Teachers are not (yet) professionals, II

Trust me, I get why we need unions. 

The NEA might want to remember that they need us even more than we need it.

Here's the first one in this series.

I have heard this refrain too many times in my second profession:

"We're professionals, we deserve more respect!"

There will always be those outside any exclusive profession that will try to knock it down a peg or two. Given that billionaires and governors have taken up the schtick, I understand the frustration. This is my house, too.

If we're going to become professionals, and we're not there yet, we're going to need to learn how to act more professional. Publicly complaining about lack of respect won't garner us any.

Here are some questions I think are worth asking among ourselves. Do not worry about what Arne, or Eli, or Billy, or any of the dozens of edu-shucksters out there hustling for a piece of the public pie.

If teachers associations were glued together as guilds, bound to advancing competency of our craft, as opposed to unions, bound to represent the interests of teachers, who in your building would be invited to join?

If "research-based best practices" was used honestly, and we, as professionals, took the time to assess the research behind these practices, how many of us would still cling to Marzano's miracle numbers?

If teachers took the time to read the research on cognition, who among us would continue to blather base our methodology on  Gardner's "theory" of multiple intelligences?

I don't mind getting my ass kicked by a fellow teacher who strives to improve her craft as I strive to improve mine--I came from a field where this was not only encouraged, but formalized in regular morbidity and mortality (M&M) conferences. The profession's standards matter more than the feelings of those licensed to uphold those standards. If your school adopted regular M&M conferences, what would be discussed? Which of your disasters deserves this kind off scrutiny?

If teachers had a professional organization of their own responsible for licensure, what kind of missteps would lead to suspension of your license?

I love what I do, and teaching matters more to me than it does to most folks--that's as it should be. I know more about cognitive science than most people, also as it should be. Every teacher should be able to say the same.

At least if you want a place in our guild.

"No ideas but in things"

"No ideas but in things."

--William Carlos Williams

Stuff comes from stuff.
That's a big deal. 

Everything you touch came from something else. If we ever truly taught science as knowledge, instead of as a means to magical goals, we'd get this.

If we ever taught science as knowledge, we would not need STEM initiatives.We'd need more science classrooms.

Somehow biology has become this brainy, biochemical abstract broth disconnected from the muck and the mud that have always fascinated children.

If a child knows more about his DNA that his poop, he don't know shit.

We really need to go back to what we know we know....

Et tu, Zappa?

There's seems to be some confusion about my role.

I am, of course, an agent of the government, of the public, of my town. I am a science teacher, which should mean I teach science.

Arne says it means I am the linchpin of our economy.
Einstein said I have the power to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.
Governor Christie says it means I'm a lazy ass lapping at the public trough. His sidekick Cerf says I'm an ankle-biter.
Walt Whitman said I should be destroyed.
Cicero said I am pretty valuable to the state--even used the word "noble."
Frank Zappa advised children to avoid me lest their minds rot.

Frank Zappa might be right....

 
All kinds of noble and ignoble nonsense spews from the mouths of those who would judge me.

Teachers are fair game, and understandably so--we're involved in a process no one truly understands honing our varied skills on the most impressionable among us. That these impressionable folk happen to be the result of sexual unions among adults who (mostly) live in the same town I teach only adds to the fun. Add to that that they're paying me out of pocket to do this, well, I expect a little noise.


I'll make it easy for you.

• I teach children science because I want them to see the world outside of humans--infinitely fascinating.
• I teach science because I want my republic to survive the nonsense spewed by those who'd stomp on their children to push a career--a nation still worth salvaging.
• I teach children because their fresh views help me see better--and as my senses fade in my twilight, I need all the help I can get.
• I teach mostly because I love it--I'm selfish that way.

Frank Zappa photo from The Rebel Kind. 

Teachers are not (yet) professionals

A scorpion, being a very poor swimmer, asked a turtle to carry him on his back across a river. "Are you mad?" exclaimed the turtle. "You'll sting me while I'm swimming and I'll drown." 

"My dear turtle," laughed the scorpion, "if I were to sting you, you would drown and I would go down with you. Now where is the logic in that?" 

"You're right!" cried the turtle. "Hop on!" The scorpion climbed aboard and halfway across the river gave the turtle a mighty sting. As they both sank to the bottom, the turtle resignedly said: 

"Do you mind if I ask you something? You said there'd be no logic in your stinging me. Why did you do it?"

"It has nothing to do with logic," the drowning scorpion sadly replied. "It's just my character." 

Joe Hill

I belong to the Bloomfield Education Association, the NJEA, and the NEA--none have behaved admirably the past couple of years, but they have done what unions are supposed to do. I pay them a lot of money to do this, and I'll just smile here and pretend everything's hunky-dory. That's how the rank and file are supposed to roll.

A lot of teachers are frustrated, but that's part of being in any profession that deals with embryos that pretty much do what they do, no matter what the President, the Pope, or the PTA say.  We can handle frustration.

