You Can't Teach Anyone Anything!

After having read a recent article in TIME magazine about the teaching profession, I felt it was time to add my two cents to the issue. The title of this post accurately describes how I feel about teaching. The title is actually a quote from one of my professors who really influenced me during graduate school. Teachers have a lot of pressure on them to perform many feats. We are required to discipline, educate, motivate, guide, support, scaffold, create, organize, structure, record, observe, communicate, and the list goes on and on. Teaching is not easy. It's no wonder that over 50 percent of all teachers quit within the first 5 years.

There is more than just one problem when it comes to our educational system. One major issue that is currently in debate is as follows: Parents think teachers are not doing enough and teachers think parents aren't doing enough. I, however, see a bigger problem. The problem is what our title implies; teaching. The word teach has many definitions, and many synonyms. Just look it up in Webster's Dictionary and see for yourself. If I were asked to define teaching, it would be as follows: "the skillful and progressive implementation of frustration". Why? Because it is only when we feel frustrated that we seek out a solution to our problem. This is what I would call genuine motivation. Think about how a baby learns to walk. We do not teach it to walk, it learns all by itself. A baby is driven by frustration to tackle this problem of being immobile. It seems that the present ideology of education supports an environment where the student is sheltered more and more from frustration. This in turn places the frustration onto the teacher, who quite frankly, doesn't need it. A case in point: Why aren't students given a letter grade of F anymore? How come students no longer stay back a grade level when clearly they should? Why is it even possible to offer a 504 accomodation that states "The teacher will aid the student in filling his/her backpack at the end of the day"? My answer: The Wizard of Oz Paradigm.

Dorothy wanted to explore a new world because she felt frustrated with her own Kansas. This frustration led her to Oz, and eventually into a fantastic journey, filled with suspense, mystery, laughter, and even a little danger in her attempt to find a way back home. She turns to the Wizard of Oz, the all powerful and all knowing, to help her get home. In the end, she realizes that the power to go home was with her all along. The Wizard turned out to be a charlatan. He did nothing to get her back to Kansas. But what he did do was get her to realize that no one could get her home, only she had that power.

In many school systems, teachers take on the role of the Wizard of Oz. Not because they want to, but because parents and administrators need them to. Parents want an all-knowing, all-powerful teacher for their children. Administrators want to keep up a facade that teachers are responsible for both the success of great students and for the failures of poor ones. The truth, it would seem, is visible only to the classroom teacher. We are not all-knowing, all-powerful individuals. Nor are we responsible for success and failure. Why? Because we do not teach.

When a "teacher" is performing his or her job, we are not downloading information into students' brains. We offer experiences, frustrations, methods, strategies, rules, concepts, etc. How all that information gets stored into the human brain has nothing to do with us. Sure, we can drill students to regurgitate cold facts through the use of rote memorization. Repeated exposure to specific information will no doubt help embed that information in the synapses of any student. In the end, this method creates individuals who are well suited to be game show contestants. Seriously, how is knowing the date on which the Titanic sank ever going to be useful in the real world? On game shows is the answer. How a student learns anything is completely up to the student. Every individual has different learning styles. Remember Gardner's Multiple Intelligences? His theory basically states that everyone is a genius within their personal intelligence area. Some are visual learners, some are kinesthetic, etc. All this just proves my point even further. The assimilation of information is soley the job of the individual.

As "teachers", we cannot put information into students' heads. We can try to make the information more interesting, more meaningful, even easier. But in the end, unless a student wants to learn because of frustration, he or she won't. The individual is the key in the learning equation plus the factor of frustration. This is why I say you can't teach anyone anything. You can demonstrate, you can model, you can share your ideas, you can offer frustration, but you cannot teach anyone. They must teach themselves.