maycocksean said:
I think a lot of it is cultural. Teachers are authority figures and in our individualistic culture we're not too big on authority figures...We Americans respect power at the point of a gun or the smack of a fist. Teachers don't have that going on. In the past 100+ years or so the majority of teachers on the elem level especially have been women, so there may be some sexism too--the picture of the spinster teacher and so on.
In talking with my Chinese-Korean students, I'm learning that there is a very different attitude towards teachers in their cultures...Teachers are respected deeply in their cultures (though not necessarily liked)...Americans on the other hand are "self-made", and so our destinies are in OUR hands not that of some dry pedagogue...In their home countries teachers routinely shout at and harshly reprimand their students.
Another factor could be the low pay...The American Dream doesn't have much room for someone who chooses ON PURPOSE a low-paying profession with little hope of economic advancement.
...But then again, the need for teachers is much greater than for doctors or lawyers (after all based on pure numbers every single person in America will need a teacher for at least 12 years of their lives while most will need a doctor only sporadically and some may never have need of an attorney) so maybe we wouldn't be able to meet the demand. And many teachers are gov. employees and the gov. isn't going to be doling out six figure salaries any time soon.
Very interesting, these points certainly make more sense than any theories I was able to come up with...I think actually Dreadsox has touched on the sexism and low pay points before, now that I think about it. The ambivalence towards authority figures also kind of dovetails with your earlier observation about what we seem to value the most, and how that sometimes contradicts what we claim to value.
There are actually people who argue that teachers make too much?
Wow they must not know very many then. I can see the merit in the "raise the standards, then raise the pay" idea; on the other hand, if professors could be argued to be a precedent of sorts for this (insofar as we're "teachers" with PhDs), I'm afraid it's not the most encouraging precedent, since it's generally only those who teach sciences, business or law (or are coveted superstar scholars, or have served as administrators) who make anything remotely resembling most doctors' or lawyers' salaries. Especially at public universities. It's depressing, though, to think that raising preparation standards might have the effect of hurting supply...seems like a lot of schools have enough trouble meeting demand as it is.
I would like to hear more teachers' perspectives on this standards issue, though.
When I guest-lectured in France last summer, I was struck by the awe or at least intimidation with which their (college) students regard their teachers, too...not sure if this extends to French primary teachers, though.
And I will definintely check out the Tracy Kidder book--I've heard lots of good things about him, never read any of his stuff before though.
I agree that many college profs. could use a course on how to teach...There are many who know their content but really don't know how to pass it on to others.
There is one other big problem here, and that's the whole publish-or-perish thing, or more generally "the rise of the 'research institution' "--the two very much go together. Professors are expected nowadays to increase the scholarly prestige of their departments and their university, not just its reputation for teaching, and that means accumulating a pretty extensive publications record if you want to make tenure (though only about 50% of college teachers are actually in tenure-track positions now--basically, it's the academic equivalent of the business-world practice where you keep as many of your employees in "part-time" or "temp" status as possible, to save yourself money). The upshot of this is an academic culture where teaching is increasingly devalued as a source of merit; too many get away with mediocre classroom performance (i.e. mediocre teacher evals) because their publications record looks so good; non-tenure-track "adjunct faculty" are in effect subsidizing their tenured counterparts' research through their own anemic paychecks; and meanwhile tenured profs have to spend hours and hours applying for grants to cover research expenses which in theory should be paid by their departments, but can't be because there's too many research expenses for the allocated budgets to cover. My father, who was too old to have experienced this pressure himself and died before it really pervasively took root, had heard about it starting to happen at the Ivies, and I remember him remarking once that this was the most ass-backwards tenure criterion he'd ever heard of; if anything, he said, junior professors should have to observe a publications
limit, so as to ensure that their early career years remained focused on achieving what their students were paying them to provide--good teaching. While I certainly don't think pressure to publish is all bad--it's necessary for the future of one's field for scholarship to advance, and many admittedly wouldn't contribute much without some prodding, plus so many fields are absurdly saturated from a supply standpoint right now that it's reasonable to respond by increasing some standards--nonetheless, I feel he was right to deplore the ascendance of scholardom at teaching's expense; it
can be a great privilege to study with a distinguished scholar, but not if they're lousy at imparting what they have to impart. Especially considering how outrageously expensive tuition has become. And anyhow, inevitably the very idea of "distinguished" winds up being degraded when that gets measured primarily by quantity.