What we cannot tolerate is our erosion of autonomy.

The union fights for dollars, benefits, hours (ha!), and reasonable working conditions. It does not fight for the kids. Not saying it should (though if the NEA could grab $15/year/kid I bet it would), but let's be clear on what the union does. It serves a clear and necessary function, as do septic tanks and sergeants.

If a colleague of yours is accused of doing something unseemly with a student, the union lawyers will defend him, no matter what the circumstances. We pay the scorpions to be scorpions, and I'm OK with that.

Just don't expect them to be anything they're not.

***

In medicine, I almost got to fisticuffs twice--and I still regret not punching a particular colleague in the nose (/me waves to Barry).

Cooler heads prevailed, and instead we tossed journals at each other. P values, corroborated studies, prospective vs. retrospective, controlled vs. anecdotal, meta-analysis vs. multiple studies. A lot of medicine is as mucky and murky as Chicago politics, but we worked with what we had, and we had a common goal: fix the kids.

If a child died, we all lost.

I don't get the sense that my current profession fears damage to children more than damage to ourselves. We say the right things, but our behavior is what matters.

If a hospital administrator ever tried to pawn the stuff masquerading as "research" in the ed world, we would have simply laughed. Despite organizational charts on paper, we knew as the ones directly giving care that we held the power. Laughter has a way of democratizing a workplace.

Instead I get a union that put this on the cover of NJEA Review last September:

Mikey don't play that way.....

A profession can survive a crisis in faith, as long as our faith is shared. It cannot survive a lack of vision.

A profession can survive bad research, as long as the research can be assessed honestly. It cannot survive bad research used dishonestly.

We're either professionals. or we're not. It's our behavior, not our words, that matter.

***

The union is designed to protect our jobs, not our profession. That's up to us.

I have an idea. Why not develop guilds to complement our unions?

• We have a common cause, educating our children.
• We have common methods, subject to peer-reviewed research.
• We have common goals. Within a building we know who's got game.

No more fear. No more fear. No more fear. No more fear.

***

In two weeks, licensed NJ professional high school teachers will proctor the HSPA, our alms to NCLB. We will grumble, we will bark, and we'll still hand out the tests.

Arne has not earned our love.

 

Some of us might even feel dirty, though most of us will just do what we do because we're told to do it.

That's not professionalism. 

***

I'd like a colleague to be passionate enough, mad enough, care enough to punch me in the nose if my actions endanger a child.

Look at your classroom. Look at your students. Look at your actions.

Here in New Jersey we are in real danger of losing our union protections within the next two years. A few of us will lose our paychecks no matter what we do.

I propose that we work together to do what's best for our kids. We can hash out just what that might be privately, and a few noses might get bloodied. The only hard rule is that we act what we believe matters for our kids, not ourselves.

Isn't that why you got into this profession?

If you're happy and you know it, clap your hands....

Jose Vilson and Ken Bernstein got me going today. Tom Hoffman deserves some blame, too. How far are you going to take this?

The turtle and the scorpion story is well-known, lofted verbatim from Snopes.

The electric slide

I occasionally borrow a hand-cranked generator from the physics folks a floor below. It's a very simple device, exquisitely crafted by someone likely dead now. It should work well for another hundred years.

It's simple, and makes the concept of "generating" electricity accessible. If you spin a coil of copper inside a magnet, you push electrons. (You do not, of course, create these electrons anymore than you create the magnets or the wire.)

If you put some resistance in the path of these electrons, say, a light bulb, you need to crank much harder to spin the coil. Again, you can feel this. You are converting mechanical energy into something that "pushes" back.

It takes a fair amount of force to brighten up a reasonably sized bulb.

If a child learns nothing more than this, that to "create" electricity requires a push, that it's not magic, that you don't get electricity for nothing, she's a step ahead of most adults.

***

When I crank on the generator, I breathe a little harder as my muscle cells are called on to work. My cells burn up organic molecules, breaking down into carbon dioxide, using oxygen to catch the remnants of these molecules, spent electrons, in the depths of my mitochondria.

When I crank on the generator, the concentration of carbon dioxide in my room rises a tiny bit--the same carbon dioxide implicated in global warming.

When I crank on the generator, my muscles warm up a little bit--when I convert chemical energy into mechanical, I am less than 100% efficient. The heat I lose no longer serves me.

When I crank on the generator, I make energy increasingly less useful, energy captured as bonds by plants, now released as mechanical energy by me, so I can see photons emitted from the lamp. It took a bucketload of sunlight to produce a thimble's worth of incandescence.

A young child does not need to know any of this to know that generating electricity requires a push, and that the more electricity you need, the more push you must provide.

***

I remember learning about electric generators--it was a classic mid-20th century 16 mm film, moving images of the Hoover Dam with a sonorous male (always male) voice extolling our  country's technological virtues.My brain whirs with the clickety-ckickety of a 1963 projector when I think of dams. Children are that impressionable....

