be models to our students, voting and participating, showing them how democracy is done by people they know and admire. It is unarguably true that action is burdensome. It is equally true that action creates opportunity. We tell our students this daily, but often forget ourselves. Yet our history matters. We strove to get this far and only effort respects effort. The day that educators generally accept this will be a better day. The most effective of all the metaphors that originate from "fairy tales," it seems to me, is the "Emperor's New Clothes." Only sufficient honesty punctures sham courtly practice and concordant misrule. We should be honest enough to address the placement problem, and stop pretending that we don't regularly leave children behind via false promotion. We must bravely take on the passion problem. Instead of neurotically over-testing and under-teaching, we can be courageous enough to: ask kids to tell us why they're so confused and literally careless; allow for teachers to explain and be heard about why their jobs have become increasingly difficult; and ask teachers for a better way to proceed and give them more genuine rein on how they would blueprint that way. We have to treat that fuzzy, lip-service word, passion, with real admiration, and admit that along with some of our currently prominent educational values, such as standards, assessment, and accountability, there are others just as powerful and more, like curiosity, creativity, and fun. These are how we all learn best and how learning becomes lifestyle. All the testing in the world will not change that, at least, not for the better. We have to be brave enough to care most about the immeasurable. Finally, and equally, we should be self-honest and acknowledge our own personal political problem. Education is political and so must more of us be. In all, we need to be much more truthful – to ourselves, society, and systematically. It will never be simple or easy. Good educators, luckily, are pretty inclined toward hard work for long-range results. 2 AEA Advocate x Winter 2013/14 31 11/4/13 3:23 PM