Not-So-Bad Teacher

Van Halen--"Hot For Teacher" (mp3)

Bad Teacher does not need to be made into something that it isn't. It is not satire, social commentary, an indictment of our educational system, a witty expose or anything of the sort. It is not especially relevant to our times or mandatory viewing for anyone entering the profession.

But it's pretty funny and it does get a lot of things right.

PLOT: Self-serving gold-digger becomes teacher after fiance dumps her. Convinced she can get another rich man with a "boob job," she begins scheming for the money to do that.

Forget, for a moment, the Hollywood trappings of the film that must make her as outrageous as possible. As a teacher, Cameron Diaz's character, Elizabeth Halsey, shows movies to kill class time, sucks up to the principal by feigning interest in his hobby, minimizes her indiscretions, disparages the teacher who seems to do everything perfectly, doesn't bother to learn her students' names, teaches to a test, pays little attention to her required chaperoning duties, has nothing to say to parents on Parents' Night, tutors solely for the money, does whatever it takes to win the "teaching bonus." And, when a student bring her a homemade gift of cookies, she doesn't hesitate to tell the girl how much they suck. She does the same thing with student essays, with even more extreme language.

In short, she is some combination of the daily actions (and desired actions) of a typical teacher. Not all teachers, of course. Not all teachers do or want to do or say all of these things. But after a quick, mental, ethnographic study of my school, I have no trouble coming up with teachers who do each of her "bad" actions in the list above. In fact, there are many candidates for each of them.

Her hungover-driven malaise captures the challenges of the profession. Some of the work is drudgery. Some students have been so tightly wound for success by their parents that they are practically insufferable. Some teachers have staked out and continually defend some turf so much that it makes them poor colleagues. As the outsider trying to take advantage of the system, she also exposes its pettiness—the little things one must do to be part of the team.

Among her colleagues, we see the ones who are afraid to challenge the rules in any way and the "good teacher" ones who work the system in "good" ways that are rewarded--tattling on other teachers, focusing on state standards to a fault, scheming in their own ways for their own advancement. But even the “star” teacher is a victim of the system—she got into her teaching too much 3-4 years earlier and apparently had some kind of breakdown that her adminstrators refuse to forget.

You know, my wife hates movies and television shows about lawyers. Why? Because she is one. And, as such, she can't stand the liberties that such films take with courtroom procedure or the use of evidence or the obvious conflicts of interest that would keep particular lawyers from actually being involved in the cases in question. She can’t suspend the disbelief necessary to watch them. Similarly, so many teaching movies, despite their best intentions, become cringe-worthy. Even something as uplifting as Dead Poets' Society (the soaring ending with a student suicide and a teacher firing) has not held up over time. These teachers who are so committed, so driven to help their students to be the best, they don't exist. There is no point to showing their lives outside the classroom.

You can’t make that criticism of Bad Teacher. Despite the exaggerations of her circumstances, it’s refreshing to see a teaching character who deals with real-life concerns outside the classroom, who can’t drag her best self to school every single day, whose personal relationships impact her relationships with her students, who needs the extrinsic motivations of money and vanity to kick her into doing her best work.

No, Bad Teacher doesn’t need to be made into something that it isn’t. But neither does teaching itself. Teaching is not about the grand gesture, the noble sacrifice, or even about being one of the ranks of committed professionals. It’s about the daily grind, the small victory, the offhand comment or spontaneous action that may change a student’s life forever. And it’s also about a paycheck and the unpleasant things and mundane jobs someone might have to take on to keep or to augment that paycheck. And about the self-doubt that haunts every real teacher, the worry that someone might discover that we, like Elizabeth Halsey, are the frauds that we often think we are.

Twitter & the Luddite

Change of Time - Josh Ritter (mp3)

When removed from its Christian context, an evangelist is anyone who trumpets the glories and power of an idea -- or object or belief -- with the confidence and stubborn insistence that anything short of full commitment is weakness.

The evolution and progression of civilization requires evangelists. Ideas cannot reach enough ears and eyes without the unwavering passionate commitment from these kinds of people.

I am not an evangelist.

A close relative of the evangelist is the early adopter. They’re the eager guinea pigs of the technology world. These are the goobers who camp out overnight so they can be the first to own an iPhone. They’re the ones who pay attention to when a new version of Photoshop is released. When the Zune debuted, early adopters actually purchased those goofy things. They’re the soldiers at the front of the group in the U-boats from Saving Private Ryan -- you know, the first ones to their brains blown out.

I am not an early adopter.

21st Century progress depends heavily on evangelists and early adopters.

In the world of education, you would be hard-pressed to find a larger collection of passionate evangelists and early adopters than collected in Philadelphia in January at a sold-out convention known affectionately as EduCon 2.3. These people drank so much of the Kool-Aid that the damn thing was sold out roughly eight years ago.

I wasn’t there, so everything I say now about EduCon is pure speculation based solely on reading the Tweets and follow-up blogs of many who did attend.

EduCon is the Jesus Camp of teachers who are early adopters and evangelists. They all pack into a finite space, work one another into a fervent lather, speak in techno-tongues, and then disperse with a fiery passion powerful enough to stay lit for days if not a whole week in the face of the pitiful skeptics and realists who were stuck in their classrooms back on the home front.

I mock them because I love them, these wild-eyed iPad-toting preachers who use words like “wiki” and “ning” and “hashtag” and “techno-pedagogy.” Watching them get all wide-eyed and teenage-girl-giddy when talking about something like Pixton is to see the embodiment of hope and conviction and optimism and urgency. Sure, it comes with a dose of negative scary cult vibe, but that’s the price of human nature.

