On Teacher Failure

Here is the draft chapter on failing teachers for the second edition of Letters to a Young Math Teacher:

Letter Twenty-four: The Possibility of Failure

Every adversity, every failure, every heartache,

carries with it the seed of an equal or greater benefit.

–Napoleon Hill

No beginning teacher wants even to consider the prospect of professional failure. But just as students fail, teachers fail. Some have claimed that less than half survive the first five years of teaching. (The data clearly indicate that claim to be overblown, however.[1]) In any case, whatever the data, some teachers do not make it and I address that prospect in this letter.

There are many reasons why teachers fail. One is that some of them are placed in impossible settings. A professional circus lion tamer with a chair and a whip would have a difficult time dealing with a particular group of screaming maniacs, yet school administrators glibly assign rank beginners to teach such groups, caring too little about the inevitable results. They often even exacerbate the problem by providing little or no support for this teacher. The blame for those results is then assigned to the beginner.

You have probably seen motion pictures about teachers placed in extremely difficult settings, but who have come through with flying colors. The list of such films is very long: Blackboard Jungle, To Sir With Love, Up the Down Staircase,  Freedom Writers, Conrack, Dead Poets Society, and Mr. Holland’s Opus come to mind.[2] While I enjoy such films as entertainment, I always find myself thinking about my former teaching colleagues who worked hard to deal with students not half as tough as those in the movie but failed.[3]

This problem of teaching in impossible settings is made worse by today's insistence on evaluating teachers by technology: how well their students do on standardized tests. I am reminded in this regard of a beginning teacher who was assigned 47 students in her homeroom, which contained only 30 desks. “I’ll have students hanging out the windows,” she complained to her principal. “Don't worry,” the principal responded, “you’ll have plenty of room.” And indeed she did: on no day did more than 15 to 20 students show up. “And some of them lasted only until the free lunch each day," she told me. Despite this, the teachers in that school would be evaluated on all 47 of those students, never mind whether they ever had a chance to teach them.

But even when the setting is reasonable and you have teachable students, you may fail. One very common reason for failure is a difference in philosophy. Many of you have graduated from programs that focus on such things as the development of student creativity and general problem solving skills and now you find yourself in a school whose entire focus is on drill-and-practice. You may be issued a textbook that reflects this approach: each textbook example is followed by dozens of exercises similar to that example, some of them starred, which means that they appeared on past standardized tests. If you don't accommodate to this approach, you can be in trouble. (See Ray’s response to this kind of situation in Letter Twelve.) You must realize that it is quite possible to be right in your philosophy of teacher education and even a breath of fresh air to your students, yet fail to retain your job.

Early Failures

Far too many beginning teachers fail the first minute they step foot in their classroom. Despite the best of intentions they simply do not fit in this setting. As contemporary headlines too often illustrate, too many teenagers are bullies. Often they adopt this posture as a defense: second-raters themselves, they join in picking on any student or teacher who is different from them in some way (for example, in academic accomplishment) and they seek ways to make that individual uncomfortable.

Accustomed to a culture of achievement, some teachers are unable to accommodate to the culture of their students. When I talk to such teachers, I usually ask them to think back to their own experience in school. The answer they give is either that they attended a school whose focus was on academics or they were isolated and often bullied in a more comprehensive school. While the latter group has a better chance to find a way to fit in, they may carry with them the same characteristics that caused them to be bullied as students.

I always found it easy to pick such prospective teachers out from my college classrooms and I tried to counsel them privately to understand their shortcomings and to think carefully about how to proceed. In most cases these young men and women found it easy to find teaching positions, but few of them succeeded. What bothered me about their failure was the inability of those who hired them to identify the characteristics that were so clear to me. and either not to hire them or to provide them the counseling they would need to survive in the classroom.