A huge dam with huge turbines generated huge amounts of electricity. Somehow that juice got to the wall. It cost nothing because rivers were meant to be damned.

In junior high, my class visited the Oyster Creek nuclear plant, and again we learned about huge turbines generating huge amounts of electricity, clean energy, so safe school children wander within yards of a nuclear reactor.
.
Turns out most electricity generated in the States comes from burning coal, a process remarkably similar to the way I extracted energy from last night's clams. Oxygen strips off electrons from unstable organic molecules, coal and clams to carbon dioxide and water. I do it in a lot more steps, or else I'd spontaneously combust, but the end result is the same. The universe has smaller, more stable molecules, and useful work can be done.

Either way, something had to put the unstable molecules together in the first place. Both coal and clams rely on the nuclear furnace just under 100 million miles away, both coal and clams rely on plants to do this. You don't get something for nothing in the natural world.

***

This is a Chevy Volt. It is an electric car.

You can plug it into your wall and pretend it's green. Or you can start thinking about where things come from, where things go.

If giant hands holding up the Earth assuage whatever feelings you might have as we plunder the planet, then we get the planet we deserve. Nothing comes from nothing.


 GM is depending on your ignorance (and your guilt) to shell out over $30,000 for a car.Before you do, come on by B362, and I'll let you crank on our class generator for a bit.


You're an adult now--time to give up magical thinking.

We can argue about the efficiency of coal-generated generating plants vs. gasoline engines, about the relative costs of charging a car during peak or off hours, about the carbon cost of making huge batteries, about the break point (likely around 80k miles) where a Volt may be greener than your Daddy's Oldsmobile, about the risks and benefits of dams, of nuclear rods, of dams, of wind, of solar, of tidal generators.

And these could be interesting discussions....

If you don't believe in magic

First photo from Old Pinawa self-guided tour online brochiue here

Curious thoughts

I have had it up to my ears with folks reminding me about the natural curiosity of children, as though teachers spend their idle hours dreaming of ways to squelch it.

Unless the definition of curiosity has evolved (which is quite possible in an ed world that confounds "tolerance" and "love"), pretty much anything furry with nipples has natural curiosity, and as good as I am, I'm not going to be able to teach a marmoset much.

Curiosity is what made Jerry Springer a superstar. Every time we reduce science to something that flashes, fizzes, or booms in a classroom, we've Springerized science.

Science  defies hashing patterns we think we know. That's why it works. It kicks our ass over and over again each and every time we think we know everything about the natural world.

Children are also naturally religious superstitious. They see patterns where none logically naturally exist. 

***

If you want a child to care about the natural world more than, say, angels, witches, and aliens (all interesting in their own right), you're going to need to introduce her to what's real.

Toss out the television, ditch the iPad, chuck the earbuds, and, most important, stop feeding her fear. Big Macs kill a lot more people than mud pies ever did.

It's not lack of curiosity that kills interest in the natural world, it's lack of exposure.

Heck, even toss out the books if your child has never turned over a rock to see what lies underneath.

Gingko blues

Do not ever follow any advice I give for eating anything. If something has an acetyl group in it, I'll try it. 

Some folks' skin reacts to the pulp, too. This is the Science Teacher blog, not Fine Foods.

My favorite tree on the Bloomfield Green was cut down a couple of days ago, mostly for the crime of doing what its family has done for a quarter billion years: stink.

The tree was about as old as me, had its first offspring about the same time as I did. I pray the coincidences end with its death.

The gingko is infamous for its stinky fruit--some call it the "vomit tree"--but I loved my tree, walked by it several hundred times a year, and I'm going to miss it.

***

While the fruit do stink--imagine a dog vomiting into your son's gym socks sometime mid-June--the wood's subtle piney jasmine scent rivals my stash of ambergris for my favorite nose candy. I brought a wedge back into B362. One of my lambs also loved the smell--she took the wedge home with her.

I'm hoping the nuts are at least half as good.

I've read several different ways to prepare them, but I think I'm just going to roast them until they look roasted enough, then pop one or two or more into my mouth. I'll let you know how it goes.

***

What does this have to do with teaching science?

Most of my lambs have no idea where food comes from. A few watched me as I picked up a few fruits off the ground. I told them I planned to eat them, and I do.

An ancient tree planted decades ago in my town, likely by someone now dead, has been fallen by a cultural intolerance of, well, smell. Before the tree passes from my memory, I want to know what she tastes like.

The aroma of my fallen gingko reminded me of the vast unknown pleasures that await the curious. I want my students to chase the pleasures nature offers each of us, for barely the cost of paying attention, even here in an urban district, long tamed by concrete and asphalt.

The world is bigger than we can dream. It's not enough for me to say it, no child should accept the word of a teacher because he is a teacher. The gingko can speak for itself.

To be fair, the tree was not completely healthy. Then again, neither is anything else our age.

Photo from "Wildman" Steve Brill's site, a site well worth the visit.