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.

The Teaching Task: Secondary School

Consider the task you take on as a new teacher when you accept a secondary school teaching assignment. Here are the responsibilities of a typical newcomer:

You will teach between 120 and 150 students in five classes. Those classes will not all be the same subject: you'll have two or three different so-called subject preparations. In each of these classes you will be expected to organize the instructional program, present new content in class, develop and correct homework assignments, and evaluate your students. In doing so you will be expected, of course, to maintain acceptable discipline. You will be assigned a homeroom with another 25-30 students and a study hall to supervise with at least that many. If you are fortunate, you will teach all these classes in your homeroom, but some of you will be "roller skate" teachers, expected to teach each of your classes in a different classroom. You'll have a single period set aside for preparation. And you'll have a lunch break when you don't have a lunchroom supervision assignment.

Now think about that assignment. Who else among your fellow graduates takes on this level of responsibility? Most will head off to take jobs in which they are responsible only for themselves. New salesmen, lawyers, doctors or engineers, for example, do not supervise dozens of colleagues. A recently graduated military officer may command a platoon or division, but he or she will have experienced non-coms – army sergeants and corporals or navy petty officers – to take major responsibility for their few dozen charges.

Is the assignment even doable? Consider homework and tests. Every minute you spend correcting each of your students' papers means an hour to an hour and a half of your time. Some teachers develop plans and tests they use year after year (an approach open to criticism); as a newcomer, you won't have that short-cut. And you will have constant reasonable demands on your time by individual students. Unless you devote every minute of your waking day to your teaching program, you will end up having to cut corners.

But what corners? Do you curtail preparation time and end up "winging it" in your classes? Do you reduce homework correction to the point that students know they do not need to spend time preparing it? Or do you end up with no life of your own?

That is the job you are undertaking. Recognize that the going will be rough, especially in your first year as you are accommodating to your school and your students are accommodating to you as well. Some of you won't make it. The claim that one of five will fail is overblown but that won't matter if you are one of those in trouble.

Yes, this is a tough job and you should not be hesitant to let those who are so critical of our schools know what you face.

And if you end up a successful classroom teacher, you will have much to be proud of.

Introduction

In 1931 George Miller wrote a delightful book titled Letters from a Hard-Boiled Teacher to His Half-Baked Son about entering the teaching profession. In it he offered serious advice that he presented in a straightforward way. Miller wrote, "You are now about to peep behind the scenes of this teaching game and see the secret wires, pulleys, slap-sticks, and other annoying contraptions, which were never mentioned in your college courses," and he went on to provide insights into and ways of addressing the wide range of problems new teachers face.

Miller's book has long been out of print and difficult to find even in libraries. Remarkably a search turned up no similar book written over the 83 years since it was published. For that reason Ray Patenaude and I have written and William R. Parks has published an update titled Letters to a Young Math Teacher. While that book includes two or three chapters that relate, as the title suggests, specifically to mathematics teachers, 90% of the text applies to all teachers setting out on a career in teaching.

This site is being designed to serve as a forum at which newcomers to this important profession and experienced teachers and others interested in the real world problems of teaching can interact. It will supplement and extend what we have written in Letters and parts of what will appear here may be reflected in later editions of that book, thus enhancing its value for beginners.

I propose to write approximately weekly short essays on topics related to classroom teaching in today's schools. I invite comments about what I write including reactions, disagreements, related examples and extensions to particular teaching areas. Thus a teacher of social studies or an elementary school teacher might feel that something said about teaching in other areas applies differently – or even not at all – to their specialty.

Finally, I urge new teachers to follow this blog in order to help them address their immediate problems and I urge experienced teachers to do so in order to serve as mentors to these newcomers, at the same time updating their own professional background. In each case the blog should serve as a kind of in-service training activity. By signing up you will be informed of new postings.