A few of those teachers did make it, however; some of them even became very successful in their careers. But almost all of those who did well taught in settings that accommodated to them rather than the reverse. Most often they taught in private or parochial schools in which academic achievement matched their own preferences. There they found students who shared many of their own characteristics and they were able to manage them satisfactorily.

How Can You Handle Failure?

Okay, let's assume you have failed. You learn that you are no longer to continue in your current position. For most of us this is a devastating experience. It is one thing to fail a course in school or college; it is quite something else to fail at our chosen profession. And often those of us who fail in a school setting have never experienced failure before: in fact we have usually been exceptionally successful students ourselves.

Failing forces you to reassess your future. Should you try to find another teaching position or should you give up on teaching and identify another career?

Before you make that important decision, you should evaluate what went wrong. And here you should not focus on the school setting; rather, you should focus on your own response to that setting. It is too easy to say: the kids were bad, the administration was no help, your colleagues looked only to their own interests and shared nothing with you, the parents interfered, the school was concerned only with successful athletic teams. Every one of those things may be true, but other teachers were able to address those problems and you were not.

I suggest that you take this assignment seriously. Write out a list of the things you did wrong and try to be as specific as possible. It is no help to say you didn't accommodate to your students. It is a rare teacher who does entirely. Remind yourself how you mishandled interactions with individual students, specific events that went wrong, colleagues you irritated. This is a difficult and painful task but, if you take it seriously, it can serve you well.

Once you have made your list, look at each point and rethink it. Could you have done something different and addressed that problem satisfactorily? If you find that you have enough positive answers to those questions, you have every right to decide to try to continue teaching. If not, hopefully then you will have satisfied yourself that teaching is not for you.

Can You Start Over?

Let's assume that your inventory encourages you. Can you find another job? Of course, this depends on the current availability of teaching positions and you have a serious blemish on your record. You will certainly not be dealing from a position of strength.

Here is a suggestion about what you might do. Make an appointment with the administrator who fired you. At the outset assure your administrator that you are not questioning the decision to let you go. Then share your list of the problems you failed to address satisfactorily and how you believe you can address them. And finally ask for a recommendation that indicates how you are addressing your shortcomings. Such a recommendation can do much to counter the black mark your failure represents.

Starting Over

Be assured that many teachers have failed and then overcome failure. But, if you do find a new position, see to it that you commit as few of your prior errors as possible. This book should be as meaningful to you then as I hope it was when you began your first assignment.

Jon Unger, a high school algebra teacher, made the following remarks in a 2015 commencement speech at his Madieira High School commencement. Although his remarks were aimed at graduating seniors, I believe they should speak to you as well:

 As you move into your futures, I am not going to wish you a fairy-tale life where you live happily ever after. I am not going to wish you a road without bumps and dead ends and obstacles. I am not going to wish you a world without hardship. Instead, I am going to wish you the strength to persevere when everything around you is falling apart. I am going to wish you the ability to rise from the ashes and bounce back stronger than ever when it seems like nothing is going your way. I am going to wish you the faith, wisdom, and guidance to overcome all which comes to you, to find the silver lining in every cloud, to find the compensation in every loss. Vince Lombardi, the famous football coach, put it well when he said: ‘The glory is not in never falling down. The glory is in fighting to get up every time you do get knocked down.’ Another writer said this thought in a different way which I have always found inspiring: ‘Only when the sky is darkest can I see the stars.’[4]^,[5]

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[1] Craig McBride has studied this claim – 12% annual turnover leading to (.88)⁵ = 53% remaining after five years – and found it to be unsubstantiated when applied to beginners only. Taken from U.S. Department of Labor and Department of Education statistics, this one-half leaving includes all teachers and such reasons as retirement, transfer and promotion.

[2] I have not included Stand and Deliver, because it is a film of a teacher, Jaime Escalante, who has achieved success in a difficult setting. In this sense he and this film represent a counterexample to my list.

