The Anxiety of Teachers

Teachers have always been under pressure to prove that what they are doing is worthwhile. Arts teachers (music, dance, visual arts) try to prove that the arts are valuable when the district budget is tight. English Language Arts teachers want to prove that they are teaching writing and reading. The list goes on.

What is the best way to prove you are teaching? Get the students to perform in some way. After all, as teachers, we have the right to demand this performance--that is part of the authority we have. So, we create tests, we ask students to write a term paper of a certain length with a certain number of resources, we tell students to write a book report that proves they have read the assigned books, we try to create "rigor" in our classes so we know that we are good teachers.

And we are rewarded when the handful of compliant students take the test and develop the values of trying to figure out what the teacher wants in writing the papers. These students get A's. Another group of students is less compliant, but they manage to get the job done. B's and C's. And a group of students figures that most of the assessment activities are a royal waste of time and this group doesn't do the homework, doesn't study for the tests, doesn't write the papers. F's. And yet, this group may have the smartest, most creative students in it.

So, we figure we are teaching because the majority of our students are passing our assessments and it's just a handful of unmotivated students who aren't, and that's just going to be inevitable. In behaviorist terms, we have a fairly powerful set of reinforcements in this system--you have variable rewards because not every student goes along with the system. As anyone knows who has overcome a gambling addiction, intermittent rewards reinforce a behavior far more than consistent positive rewards. Not that I am a behaviorist, but the theory does occasionally explain phenomena.

But, are they learning, or, more to the point, what are they learning? A lot of them become experts on figuring out what a teacher wants or doesn't want. The straight A students assess the teacher on the first day of class, figuring out how demanding a teacher is, how hard it will be to get that A. The straight F students might be figuring out how to make the teacher angry, which can be good sport. The C students are figuring out which of the A students might be willing to do someone else's homework.

They may even be learning content. They may be passing achievement tests. But what kind of work ethic do they have? Can they work independently? Can they pursue their own interests because they know how to find information? Can they tell the differences between an informative website and one that is biased? Can they solve novel problems?

When they are out in the world of work, they aren't going to have a boss who gives them a grade every nine weeks. They are not going to be given a bunch of information to memorize and then cough back up on a test. They aren't going to be given decontextualized facts--they are going to have to figure out things and solve problems and put new ideas together.

The fact is, getting back to the anxiety of teachers, that people were born to learn. The vast majority of people learn an extremely difficult thing before the age of three: language.

It stands to reason that given certain kinds of encouragement and flexibility, students will also learn in a classroom. The key is, different students will learn different things, which is a little hard to manage in these days of accountability and benchmarks.

Yet, the art of teaching lies in the ability of teachers to figure out their students' interests and to make connections between those interests and the curriculum. The art of teaching lies in encouraging curiosity, in teaching not TO the achievement test, but well BEYOND the test. We don't have to force students to prove something to us as the authority so we can prove something to the authorities over us. We can meet the benchmarks and help students to develop a love of learning, which is the foundation for being a productive employee in the world of work.