As I was giving “snaps” to fellow adults and worshipping Doug Lemov, it occurred to me that this is exactly what is wrong with education reform. We idolize someone in a given moment for “progress” they’re making with certain techniques or tricks and then try to create a robot nation of “Lemovites”. Me? Not agree with 100% of what you try to shovel into my brain?! Pish tosh.
Needless to say teachNOLA and I parted ways for many reasons above and beyond this Lemov fellow, but first let’s deal with the elephant in the room. Throughout our one week training gear-up to teach summer school in some of the toughest schools in New Orleans, we learned a lot about Teach Like a Champion techniques and virtually nothing about translating curriculum. In essence we learned all of the party tricks without having something solid to apply them to. A group of four of us teaching the same subject with the same objectives (Grade Level Expectations) could not agree on what it was we were supposed to be teaching, nor how we were supposed to be delivering it. In any other field this kind of debate is healthy, even encouraged, but it is very dangerous in education. No wonder our kids are coming out with such a wide variety of knowledge…there is no standard! Trust me, depending on some of these teachers who would be hard pressed to pass their own exams, let alone make them, is why our nation is falling behind.
So all of you in education reform who are seething with rage at this point for speaking of Lemov in such a derogatory way, read this word carefully and internalize it. Curriculum. Again, curriculum. The first step to having a wider array of effective teachers in the classroom is enabling them to be so. If a teacher spends the bulk of their time grappling with what it is they’re supposed to be teaching instead of studying what they’re going to be teaching and how they plan on delivering it, of course education is going to be a hot mess. We need a national standard, a curriculum to be our jumping off point for all grades and all subjects complete with lesson plans and activities. Once teachers have this standard in front of them, then they can improvise. After all that is the job, teaching.
Which brings me to my next point. If you’re not familiar with the hours in education, but know generally that teachers are underpaid, then let me enlighten you. For some of the jobs I’ve interviewed for schools tell you to expect to work not only the five days they have you during the week from 7 am- 5pm, but on top of that expect you to devote your Saturdays to things like curriculum translation, grading etc.. So let me break that down for you. If you’re lucky you’ll get $45,000/yr out of which you can expect to actually see $36,000. As depressing as that already is let’s do the math for the 70 hours they want you to work per week minus the two months we have off here in Louisiana for the summer and the month or so in holidays off throughout the year. That is forty weeks totaling 2800 hours of work/yr, bringing your hourly rate to a whopping $13/hr. Just like childcare, we are entrusting our children to people who are severely underpaid for the responsibilities heaped upon them.
This is a general trend in the working life here in America: live to work, not work to live. It’s crazy. When is anyone supposed to have time to invest in their family or personal life when they’re expected to devote the majority of their time to a job ? A job that could be made far easier if we would just decide to work smart as a nation, not hard. This has always been my motto in life and should be the motto in education.
Bottom line, “lesson planning” should be time spent by the teacher looking over standardized lesson plans deciding which techniques to use and how they will personally deliver the material. It should not be starting from scratch because this is not the first, nor the last year we will be educating children in any given subject area. Not only will this lift a great burden off of teachers but it will allow them to spend less hours on research that has already been done and more time on other job responsibilities such as grading and personalized relationships with their students, which is the second biggest key to educational success besides the curriculum.
Come on America, let’s get it together and begin education reform with changing how we think about our teachers. They are not slaves and though many of them have a heart for education and spend extra time out of their own goodwill it should not be something we expect. A lawyer is paid by the hour, a doctor is paid by God knows what, but it’s outrageous! I think it’s high time we send some of the funds that are being misdirected into organizations such as teachNOLA and TFA who have notoriously high turnover rates to the qualified educators already invested and investing in our children and schools as well as a nationalized, standardized, COMPLETE curriculum. Then and only then will we see real progress in education to which we can add SOME of Lemov’s techniques which are admittedly helpful in the actual delivery of said curriculum.
JAK
Christen