[3] The script for these films is boilerplate. Scene One: An impossible situation is established: a school in a dreary urban setting with a blacktop schoolyard strewn with trash, locked school doors and boarded up windows, school halls filled with students screaming, pushing and grappling, a filthy classroom that would better serve Dickens’ Wackford Squeers into which several dozen of these half-dressed teenagers (best played by down-on-their-luck actors in their late twenties) arrive to arrange themselves around but not in desks. Scene Two: Enter the young man or woman who will teach these malcontents. And suddenly all is well. The students not only take their seats but the boys shave and both boys and girls adopt reasonable clothing.

   My favorite among films of this genre is Up the Down Staircase, derived from a humorous novel by Bel Kaufman. I enjoyed the book, but the teacher in the film is acted by Sandy Dennis, an actress with a high whiney voice who is at her best playing roles in which she is bullied. I found myself giggling at the stupidity of the film producers who assigned her this lion-taming role.

[4] The closing quotation is a minor revision of a statement by Ralph Waldo Emerson.

[5] Jon Unger's complete commencement talk is posted as of this writing at http://dianeravitch.net/2015/06/08/a-graduate-of-harvard-law-school-who-became-an-algebra-teacher-addresses-the-class-of-2015/. I recommend it to you as it carries a message to every one of us about commitment and compensation.

A Reservation about Kahn Academy

Salman Khan has developed outstanding lessons that communicate content concepts very well. I have watched a number of his tutoring videos as well as his TED talk and both have added to my respect for what he is doing. I join many others in believing that the Khan Academy is making an important contribution to contemporary education.

Such statements always seem to call for a "but" or a "however" and I offer mine here based on my own experience.

The problem I see about Khan Academy is that, in addition to serving a useful tutoring role, it purports to offer a complete educational experience: that is, for example, it claims to teach a high school algebra course. And a number of schools are now using the Khan materials to teach such courses with classroom teachers playing, at best, supportive roles. We also have an evaluation of the program being undertaken by the SRI Foundation with the support, as it has of the academy itself, of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Whatever the outcome of that early research study, I predict that school adoptions of Khan Academy materials will ultimately fail and be withdrawn. My prediction is based largely on the infamous Raleigh Experiment of the early 1960s. I believe that considering the history of that too long forgotten experiment has lessons for us today and I offer it here.

The Raleigh experiment involved the use of another purported educational panacea, programmed instruction. Programmed instruction was the ultimate behavioral approach to teaching. A school subject was broken down into tiny elements and those elements were taught in a question-answer (paper-and-pencil at that time) dialog with immediate feedback. Although each question gained only a minute amount of ground, over time the gains mounted up and concepts were inculcated. And, as with the Khan Academy program, students learned.

To implement this process mathematician Jack Forbes of the University of Illinois Chicago Circle, prepared a programmed text that covered the content of a first year algebra course for Encyclopedia Britannica Press (EBP) through which students would independently work their way.

The publisher talked the Raleigh, North Carolina school system into undertaking a carefully designed year-long study of Forbes' product. Three groups were identified: (1) a control group of classes taught using standard resources by their regular classroom instructors, (2) a group of classes that used the Forbes materials with a teacher serving as a back-up mentor for students, and (3) a group of classes that used the Forbes materials with only a clerk in the classroom to pass out and receive materials and to administer tests.

At the end of the year the students were tested and the results were explosive. Programmed instruction was the big winner. There were significant differences in the test scores with group (3) best, (2) second and (1) last. You can just imagine how teachers, and Raleigh teachers in particular, were embarrassed by these results.

Of course, this made national headlines, schools fought to sign up for EBP programs, and publishers everywhere established their own author teams to write similar materials. (I headed up one of those teams for Prentice Hall.)

But then reality set in. The results could not be duplicated. The experiment was a perfect realization of the Hawthorne Effect. Students in groups (2) and (3) had been identified as participants in an important experiment and that year of study was their championship season. They put up with the day after day of drudgery and they temporarily took responsibility for mid-numbing hours of addressing atom-sized bits of self-instruction.

