Great Teachers

I've been thinking recently about some of the great teachers my children have had. There have been many. There was the kind elementary teacher who would play guitar and sing with the kids and bring her dog in to visit as a reward. There was the history teacher who regularly traveled with the kids to a national history competition or the science teacher who did the same for a large science event. There's the band and orchestra teachers who share their love of music with a new generation of musicians. There is the English teacher who stepped up to make a school musical happen when no one else would. There's the one who runs the birding club.

Then there's our school system that has been traditionally built around core subjects that are not as relevant as might think they would be, given the emphasis placed on them. There is the push for measurements and accountability of teaching, learning, school quality, etc. This push at times results in an educational industrial complex where large centralized assessment companies sell their assessment services to school districts to help them measure student performance and then at the same time they also sell the key in the form of study materials that make it easy for teachers to teach to the test and give students the ability to perform well on the matching assessments.

Then there's the COVID-19 pandemic which has forced a harder look at what is or isn't important, what can be cancelled, what can be postponed, what should still go on, and so on. The big question is whether we will take advantage of the pandemic to undo the maddening assessment culture we have built and focus on what is really important. Universities need easy ways of measuring who to give scholarships to (GPA and ACT/SAT scores), but they have been willing to bend the rules and find other ways to reward students who were not able to take standardizes tests due to the pandemic.

What if we stopped focusing so much on some of the mostly irrelevant topics like calculus (relevant to engineers but not many others) and pushed more for creativity and travel and experiences and useful projects and actual skills? What if we pushed to teach our kids languages, cultures, how to serve others, and be generally good people? At some point there can and should be exposure to some topics that may spark a desire to go on and become a great scientist or mathematician, without forcing those who don't need those skills to waste time focusing on something they will quickly forget anyway.

What if we explored nature and performed music and built things?