Of Dentists & Discipline

A dentist in Wisconsin is losing patients right and left. The exodus began after a small "up close and personal" article about him in the local newspaper reported "in all his life he has never had a cavity."

It would seem that patients were more comfortable with dentists who had personally experienced their pain.

To some extent, the same may be true with educators.

Is the better math teacher the one who as a student intuitively understood the concepts being taught, got straight A's and went on to major in math, or instead, the one who struggled to understand the concepts and made her B's with extra hard work and after-school sessions?

Is the better Physical Education teacher the one who excelled at all sports, was the first picked when classes chose up their sides and went on to be the high school star, or instead, the one who didn't especially enjoy PE class but worked to overcome the fears and got to the point where sports were an enjoyable experience?

And finally, who might be best suited to work with those misbehaving students, the person who "never once got in trouble in school" or the one who had his fair share of detentions?

If you haven't had the opportunity to look at what the George Lucas Educational Foundation has been doing lately, they have some neat ideas (free), a wonderful Edutopia Magazine (free) and three different e-newsletters (again, free).

Recently the foundation's website highlighted an article by Mitch Martin (a high school English teacher from Naperville, Illinois). His article should have been read by that Wisconsin dentist: "Mr. Martin's Oopses: The Best Educators Have Struggled to Learn, Then Succeeded -- A teacher must be bad at something to be good at teaching."

Mitch argues for the importance of experiencing the Struggle and then the Success in order to gain that empathy for students who may not be gifted athletes, intuitive mathematicians or perfectly behaved students.

The National Council on Teacher Quality issued a paper on "How Good Policies Can Yield Better Teachers" where they reported that research seemed to indicated "that master's degrees have a slightly negative impact on student achievement." Why? While they acknowledge that "more effective teachers will score relatively higher on tests of literacy," there is the possibility that "smarter teachers are less effective with struggling students because they cannot appreciate the students' difficulties." One of the most important attributes of a "good teacher" is that "the individual has a history of success no matter what the endeavor."

It's only human nature that we gravitate to those areas where we do well. Mitch Martin might suggest we take a detour from time to time and try something we don't do so well, just to get the feel of it.

Luckily, we're not dentists. Our students are stuck with us. But perhaps we can put ourselves in their desks once in a while to see the board from their seat.

Fe Espiritu, a teacher in the Philippines, said this when asked what makes a "good teacher:" Good teaching is keeping yourself in the shoes of your students.

An experiment: We at the Advantage Press have reached out to some old students we knew - some of those who spent quite a bit of time in the detention room - and asked them to write a few "Discipline Learning Packets" for us. Who better to help out today's misbehaving students than those who sat in those seats ten years ago and overcame their problems to graduate and succeed? We'll see what happens.