On Teaching

The other day, my college buddy Bruce Scrogin, a voracious reader, forwarded to me an article from The New York Times Magazine by psychiatrist Daniel Carlat, “Mind Over Meds.” (4/25/10) Dr. Carlat bemoans the split in contemporary mental health care between the pharmacological approach and the talk therapy approach, not a new observation but the article had several gems in it, like this quotation from pioneering psychopharmacalogist Leon Eisenberg, “…in the first half of the 20^th century, American psychiatry was virtually ‘brainless.’ . . . In the second half of the 20th century, psychiatry became virtually ‘mindless.’”

The passage that particularly caught my eye – and it is relevant to the concerns of this blog – was this:

Like the majority of psychiatrists in the United States, I prescribe the medications, and I refer to a professional lower in the mental-health hierarchy, like a social worker or a psychologist, to do the therapy. The unspoken implication is that therapy is menial work — tedious and poorly paid.

The elevation of the technical and the diminishment of the human and relational is, as many social commentators have observed, a characteristic of our time. Reading Dr. Carlat, it struck me how much this diminishment of the human and relational applies to teachers and teaching.

Certainly his comment on status and pay applies: as you move up the administrative chain of command, the work in education becomes more bureaucratic and these days, technocratic – and is more rewarded financially. But I’m interested in another aspect of Dr. Carlat’s comment: the focus on the technical side of teaching with increasingly less frequent mention of values, passion, or artistic touch.

This technical focus has been amped up and institutionalized in our time by NCLB. The teacher is reduced to a knowledge-delivery mechanism that prepares students for high-stakes tests. The Obama administration’s “Race to the Top” is not much different. “Effective” teachers are praised; however, effectiveness is defined by the scores students get on standardized tests.

Another manifestation of this technical orientation is the increased focus on teaching techniques and, in a similar vein, best practices. Before going on, I want to be clear about this: I’m all for pinpointing good techniques – from gestures to ways to ask questions – and I do believe that some pedagogical practices (for example, particular ways to address grammatical errors in student writing) are, one the whole, better than others. Teaching does involve a good deal of technique, skill, tricks of the trade, and good teacher education and professional development includes a worthy dose of such knowledge.

But good teaching also involves values, emotional connection, belief systems, artfulness, instinct born of experience. I certainly appreciate that fact that these factors are harder to measure than, let’s say, the frequency of certain kinds of questions, but because there’s not an easy metric for them does not diminish their importance.

This issue was recently brought home to me by an article in the New York Times Magazine, another Gotham piece sent to me by a student of mine, Shirin Vossougi. (It’s my friends and students who keep me up to date.) The article “Building a Better Teacher” (March 7, 2010) is written by education reporter Elizabeth Green. It is a welcome addition to the current wave of mainstream articles and commentaries in that it isn’t hostile to teachers and attempts to stay close to teaching itself. But what made Shirin and then me uneasy is its exclusive focus on two aspects of teaching: on techniques that some claim work regardless of context (for example how to give directions) and on content knowledge in subject areas, mathematics, science, literature. The article is set up such that the two are treated pretty much as separate entities, and little else about teaching is addressed.

At the end of the article, Greene wisely takes us to the obvious next step, and moves toward a combination of the two approaches. But she doesn’t mention that many people before this moment have given a lot of thought to this very blend, from John Dewey to educational psychologist Lee Shulman. For that fact, with the exception of two paragraphs on the Normal School and early schools of education, there is a historical and cultural flatness to the discussion of teaching. One gets the sense that teaching is strictly a technical pursuit. There is no mention of the other factors that contribute to good teaching, from value systems to a love of the subject. Nor is there a reflection of the long and rich discussion of teaching that, in the West alone, goes back to Plato.

I’m not laying the blame for this narrow treatment on Ms. Greene, for she is rendering a current big buzz – though I wish she would have been a bit more critical of it. The sad thing is that we have come to this place where influential school reformers and policy makers conceive of building a better teacher in such mechanistic terms. This is our new common sense about teaching and learning.

Writing in and out of Jail

The other day I received a letter from a young man incarcerated at Pelican Bay, a maximum-security prison in Northern California. He heard an interview I did on a show called Humankind (and if you find this of interest, see also Speaking of Faith). He decided to write.

The letter is five pages long, crammed top to bottom, and contains mostly social analysis involving education, the conditions in the inner-city, and the state of Black America. Since entering prison, the writer has been taking college classes and receiving rehabilitation counseling. He reads widely, from self-help books to Jonathan Kozol. I couldn’t help but think of Malcolm Little, another young Black man in the middle of the last century, who powerfully read and wrote his way from prison into a new life.

There are two new books that recommend. Father Gregory Boyle’s Tattoos on the Heart and From the Inside Out compiled by Deborah Appleman.

Father Boyle is well-known in Southern California as the founder of Homeboy Industries, a remarkable cluster of gang rehabilitation programs that involve job training, counseling, and education. If you’re not familiar with the program, spend a few minutes on their website.

I’ve just had the chance to skim Tattoos on the Heart, though I have heard Father Boyle read from it. I’ve read and heard enough to strongly recommend it. The book is structured as a series of stories and vignettes drawn from Father Boyle’s work with young men and women caught up in gang life. He is a good writer and captures in brief sketches the terribly complex lives he encounters. There is much in the stories that sheds light on poverty and despair and violence, but also on possibility and human development, even in the most seemingly hopeless of circumstances.

There is a potent lesson here, I think, for programs that work with all manner of children and adults – not only gang members – who have had a rough go of it. Programs and classrooms that convey a sense that you matter, that your mind matters, foster achievement where achievement seemed unlikely. To feel intellectually cherished – which also means being intellectually challenged and pushed – enables people to be smart.

Deborah Appleman taught writing in a Minnesota prison and the result is From the Inside Out. It is a collection of prose and poetry written by the prisoners, addressed mostly to those on the outside, to sons and daughters, to relatives, to their younger selves – and some of the most painful writing is to their younger selves. The writing is at times angry and driven by shame and self-recrimination; at other times, it is tender and filled with longing:

My heart breaks at the thought of not witnessing you walking into school for the first time. I know I would have been more nervous than you. I didn’t get to hear you retell every minute of that day as I recall my own experiences from so long ago. I gave all of that away.

Reading From the Inside Out, we’re reminded of how powerful a medium writing can be in trying to render experience and reflect on it. Appleman is a gifted teacher, and she created the conditions for these men to bear witness in print. I can’t help but think about how little a sense we get these days of all that putting pen to paper can achieve. So much of the discussion of Language Arts is characterized by benchmarks and test scores and curriculum guidelines. It takes these guys writing to save their souls to remind us of what else it can mean to write.