In Defense of Teachers

Photo Credit: Mira Kireeva (@solarfri)

This evening I attended a virtual “Meet the Candidates” event for the people running for my local Board of Education. One of the candidates indicated that in talking with members of the community, they had heard from parents that “ a lot of new teachers” had been hired for this past school year and that there was a feeling that some of these teachers were not sufficiently experienced to educate their children. I cannot speak to these parents’ experiences, but I can speak about my own. My daughter had four “new to the district” teachers this year, and I found each and every one of them brought something to the table. In fact, my biggest fear is that many of them will not be rehired for the upcoming year. So, I wanted to take a moment and talk about my concerns with this rather generalized argument and explain my support for not only the “new” teachers but all teachers.

My first problem with this argument is that the speaker did not define their terms. The statement made was that the district had hired “a lot of new teachers” for the 20-21 school year. The implication from the remainder of the argument was that these were inexperienced teachers who were not able to provide an adequate education for the students in some way. But who were the “new” teachers? Not all “new” teachers lack experience. A teacher could be new to the district but have years of previous experience teaching somewhere else. Therefore, just because a teacher is new to the district (i.e. newly hired) is not a sufficient basis on which to judge their adequacy as a teacher. Furthermore, even assuming that the statement was meant to refer to newly credentialed teachers (i.e. lacked any previous teaching experience other than student teaching), that is still not enough information to tell whether they are a “good” teacher.

I want to take a minute and talk about “good..” I deliberately chose not to use “qualified,” because, presumably, a teacher would not have been credentialed or hired if they did not possess the required knowledge and experience to be considered “qualified..” At the same time, “good” is an extremely subjective term. Indeed, what constitutes a “good” teacher could be the topic of its own blog post. So, for purposes of this post, I use the term “good” to mean that a teacher knows the material they are teaching to the students, connects with the students, and adequately communicates both their expectations and the subject content in a clear and appropriate manner.

Photo Credit: Ian Schneider (@goian)

So, let’s talk about newly credentialed teachers. There are generally two categories: bright fresh young adults out of college, and second-career folks. I wanted to talk about the latter first. I find second-career teachers on the whole to be extremely good teachers. They have been out in the world actually using the subjects they are teaching in everyday life, giving them an extremely good handle on not only the basics but often the minutiae of the material. They can easily provide answers to the “how is this relevant to my life? when will I use this outside of school?”-type questions. They also often have great, relevant stories that can entertain. Both my brother and brother-in-law are second-career teachers in physics and history, respectively, and both of them are adored by parents and students alike. My cousin has been involved in music all of her life, providing private piano and voice lessons before becoming a full-time church choral director. This past year, she became a first-year high-school choral director; not an easy task during the year of COVID. In fact, I would argue she had what was probably the most difficult class to navigate given all of the extra concerns and cautions related to singing that come with COVID. And yet her school received a First at the state’s choral competition (among other music department awards). New is not the same as inexperienced and it is not equivalent to incapable. My daughter’s art teacher is an amazing woman who comes from the art world and has been teaching the children all kinds of things I never learned in art. She had found ways to tie projects into topics and games the children find interesting. One of the things she shared with me is her desire to teach kids that, out in the world, “art” is not just painting or sculpture or getting into galleries, but digital art, comic book illustration, toy building and modeling, animation, advertising design, and so much more. She brings a huge wealth of information to the students that no teacher, no matter how many years of experience in the classroom, could provide. To in any way suggest that she is not a good teacher because she is newly-credentialed lacks logic and merit.

Photo Credit: Beci Harmony (@bacihannah)

So, let’s move on to the last of the three types of “new” teachers—the young adults fresh out of college. First, let’s remember that all of these teachers have numerous hours of student teaching. Experienced teachers and administrators have watched them teach these subjects to other classes of students and deemed them, adequate teachers. Presumably, we should be able to trust our seasoned educators to make these determinations. If not, our problem lies not with the newly-credentialed teacher, but with the credentialing system—something over which they had no control. and, therefore, cannot reasonably be held against them. Alternatively, if we do trust our credentialing system, then we need to show it by not outright dismissing the adequacy of the abilities of newly-credentialed teachers. Each of us started somewhere. None of us got where we are without having been given a chance by a person when we had no experience or no credentials. Furthermore, our blind deference to experience over raising up a new generation has shot us in the foot in many professions. My understanding from friends in the business is that there is an entire level of experienced engineers that simply does not currently exist because the people who ought to be reaching that level right now went unhired in years past due to budget cuts and other issues. Many teachers are reaching retirement age. If we don’t begin to hire new teachers and give them the experience they need to move forward in their careers, we are doing a disservice to future generations.

