Inertial Teaching

“So, kids must have a tougher time learning about analog clocks these days than when you first got started,” says I to my child’s seasoned teacher.

“Oh yes,” says she. “It’s a shame. They can tell you the numbers on a digital clock; but that’s not *really* telling time.” (Or words to that effect – I don’t have a transcript to go back to.)

“Surely you can’t use this brief exchange to endorse the reactionary school reform crusaders,” says the reader; accustomed to a comfortable left-center orthodoxy in these pages. Maybe I could, but I won’t. And stop calling me “Shirley.”

I find myself in a bit of a quandary that probably isn’t that unusual. I find that there are ways in which I think (in my fairly uninformed kind of way) that my kids’ education could be better. Extrapolating, there are probably ways in which our community and our state could make the entire system better. I look around and see that there are blocs advocating for “reform” and blocs advocating, in effect – if not explicitly, for “status quo.” Trouble is, the reformers seem to be sanguine about the prospect of losing the baby, so long as we can get rid of that damnable bathwater. I suspect their cures will be worse than the disease. Lack of trust and a common vision with the reformers tend to make me default to the status quo.

But what was this about clocks? The exchange seemed a nice little metaphor for teachers who are just marking time (clever, huh?) until they hit retirement. Because it’s so convenient, I’m just going to pin a lot of assumptions and projections on this teacher so I can tell a little story that illustrates a minor point. The real-life teacher may not actually bear a great deal of resemblance to the allegorical teacher I need for purposes of this blog post.

In any case, it’s not a shame that kids have less exposure to analog clocks than they used to outside of school. It’s a morally neutral change in circumstances. There are simply fewer analog clocks “in the wild” than there are in the workbook pages of the average elementary school. If you are still an engaged teacher, you either compensate by working harder to teach the kids to read such clocks or you place less emphasis on it, because in the scheme of things, who the hell cares? When are kids going to be more than 20 feet from a digital clock these days? It’s not *really* telling time when you read it on a digital clock versus an analog clock? I know it’s only first grade, but time is such a deeply fascinating subject, I can’t fathom anything more than a passing shoulder shrug about the particulars of a clock display.

And, if you’re not spending time giving the kids the outlines of time being variable at relativistic speeds (my kids get enough of that kind of thing from Dad), then move on to teaching kids how to deal with the new realities, challenges, and opportunities kids are seeing in the wild now where once they saw analog clocks. All I’m really advocating (and it’s a huge thing – easier said than done) are teaching styles that adapt methods to the world’s changing circumstances. Some teachers, I’m afraid, are more likely to begrudge the fact that kids don’t succeed as readily to old methods.

That said, I’m hesitant to make too much of a stink about this sort of thing because I fear my desire to keep teachers motivated to adapt with the times can be co-opted by the “reformers” to eviscerate the employment rights of the old timers because they’ll happily dump experience if it means that management can get more power and can hire younger teachers primarily because they’ll work cheaper. It won’t matter too much how smart my kids are if they live in a society with no functioning middle class. I assume Somalians are born with as much innate intelligence as anywhere else; but individual potential just doesn’t mean that much when matched against massive structural imbalances.