Too Idealistic? Maybe.

Approaching this topic is surprisingly difficult for me, for two main reasons. The first, though less relevant, is that being the person to really kick off this week's discussion is a little inherently challenging. The second is that, with education being my intended career path, this topic is one where I really don't know where to begin because I have so much to say, and parsing it down to something that would be interesting to read is a little overwhelming.

That being said, I'm going to try to address something that's not really a reform driven by public policy as much as it is driven by teachers simply doing their jobs more effectively.

Now, my sister's 3rd grade teacher sounds like one of the most terrible instructors to ever be allowed in a classroom. She is terrible at classroom management, she teaches topics in a disjointed manner, and she throws tests over material that she skipped over at them on a semi-regular basis without any warning. To top it all off, she's close to retirement and makes a point of saying how much she hates teaching and is ready to be done with it.

A less extreme example of a bad teacher, though still a seriously flawed one, is the teacher that a friend one of my teaching classes worked with this semester at a middle school. We had an observation task centered around motivation to learn, and at the end we had to interview the teachers. When asked about what we, as teachers, could do to address students that simply aren't motivated, her response was that there's nothing we can do.

In both of these examples, there's a critical flaw: attitude. Teachers cannot have this negative attitude toward their students. It sounds a bit clichéd, but teachers need to have faith in the ability of every single student to succeed, and their job is to do everything they can to make sure that their students walk away with the necessary content knowledge and belief in their own ability to succeed in future classes. I know that not every student that I have in the future will end up successful, but goddamnit, I will do everything in my power to help them get there.

That being said, attitude clearly isn't the only thing that needs to change. Elaborating on a point that I made before, content knowledge is a necessary thing to give students. The remainder of my discussion is going to be heavily oriented toward math classrooms, though honestly, I believe that the ideas at hand can be adapted to other classrooms to address similar issues in those fields.

I'm going to start with a sweeping generalization that is going to highly offend at least one reader: elementary school (and usually middle school) teachers suck at math. They don't understand how it works or why it matters. There are dozens of anecdotes out there about basic algebra tests being administered to them with abysmal results.

This is why so many people loathe math, even though it's the most beautiful and pure of the core academic subjects. They're being introduced to it by teachers that don't have the conceptual understanding that is needed to do well in high school and beyond. Instead of being taught to see patterns in how things work, students are thrown massive tables of numbers to memorize, a daunting task which turns most people off to the subject entirely. Occasionally, a student may actually be interested and ask a question like, "What if I want to subtract a bigger number from a smaller number?" to which a teacher will probably say, "YOU CAN'T DO THAT." This is terrible and not how math works. To quote Vi Hart (whose videos on YouTube you should check out immediately if you've never seen them):

The true mathematician takes 'You can't do that!' as a challenge. If you someone tells you that you can't subtract a bigger number from a smaller number, just invent negative numbers! If someone tells you that you can’t multiply a number by itself to get a negative number, then invent imaginary numbers. If someone tells you you can’t multiply two non-zero numbers together to get zero or raise one non-zero number to another and get zero, you should probably say, ‘I’ll do both at once! And in eight dimensions!’ And if you ignore them telling you that numbers aren’t eight-dimensional and that inventing fake numbers is a useless waste of time and actually figure it out, next thing you know you’ve got split-octonions, which besides being super awesome just happen to be the perfect way to describe the wave equation of electrons and stuff.

The more appropriate answer to the student's question would be, "Well, you can only do that with negative numbers, and those are a little too complicated for us right now, so we're going to stick with the numbers we're used to for now." It may not be the answer that the student wants, but it will help them to feel less lied to later on when they're told that negative numbers are real and have these strange multiplication properties that seem like more ridiculous arbitrary rules.

Instruction should focus on trying to develop a conceptual understanding of material rather than a procedural one. This more deeply instills a sense of understanding in students than simply throwing rules at them and saying, "THIS IS HOW THINGS WORK." It makes them feel like the subject is less stupid and arbitrary, and the fact that you're probably not speaking in all caps makes them respect the class far more.

To get to the underlying point I'm trying to make, teachers need to not suck. They need to be able to do their jobs well. Allowing crap like the teachers I mentioned earlier to continue existing in the schools is an abomination. I think that these issues could probably start to be addressed by US society treating teaching like a legitimate profession and giving teachers slightly more than minimum wage as a salary, but until that happens, the burden is really on teachers in the system to actually give a damn about what they're doing and try to fully understand the material they're teaching and why they're teaching it.

But most importantly, they need to never give up on their students.