Furthermore, I would argue that young, newly-credentialed teachers are precisely what this strange year of teaching required. New teachers are now Gen Z. These are the native tech users. I am Gen X and even I consider myself to have “grown-up” using computers and the internet. In a year that required trying new things and changing tactics at a moment’s notice, heavy use of technology, and connecting with students both in-person and virtually, I believe that newly-credentialed Gen Z teachers were in the best position. They had just been educated in new ways of teaching and interacting. and had experience with all of the “new” technology, but were new enough to teaching that they were not heavily invested in any particular teaching method and could easily pivot if they suddenly found themselves teaching from home because they were quarantined, or needed to teach to students both in the classroom and at home. They also had the benefit of being able to craft their curriculum knowing about the difficulties of COVID, rather than having to construct something different by modifying a curriculum to which they had already become accustomed.

Photo Credit: Kelly Sikkema (@kellysikkema)

At the same time, I want to be clear that experienced teachers were amazing this year. Many of them engaged in Herculean efforts to educate their students to the best of their abilities under unique and unprecedented circumstances. To those who have complained that teachers “had it easy” this year, I want to share with you the story of my brother, who teaches High School physics. My brother is married to an amazing, immuno-compromised woman who has worked full-time from home this entire time. They have two children who could not go to in-person school because they could not risk the children bringing COVID home to their mother. Likewise, my brother could not teach in person for the same reason. Their two children were in 5th grade and kindergarten. The kindergartener took to online learning like a fish in water and had an amazing school year. The 5th grader struggled and, ultimately, had to be home-schooled. So, my brother spent most of his mornings home-schooling his older child but spent roughly two hours in online office hours answering any and all questions from students about lessons from the day before. He then figured out the lesson for the next day and, around 5:00 p.m., went to the school to record the next day's lesson once the building was sufficiently empty. The recordings for the various different classes (he teaches both AP and regular physics) were left for the aide to show to the various classes the next day, after which he would again spend several hours in online office hours making sure all of the students understood everything and, considering what he learned in that time, craft the lessons for the next day. What with overseeing one child’s online learning, home-schooling the other, making sure both children completed their homework, responding to students, creating and adjusting lesson plans, and recording multiple class lessons for his students, I am quite honestly surprised that he ever found time to sleep.

Photo Credit: Ozgu Ozden (@ozgut)

Did every teacher teach brilliantly this year? No. Was every student able to learn as well as they may have in years past? Most assuredly not. But this problem is not unique to your child, or your school district. Your child is not “behind.” Why? Because they are all “behind.” Everyone—every school every college, every parent, every teacher, every employer, must adjust their expectations. When children are born prematurely, or experience long hospitalizations for any reason, parents are told that we need to subtract that time from their age to understand where their education and emotional growth is. What happened with COVID is that it suddenly became necessary to do this for every child. They went through something huge this past year. We all did. We all still are.

What we need to do now is stop trying to hop directly back to “normal.” We need to process whatever the heck it was that just happened. It might also be helpful to take this time to evaluate whether going back to the way things used to be is actually desirable. Maybe, since we are already in a time of change and assessment, we can use this as an opportunity to change how education work, how employment works, how health insurance works, how our social safety nets work, how our government works, Maybe we decide we like what we have. If so, great. But maybe we discover that there’s a better way to move forward. A more flexible way that won’t bring our society to a screeching halt when (not if) another global pandemic hits. I think we owe it to ourselves to find out.

We are all tired. We are all stressed. We are all starved for human companionship and touch. Let’s be careful about the generalizations we make and the knee-jerk reactions we have right now. Yes, mistakes were made. But rather than throw blame around, let’s do our best to learn from them. Let’s try to be more thoughtful. More empathetic. Let’s model the behaviors we keep saying we want to see more of in our world.