My role in the process is equally essential. My type weighs costs and benefits. We consider risks and rewards. We observe the plights and trevails, the glories and successes of the early adopters. We talk to them. We challenge them. And, over time, we allow them the possibility of convincing us to get on the boat with them.

Our pushback hones an evangelist’s message. It shaves down the brainwashing and forces them to prove their claims. We don’t make the products and beliefs you buy; we make the products and beliefs you buy better.

You know who I don’t love? You know who I don’t understand? Luddites.

Luddites are the Amish. They are anyone who, at any point in time, drew a line and determined that all technology and modernization up to said point was acceptable while all of it beyond said point was evil, deplorable, of the devil, whatever. They are people who bury their head in the sand and wish new things would just go away.

Case in point. Our IT director sent out what was intended as an innocent email. Our school needs to figure out how to use text messaging to reach students, and she was curious as to how many teachers and coaches and dormitory advisors were already doing this. How, what software or program, et cetera.

Three of the emails she received back were sent solely to decry the horror of a school that would discuss using text messages. The level of cleverness and degree of indignation varied, but the theme was constant: “F**k Text Messages and the iPhone they rode in on!”

The goal of the Luddite is merely to freeze time, freeze assumptions, freeze change. And they seethe and growl at those who attempt to move things forward.

The Republicans I struggle most to like are those who seem not to argue for a cause so much as for a bygone era. They romanticize an earlier America and long for us to return to it. They refuse to discuss social change because if it wasn’t like grandma used to make, they want nothing of it. Period.

Ironically, in the world of education, the Luddites tend to be very liberal politically. They don’t mind social change, but they fear anything that threatens the 1955 nature of their authoritarian classroom. Like grandma used to teach it. Of course I’m being overly simplistic, but it feels far more accurate than not.

Text messages, Facebook and XBox are not the enemy. They’re not the devil anymore than automobiles or rotary-dial telephones or the Gutenberg press. They are merely vehicles, means by which and through which both good and evil can be accomplished... albeit usually at a much more efficient pace. Anyone paying sufficient attention to the revolution in Egypt should not so quickly dismiss Twitter as child’s play. It seems 140 characters can play an astonishing Best Supporting Actor role in history.

Educational evolution (or revolution) need not be lightning fast. It need not be dictated and forced through by evangelists. But the longer the Luddites are allowed to stay at the table and scream out their own edu-Palinisms, the sooner it feels an edu-Armageddon is inevitable.

A Teaching Quandry

Sufjan Stevens--"I Walked" (mp3)

A teaching friend of mine is strongly supporting a former student of his who is running for office. He is quite gung-ho about it, pushing the candidacy, wearing the buttons, trying to find the younger man speaking engagements. The problem is that my teaching friend has political positions that are diametrically opposed to the former student he is supporting. At least, that's a problem for me. I don't think my friend sees it that way.

So let's bring the specifics of the situation in quickly and then take them out again: my friend was a rabid Obama supporter two years ago. That is still the way he leans, I'm quite sure. His former student is running in defense of the Constitution, against assaults on the Constitution. "Assaults from whom?" I ask. "Well," he responds, "that is never overtly identified," but he says it with the kind of grin that allows me, who knows him well, to verify that we are talking about Obama. Okay, enough.

This is more universal than that, anyway. This is Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker in a galaxy far, far away and every place and time in between.

How does a teacher support a student whose values are counter to his own? How does a teacher who realizes that a student's values are counter to his own not see his student as unethical or immoral?

It is quite a quandry.

Most of the time, those of us who teach don't have to deal with it. But, then, when you expand the discussion, almost all of us teach--our children, our Sunday School classes, the kid next door, an inner-city child we mentor through a Big Brother-type program, the younger employee to whom we try to share advice or wisdom. And that means that all of us have probably been in this situation.

The choices are fairly perplexing. Either you start to discover or you've always know that the person that you are working with has some unsavory beliefs (unless it's yours that are unsavory, which isn't really a circumstance I'm dealing with here) and you are in a situation or a profession where your support is expected, so you have to decide what to do. Do you tell the student he's wrong? Do you try to change his mind? Do you give him a poor grade for what you consider to be an unethical stance? And what do you do if he ever becomes an adult who is on the "other side," whatever that may be? Do you cut him off? Do you keep challenging him? Do you help him based on some professional principle?

As a young teacher, I took on every student I disagreed with. I had parents calling the Academic Dean because I had hammered their son on a weak (I thought) anti-abortion argument. As an older teacher, I give those positions, when articulated, a nod, and then I try to find another student who will argue a counter position closer to mine so that I can be more the clearinghouse than the opinionator. I'll hear positions that I know are being reiterated from parents and I'll still keep my mouth shut.

I'm not sure my younger self was wrong, but he did run a more divided classroom on a lot of days. And my older self, while not avoiding controversy, has decided to love the student first and to hope that he will come around to different perspectives. Based on what, I don't know. Maybe on the one student I knew who was incredibly conservative but who has moved to the center, at least, as he has gotten older.

Because, eventually, the "student" moves beyond our care with his own opinions. And, at that point, it's probably harder to tell ourselves that he might become something different when he has already become something.

But I don't think that we can endorse something that we don't believe in. At least, I don't think I could. Maybe I could congratulate my former student on his latest endeavor, offer to talk through his positions with him and be a sounding board, maybe challenge his positions or let him know that I don't agree with what he's doing, maybe even go so far as to make a nominal contribution.

Ultimately, I think that, in that position, we do our best with love and support, and that he knows that we offer love and support without agreement, not that we wholeheartedly jump onto a bandwagon when we don't want to take the ride. After all, Obi-Wan reminds us, through his actions, that we only enter into battle with a former student reluctantly, when there is no other option. But we have to confront him, don't we?

Sufjan's latest has nothing to do with my post. He's just so damn good.