You've heard the phrase: "everyone's a critic." Well, when it comes to education, everyone is an expert.
In my six years teaching, I have attended quite a few professional development conferences--most of them trying to promote some new method of teaching or a new product to be tried in the classroom. Everyone wants to market to the schools and these "experts" have the panacea that will correct all the wrongs of educational mishaps.
In this recent training, professional teachers are looking over the California Frameworks, a document on what to teach at each grade level. As I look at certain reading standards and benchmarks at each grade level, it surprises me--as well as other teachers--that some skills are just not taught enough, and some just slowly fade as the grade levels go by. Teachers were appalled at what we discovered. We've been using this book for nearly a decade, but none of us actually traced a skill from the second grade. Admittedly, I only look at skills I have to teach at tenth and eleventh grade; but now I see what is missing or inconsistent in the previous nine years of education before a student comes to me.
This is a document put together by "educational experts" who want sixth graders to apply abstract interpretation in poetry and discern an author's intent in writing emotionally charged verses. If you don't know what that is, don't worry: I can't even get my sophomores to think abstractly. And these experts think that sixth graders can?
This is a document put together by "educational experts" who want sophomores to write a timed-essay within an hour, yet the skill of handwriting is lost by fourth grade. Hardly anyone teaches the physical act of writing, nor do they encourage the practice of it beyond fourth grade. And these experts wonder why so many students score so poorly on the essay portion of the High School Exit Exam and college placement exams for composition classes, two tests which require students to write an essay on-demand without a computer.
There are flaws in this document, and now I question the California Frameworks.
Yet at this training, we were forced to give positive testimonials to this federal document about why they work for us. That was difficult for me now that I saw the shortcomings of this educational manifesto. Reluctantly, I blurted out some optimistic statement about teaching forward and focusing my lessons for the future (and not looking at the ugly mess in a student's blotchy educational history).
Affirmation statements are so cheesy. It's like they want us to praise conglomerate work that is so poorly put together. I'm done with "experts." I, myself, may not be an expert when it comes to education, but I think I know what works for me and my students. If I don't know it, I will ask a teacher who does, not an expert who's trying to sell a book.