Cranial Gunk

Right around the fifth paragraph of Marie Lee’s op-ed in the New York Times To Sir With Love started playing in my head. It’s right around there she introduces us to Ms. Leibfried, her high school English teacher. It is Ms. Leibfried who “appeared at a critical juncture” in Marie’s life and gave her the confidence to go on as a writer.

In asking “how exactly do we measure the value of a teacher?” Marie reminds us that some things in life are truly priceless — that there is a profound difference between material costs and emotional value (or impact).

I have had some “great” teachers in my life. By “great” I mean they had a significant impact on my perceptions of the world and myself and not that they were distinguishably good in the classroom.

Like Marie, I also had an English teacher who inspired me to write. Not fiction but poetry. I like the rhythm. The way Allen Ginsberg said “Buddha” and the severe matter-of-fact manner of Burroughs reading from The Nova Express and Jack Kerouac. I like the ease Jack Kerouac sliding through the lines of The Subterraneans.

I am fortunate enough to be able to look at my early poems from high school and cringe. I say this because I’d like to believe my writing has matured since I penned my Police inspired couplets and since the time I first met Marie at the then fledgling Asian American Writer’s Workshop.

And I wonder, if the experiences were the same for both Marie and me, how many of us in that fledgling group of writers had teachers that inspired them as well? How many benefitted from that lone voice of encouragement that provided them with just the right amount of momentum to push them past the insecurities of expressing themselves honestly?

Much to the tolerance and patience of my friends and coworkers, I have been Bible-thumping Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers’ book, What’s Mine is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption. Among the concepts they bring to light regarding our relationship with material objects is the belief that (1) it is not so much the object that has meaning but the experiences the object has come to represent and (2) there are unintended positive environmental (and social) benefits to intentions (innovations and inventions) begun to meet a single objective or resolve a single condition.

The great teachers in my life have the same reach and power as that cassette collection that accompanied me for more than a score. They hadn’t been played in close to a decade but it was still hard eventually letting them go. In addition to helping me memorize the facts and figures I needed to get from test to test, these teachers provided me with lasting experiences that helped shape the course of my life and that I now try to pass on to my own children.

Marie is right. With the current public denigration of classroom teachers by ambitious politicians, fattening their careers on the fears and frustrations of a deflated nation, it is easy to forget the resounding and phenomenal impact teachers can have on a person beyond the here and now.

An abridged version of this post appears on the K2Twelve blog. For one reason or another I am unable to post the complete version there, so I’m doing it here:

I caught the tail end of the Crime Dramas episode of the PBS series, Pioneers of Television. Of the detective show I have the fondest memories of,  Columbo , they said it was the first crime drama to show you “whodunnit” at the beginning – In fact they (the show) went a step further to even show you how it was done! They (Pioneers of Television) said people kept watching because the detective was so likeable, they wanted to see how he would solve the crime.

But Columbo is more than just a good television crime drama with a pioneering approach. It is a guide to effective teaching. The hypocrisy of Obama’s Educate to Innovate program is that inevitably in its implementation it will test the  teaching right out of the classroom (along with any possibility to educate or innovate). School districts will interpret “educating and innovating” as a new battery of high stakes tests. Teachers will be punished for not teaching to the test as the notion of merit will be based solely on test scores and not innovative or – more importantly – inspiring teaching. Students will suffer as they seek only to be told the right answers, ignoring the benefits and thrills of experimentation and unexpected outcomes.

In the Season 7 episode, “Try and Catch Me,” the Lieutenant asks famous mystery writer and suspect, Abigail Mitchell, to help him unravel the puzzle of a drawn message left by the murder victim on a stack of metal safety deposit boxes. Like a good teacher, Columbo models the task by demonstrating the steps to solving the problem. He then asks the student (Abigail) to try – and most importantly – he allows her to fail, each time dropping a bread crumb here and there to assist her in eventually arriving at the correct solution.

In Season 2’s episode, “Double Shock,” Columbo has Mrs. Peck at her wits end, as he turns her well kept world upside down with his investigative antics. This culminates in the final scenes where Columbo characteristically tests a hypothesis himself. Here he demonstrates effective teaching methods by engaging in a proof of a hypothesis and upon failing engages in developing new hypotheses. This is what effective teachers might do to encourage creative problem solving skills among their students (Innovation).

The Ultimate Columbo Site has a complete episode guide in addition to trivia about the the Columbo series. In each episode, Columbo demonstrates the qualities of sound teaching (that is as it should be, not as it is made to be by politicians and data pornographers). Every time test scores become newsworthy, a big hullabaloo is made over how US students lag behind students in other countries, especially in math and science. Instead of nurturing habits of inquiry and study, the solution has been more rote memorization and testing. But no one ever thinks to test “the Test”!

No one questions the validity or appropriateness of the tests given. If the goal is to measure US student math performance against Chinese math performance using the same test, then it is not unreasonable to expect both parties to be using the same – or at least similar — curriculum (set of lessons and topics). However, it has been pointed out that this is not the case!

While I do not agree with the draconian drill system of teaching mathematics favored by Chinese teachers, I do agree that students need a firm grasp of core concepts in order to engage in creative math activities. Columbo models this in his catchphrase: “Oh just one more thing…” He takes the time to understand the situation fully before engaging in creative experiments to prove his hypothesis. Students need to be given time to do the same in math and science education.