Without the special attention and contest-like atmosphere, the program failed with all but a few highly motivated students and the result was predictable. Publishers withdrew their interest - our contract was among those canceled - and EBP was left with a failed program. There were, of course, no corresponding national headlines about this turn-around.

I predict that the same fate will befall those who substitute full time use of the Khan materials for more traditional classroom instruction. Universal panaceas like this that place all the load on students' shoulders simply do not work over the long haul.

There is a more important aspect of the history I have described, however. Despite this failure, the EBP materials were of excellent quality and served very well when used in appropriate settings. For example, at the time the project took place I was math coordinator for the Norwalk, Connecticut schools where we had absence problems. Students missed school when they were hospitalized or took extended vacations with their families. When we identified these situations, we offered students and parents sections of those EBP programmed materials that covered the content they were missing. And this worked very well in many of these short-term settings. Thus the materials had a useful contribution to make.

Sadly, that possibility, or in fact any other use of those books, is no longer an option. Those materials are gone. Try eBay or Amazon and you will not find them. In fact, you will be hard put to find any programmed instruction materials anywhere. I expect that course sets today would be worth hundreds of dollars simply for their historical value.

That is what bothers me about the excellent Khan materials. While I predict that schools that go whole hog with this approach will soon meet the barrier that the Raleigh schools did, that doesn't mean that the materials have no value. They will continue to provide another instructional tool to be used in individual classroom settings and by individual students and parents.

I just hope that they will not suffer the fate of the EBP books, but I worry that the industrial model for our schools imposed by foundations like that of Bill and Melinda Gates will mean withdrawal of support when test results don't confirm their prior expectations.

The bottom line: the Khan materials are excellent and they deserve our continuing support but only for appropriate use.

The Teaching Task: Elementary School

Rather than detail the long list of responsibilities of an elementary school teacher, I offer two stories.

I was very fortunate to have Alice Foley as my teacher in fourth grade and then again in tenth grade to which she had transferred to teach high school English. She went on to become a school administrator and held some important state offices. When I returned to teach in the school from which I had graduated – Brighton High School in a Rochester, New York suburb – I met her once again, then as a colleague. No longer my teacher, she was now my boss. Despite all those interactions with her, I recall little about Miss Foley. I would not even be able to identify her in a photo and I recall nothing about her classroom instruction. But I do remember one episode. It took place at a party that I believe celebrated one of her many achievements.

We were briefly paired off in conversation and I took advantage of that time together to say, "You know, Alice, you are the one teacher I know who has taught both elementary and secondary school classes. Which do you consider harder?" As a secondary school teacher I was confident what her answer would be, but I was fooled. She quickly replied, "That's easy. There is no comparison. Elementary school teaching is much harder work."

Needless to say, I was taken aback by her response and at the time I wondered if she was just teasing me. I was even irritated by this answer. That was so long ago – before union times – and elementary school teachers were paid less than secondary school teachers. And I had found that quite acceptable. It was not until many years later when I served as a school system supervisor that I came to understand Miss Foley's evaluation.

Now skip ahead eight years. I am that K-14 math coordinator in Norwalk, Connecticut and I am asked to organize a program for the school board about our mathematics teaching. I decide that the best way to do that will be to involve some of our classroom teachers. It is easy to pick senior high school and junior high school teachers, but I want to include elementary school teachers as well. The system reading consultant suggests a third grade teacher and a kindergarten teacher. I contact them and ask to visit their classes.

The third grade teacher's math lesson is well organized and quite creative. She clearly knows her students individually and draws from them the concepts she seeks to share. I am impressed. But I am still more impressed with the kindergarten teacher. When I talked to her before visiting, she warned me that she was not one of those who saw kindergarten as what she called "the first step in the road to the SATs." When I ask her to explain what she means, she tells me that she feels that it is more important to provide children at this age with experiences that relate to their own lives rather than push first grade down one year.

