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Facilitate, shmacilitate! Try teaching for a change!

I laugh out loud when I read teachers complain about how they are not permitted to "facilitate." During the 1967 opening remarks of the National Education Association's national conference, the then president of this large, powerful labor union said (paraphrasing), that teachers would no longer be simply dispensers of information, but would be there to "facilitate" change in their young charges, to be a sort of "philosopher" who'd guide their students' values and the direction of their thinking, and no longer simply provide the means by which those students might learn dry, boring old subject such as reading, writing, math, science, and history.

And that's just what American public schools "teachers" have been doing ever since. That's what things like The New Math were about. And the New New Math. And Rainforest Math. And "reinterpretive" history. And Whole Language. It's why so much of the work a child does in the public schools today is "group" work.

A friend of mine realized a dream of his when he left another industry to go into teaching high school math. He immediately landed a job at our old high school. This place was, frankly, a hellhole when we went to school there. It's much worse now (I sub teach there occasionally). Late this year, I was filling in for another teacher there, and stopped by for a chat. I asked him how this, his first year was going. He looked at me in slack-jawed incredulity, and told me that his department head said that if he did not "slow them down" (his students and their pace of learning math) the principal would likely want to have a talk with him about his "future" at the school. This, he was told, was what No Child Left Behind had wrought.

Uh, huh. Must be why I was told exactly the same thing by a principal when I was a 5th grade teacher . . . in 2000, several years before NCLB took effect.

The reality is that the teachers-and their unions-control American public schools. The further reality is that for the most part, those who go into teaching do so not to "change the world" or unlike my friend to "make a difference," but rather because their college GPA is in the lowest quintile of their graduating class and they figure oh well, they can always teach! Where else can someone nobody else is likely to hire get a job with the pay, bennies and schedule of a public school teaching gig?

One of the biggest problems union teachers have is their own lack of intellect and education.

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