Teacher Professionalism: Pedagogy and Politics [View All]

[proud2BlibKansan]

This was a featured speech at the NCTE (National Council of Teachers of English) Convention in Orlando, Florida, November 20, 2010

A few excerpts. The whole piece is a great read and echoes my feelings well.

I like wearing this scarf both because it expresses the theme of my remarks and because it connects with some research conducted by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Kevin Rathunde, and Samuel Whalen in Chicago. Using an Experience Sampling Method, they hooked up 9th and 10th graders in accelerated or advanced classes to beepers and beeped them during the school day, asking them to answer questions in a provided booklet, questions which asked what they were thinking about at that time. As it happens, while a teacher lectured 27 students on Genghis Khan's invasion of China and the conquest of Bejing in 1215, only two of those students mentioned China: One was thinking about a meal he'd had the night before in a Chinese restaurant and the other wondered why the men used to wear pigtails. Nobody mention Genghis Khan.

No teacher would be surprised. We can teach and teach and teach but that doesn't mean that students are listening.

We teachers have to ask ourselves the very difficult question: "Who bears more responsibility: the people who produce the high stakes tests and scripted curricula, the people who demand they be inflicted on children, or the people who use them day in and day out?"
All I know is if teachers remain silent, they are going to lose their profession. In many cases, the profession is dead: when you're reading a script, you are not a professional. When you engage in test prep, you are not a professional.

Bill Gates and Arne Duncan & Barack Obama and the Business Roundtable are systematically destroying the profession of teaching, and our professional organization must help us stand up for who we are.
Duncan and Gates are wrong: The 'best and the brightest' are not the people we need in our schools: We need the savvy, rock steady, dependable, loving, forgiving people who have an enormous capacity for wait time and the psychological equilibrium to be able to enter the classroom every day not holding a grudge for what happened the day before.

Race to the Top, like No Child Left Behind is part of this global project to deprofessionalize teaching as an occupation. . . . The thinking is that the biggest expenditure in education is teacher salaries. And they want to cut costs. They want to diminish the amount of money that's put into public education. And that means they have to lower teacher costs. And in order to do that, they have to deprofessionalize teaching.

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