Today is International Teachers Day – this got me thinking about my checkered career as an educator and how much teaching has changed over the last half century.

I trained as an elementary teacher in England in the sixties and was in the first cohort of three-year trainees. I majored in English Literature and avoided the sciences whenever I could, but as a junior school teacher had to teach everything including music (and I’m tone deaf!). My most vivid memory of my three years isolated in an old English castle learning the craft of teaching was an elderly professor thumping on the table and saying “If you say you are going to kill a child, you MUST kill that child”. That woke me up! Of course, what she was saying was that you should never threaten a child with a punishment you have no intention of carrying out – some of today’s parents would do well to remember that shocking advice!

I remember one practicum when I had to teach photosynthesis to a class of unruly eleven-year olds. The truth is I did not really understand it myself – but stayed up all night trying to create a large poster that would help the students (and me) understand the process. Which leads me to muse on the incredible visual aids available to today’s teachers. With overhead projectors, interactive whiteboards, the internet and computer resources such as Digital Frog’s natural science software, no teacher needs to stay up all night struggling to create third-rate visual aids.

Truthfully, I never did get to grips with photosynthesis until I was editing the text for Photosynthesis in The Digitial Field Trip the The Wetlands. The excellent animations make it much easier to understand the basic process, while offering details for the older students – they can even click to view the molecular structure of the chemicals – and I did have one bright student in that class long ago who would have lapped up that information.

Of course, that is another advantage of technology-enabled learning tools; they cater to multiple intelligences and learning styles and allow slower learners to work at their own pace, while quick learners can continue to delve deeper and are less likely to disrupt the class.

One change that I personally think is not an improvement is that teaching, at least in North America, has become very prescriptive. Whenever the politicians get any flack about the educational achievements of students, they try and fix the problem by passing legislation such as No Child Left Behind. These mandates are almost always underfunded and impose more bureaucracy and strain on already overloaded teachers, while not improving the overall education.

I was lucky enough to teach in an era when teachers were considered to be professionals who could decide what and how to teach as long as the students left elementary school having mastered the “3 Rs” – reading, (w)riting and (a)rithmetic with exposure to the sciences and the arts. If there was an eclipse of the sun, we would drop everything else and teach everything around this exciting event – we’d find stories and poems that featured thsi mystical event as well as teaching the science (again, with inexpert drawings and posters! The administration understood that not all students could achieve the same academic levels and we were expected to accommodate the multiple strengths and weaknesses.

Although I have not been teaching in the classroom for many years (I moved into corporate training, technical writing and then software development), it seems to me that today’s teachers are so¬† pressured by¬† the prescriptive curriculum that teaching today is even more challenging than when I was teaching, in spite of the incredible teaching tools available to them.

What do YOU think?

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