Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need to travel sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one’s little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.
Mark Twain
Twain’s comment arrived on my desktop, courtesy of Google, as I began my second year of teaching English in a Romanian high school as a Peace Corps volunteer. I’d decided, while getting organized for the fall semester, to begin each of my classes with an appropriate quotation, proverb, or simple saying. It goes on the board; students write it in their notebooks. We consider vocabulary, then meaning, and, if the statement can be attributed to a specific person, who he or she is. The idea of starting each class with a standard, brief exercise, I’d picked up from an English teacher I had subbed for in suburban Chicago. With use of an overhead projector, she did a simple grammar lesson each day with her seventh and eighth graders; it took no more than five minutes and focused students’ attention on the subject at hand.
The Twain comment I've not yet used -- I'm saving it for lessons on travel later in the year – but it does focus attention on the topic of this new blog. The 16 months I have been here have provided an excellent school for considering current issues in U.S. education – perhaps not fatal to my prejudices, but surely a restraint on vegetating on my own opinions, or the cant of current wisdom.
One of my first discoveries has to do with the supposedly superior education in science European students receive – six years of chemistry and physics, for example. Though I am generalizing from a small sample – my school and those some fellow volunteers teach in – the sum total of hours students here receive over those six years does not exceed the daily chemistry classes I had in high school 50 years ago. Many students here get one hour of biology, chemistry, and physics each week for five or six years (and that’s for those headed to a university). Thirty-six hours per year times six years is 216 hours of chemistry, for example. The chemistry class I took in high school met daily, with an additional two hours weekly for a lab. That’s 252 hours in only one year. Furthermore, we had excellent laboratory facilities; students here have none. The chemistry they learn is all memorizing aspects of the periodic table and, I assume, molecular structures and aspects of chemical bonding. But they don’t even have Bunsen burners.
Those lessons might help students pass tests, but they don’t seem to have provided this delightful and resource-rich country with a vibrant scientific community or with entrepreneurial scientists who can turn their ideas into new industries. The parents of too many Romanian students are working abroad because that’s where the jobs are.
On the other hand, I rather wonder whether teachers in Romania are not, on the whole, better educated in their academic area than are their American peers. Four of the five science teachers in our school, for example, acquired their credentials during the communist era. Whatever the horrors of that time, schools were better funded then, and a priority of the Ceausescu government was industrial development. What scientific and technical equipment there is in our school -- with the exception of good computers – appears to be been acquired more than two decades ago, before the 1990 change of government.
One day last fall, a colleague invited me to a literature course required for her master’s degree in teaching English at a nearby university. Jammed into what an American university might consider a small seminar room were over 20 practicing teachers attending a lecture on Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno.” It was a story I’d never read, but I was fascinated by the professor’s grasp of its significance and setting (revenge and manipulation in colonial Chile). I thought of the high school English teachers I had taught and worked with at universities in Chicago, many of whom may never have read a Melville story let alone been able to discuss the significance of its time and place. But several of the teachers here were doing so, all in English, which was their second (or third or more) language.
Despite what might be a superiority in content education, teachers here head out into their own classrooms with far less experience in front of a class than American teachers have. Field experience for my colleagues here consists of a few weeks in front of students during their last year at university. Their next such experience – assuming they are fortunate enough to find a job – would be in front of their own classes, which for a high school teacher might mean 20 or more hours with 200-plus students in an average week.
The content vs. pedagogy – or academic background vs. practical experience – debate has been going on for over a century in the US; it’s particularly contentious now with colleges of education insisting that their methods courses are essential while reformist innovators such as Teach for America assert that bright, motivated, and well –educated college grads can move into classrooms at troubled schools and be far more effective than less broadly educated but fully credentialed teachers – i.e., those with the requisite number of methods courses -- can be.
My own prejudice on this issue continues, affirmed by my experience in Romania. Methods courses will never be an adequate substitute for a solid academic education. I’ve seen too many U.S. teachers flounder when faced with questions about photosynthesis from their biology students and elementary school teachers who confuse the dates of the American revolution with those of the Civil War.
More than a century ago, the renowned Chicago educator (and subject of my doctoral dissertation) Ella Flagg Young noted that the banality of the credentialing process and authoritarian management of schools discouraged “young women of parts” – i.e., well-educated ones – from taking up the work of teaching. I fear that we are still doing that in the United States. But as my Romanian colleagues have shown me, a solid content education -- knowing what happens to the cellular structure of a plant when sunlight hits it -- is surely more useful than a semester of science teaching methods, particularly if taught by an ill-educated and uninspired instructor.
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