And when I visit her classroom, she shows me what she meant. I am there to see math-related activities so she manages her two dozen children like a ring-master, involving them in what I consider perfect math for that age. She has the students pair off to march around the room then regroup by threes, she has them assign one, two and three to the individual members of each group and she then has the groups change, the ones, twos and threes going to different parts of the room. She has them match the snack items to the number of students in the room – no counting involved; instead, she asks questions like Do we have enough? Too few? Too many? And these kinds of activities continue for over an hour. Terms like add and subtract are never mentioned but activities related to addition and subtraction with physical objects build readiness for those ideas to be formalized later.

All I could think of when I finally left that classroom was that our schools would be better served if this kind of activity could be continued up through at least the primary grades. (I was reminded of the experiment carried out in some New Hampshire elementary schools in the early 1900s. No teaching of specific arithmetic concepts and skills was allowed until sixth grade but a year later the students were doing just as well as those in the standard program. For a description of this experiment, see Freedom to Learn.)

But most important, I came away from each of those classes exhausted from simply watching the performances of teachers and students. What I had seen in each of them was carefully planned activity. In both classes those activities changed every few minutes so there were many of them with an equal number of transitions, those points in any lesson where it is so easy to lose the attention or even control of a class.

Those experiences provided chapter and verse for Alice Foley's response. Of course many elementary school teachers would have difficulty teaching advanced high school topics, but I would be hard put to last ten minutes on my own in one of their classrooms.

Thoughts on Reading

I just finished reading Thomas Piketty's massive Capital in the Twenty-first Century – 577 pages of text. Well, not quite. In fairness I skipped to the sections that deal directly with the United States and bypassed those about France (the home country of the author, the book is a translation) and other European and Asian countries. I'm not writing a review of the book here. Despite all that text, its central proposition is straightforward: to address our growing separation between rich and poor we should tax wealth.

Rather, I want only to comment on what is expected of the reader of this tome, because unfortunately I believe that many people would be put off by it. Of course the very size (and weight) of the book is itself a put-off, but I will pass over that in what follows.

I didn't apply one of those standard reading tests, but I rate the reading demand to be that of an average high school student. (In my thinking about that average I did not include the thousands of so-called high school students who are not participating in the educational experience.) Although some of the sentences are long, I did not find one that I could not both understand and parse. Surely this says something about the translator, Arthur Goldhammer, as well as the author.

And most of Piketty's points are made through very well displayed graphs.

But there is some math. Very little, but some. There are many ratios: capital/income, for example. And there are two or three formulas, each of which is of the form  a = r × b, but the a and b are printed as alpha and beta. Sadly, I believe that that is enough to turn off a great many readers who could otherwise gain from this particular text.

There are two things about that equation that are problematic for readers. Just math turns many away and there are Greek letters. Never mind that the math is simple multiplication of the same form as A = l × w for a rectangle; it still shrieks "Math!" to many of us. And never mind that the formula with Greek letters is identical to the formula a = r × b; those are symbols foreign to us.

Now I am not suggesting that we need to address these specific problems in our instruction. There are plenty that are related to them. For example, the sum and integral signs are turn-offs, but each of them represents a sum: in a scientific publication you might see  Sx, with that S representing one of the forms of sigma, which simply means add up all the x's. (The fonts allowed here do not include Greek symbols.)

Having said all that, I have no simple answer to the problem I am trying to raise here. I guess it is simply that each of us who deals with learners of any stripe – in or out of the classroom, wives and husbands included – needs to seek ways to get those learners to relax in order to accept simple ideas that may be dressed up in scary clothes. I believe that this is one of the hardest and most important tasks that a teacher faces. And the way to do that is not to use the approach that I am ashamed to admit I have occasionally been driven to: "Can't you understand that, you blockhead!"

I hope that some you who read this note will have better ideas about how to address this kind of problem.