Roadblocks: I Won at a Rigged Game
Two warnings:
First, I’m not entirely sure where I’m going with this, but I think the journey is one I ought to take.
Second, parts of this are going to make me sound like an arrogant jerk. I promise to beat myself up a bit to make up for it, and I ask your indulgence because I think it’s necessary.
Another of my recurring arguments with myself boils down to my own ego. There are lots of truisms that talk about the value of our personal experience. There’s the old expression that writers should write what they know, and one can certainly see the logic of extending the advice to teaching. (I mean, discovering new things with the class is a great thing, but there’s a reason I’m not a Spanish teacher.) From the start of my teaching career, I’ve drawn on my experience as a student. The first semester I taught, I was assigned an Intro to Philosophy course, and got little to no advice on how I should structure it. So I went to my bookcase and started pulling down the books that I read in my first couple of philosophy classes at Fordham and built my classes around them. I still think back to my own high school experiences when I look for models of what I want to achieve as a teacher – my desire to be a teacher was inspired in large part by the credit I give to my own teachers for the person I am today.
But that path from student to teacher has included a number of experiences that make me critical of the status quo in education, so I don’t want to just copy what I did verbatim. The trick is, as I try to figure out ways to change the system, I am also a product of the system. Challenging the validity of the system also challenges the validity of my own accomplishments.
For starters, I am really, really good at standardized and objective tests. I don’t know why; this is one of those things where I don’t ask the centipede how it keeps all its legs moving. But whenever a standardized test has served as a filtering mechanism or checkpoint to an opportunity, I have not had to worry about the test blocking me, and I have known there was a good chance that the test would help me. From what I understand, it was my GRE score more than anything that got me into graduate school and is certainly the reason I got the aid that I did. On the one hand, I might criticize a merit pay proposal for teachers because I think it puts too much weight on standardized test results. On the other hand, I make sure I let people know about my own results if I think it would help me. On the one hand, I get frustrated when test prep becomes a focus in my lesson planning. On the other hand, I know that test-taking is a skill that affects my students’ future well-being even though it shouldn’t be, so shouldn’t I try to help them build that skill?
Even when you get past the tests, the bulk of my education wasn’t in the “progressive†mode that I discovered in Dewey and consider ideal today. From high school to grad school, I read books – some textbooks, some full books, some anthologies – and went to class, where I listened to lectures, participated in class discussions, and took notes. When it was over I took a test or wrote an essay or both. That’s how I learned about history. That’s how I learned about politics. That’s how I learned about Dewey, and let me tell you, reading Democracy and Education is no Deweyan experience, even though I wouldn’t trade reading it for the world. And those experiences still permeate my teaching today. I teach my students how to outline a chapter because I learned how to outline a chapter, and that’s how I took notes for almost 25 years of schooling so gosh darn it, it must be a good idea. And truth be told, I think that outlines, when done right, provide good practice at tying ideas and facts together, and it would benefit a lot of people to improve those organizational skills. I’m not just doing t because of tradition.
Of course, the guy in class next to me who never got the hang of outlines probably didn’t have as positive of a school experience as I did, so he doesn’t have the emotional reasons to be a teacher, so there we have the system perpetuating itself even if the system shouldn’t be perpetuated.
But if the system that produced me is so flawed that it should be overhauled, on what basis do I make my claim that I should be part of the new system?
To a certain extent, this is the self-examination that every society should be doing. What parts of my self, and my society, are worth passing along to the next generation? What parts are better left to pass away with my generation? How can we become something even better than we were? How can I become someone better than I was? (I swiped those ideas from Dewey, by the way. Told you all that reading was good for something.)
It’s just that sometimes it’s really hard for me to trust myself or my answers to these questions, and the arguments I have with myself leave me paralyzed. I have to hope that all of those essays and class discussions and tests also allowed me to build a skill for critically examining and understanding the world. I have to hope they give me insights on how I built those skills, and how the system might have impeded some of my colleagues from making similar progress. And I have to hope I have the chance to use those skills to build something even better than the system that produced me, even if that means taking a hammer to some of my own achievements – and even if it means doing some things the old fashioned-way. And to the extent that some of those skills and opportunities are the result of unfair advantages that I have had, all I can do is try to remain aware of my good fortune and do my best to turn it into good fortune for others. These days, I’m often finding that easier said than done.
About Dave Thomer
Born and raised in Philadelphia. Studied philosophy at Fordham University in the Bronx, where I made many great friends and met my wonderful wife. We moved back to Philadelphia, where I studied philosophy some more and became a teacher. Online and off, I'm looking for ways that we can be better citizens and build stronger communities.