We don't pay good salaries, we don't show them respect, and yet we expect all teachers to resemble the best that we remember from our childhood. Humanity doesn't work like that -- there's a distribution of intelligence and talent, and on the average ... we're average.
Not all mechanical engineers are brilliant, and yet we see more spectacular designs every year. Even though physicians tend to be intelligent, I doubt the average IQ is going up, and yet medicine is getting better by the minute. Why? Because in each of these cases we enhance the abilities of the average practitioner by showing them how to use the accumulated knowledge of those who came before. Teaching doesn't seem to work like that.
Joanne Jacobs, in "Learning about Teaching," writes about the possibility of creating a database of video to help teachers learn the best techniques.
Instead of threatening teachers with dire consequences for not meeting the expectations of the new national testing regimen, maybe we ought to be attacking the problem by shoring up the center.
11:15:18 PM 
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