Damaging PR for Teachers

Thanks to OneHandClapping for pointing out this story in the NY Post about letters from a NY middle school to an Army private in Korea lambasting him for destroying mosques and killin civilians in Iraq.  Yep, Iraq.  They were written as part of a social studies assignment.  The teacher didn't return calls, but the principal gave this nonsensical statement:

"While we would never censor anything that our children write, we sincerely apologize for forwarding letters that were in any way inappropriate to Pfc. Jacobs. This assignment was not intended to be insensitive, but to be supportive of the men and women in service to our nation."

What does that mean?  Was part of the assignment to mail the letters?  Does he mean that they wouldn't have edited the letters, but might not have mailed them, but that would not have been censorship?  Was the assignment to write a supportive letter?  If so, was that appropriate?  And, what if that wasn't the assignment and the principal just said that to try and get the heat off him and his school?

Well, I doubt anyone's going to go get the answers to those questions.  Notice, however, how damaging this kind of thing is for all teachers.  Here are some of the comments from another blog that posted on this, Wizbang:

What else do you expect from glorified babysitters? I have about as much respect for the average grade school teacher as I do for personal injury lawyers, used car salesmen, and street people who beg for money.

***

That teacher SHOULD BE FIRED!

They are glorified BABYSITTERS!

God help them if they actually had to WORK FOR A LIVING!!!

***

Lee: You don't know the half of it. My wife's stepsister (I'll call her Hazel) is a sixth-grade teacher, at one of the worst schools in town, no less (when you don't have seniority, you get the crap assignments). She's told us lots of horror stories about people who get into early-grade teaching not because they want to teach second-graders, but because they want to be second-graders. Their idea of teaching is all-day playtime. Hazel says that about half of the students she gets entering the sixth grade each year are reading at least two grade levels behind, and that many of them have had imprinted in them an anti-intellectual attitude that makes them proud of their failures. They bully any student that "blows the curve".

Hazel tells us that she is one of the very few teachers in the school that writes up daily lesson plans. She says that most of the teachers keep a boilerplate lesson plan or two in a drawer, so that they have something to whip out when the school board comes around to inspect. They use the same ones over and over and nobody ever gets wise to them (or, if they do, they don't care). The principal is just marking time until retirement and has basically told the teachers with concerns to buzz off.

During the campaign last year, for about a week, there was a large Kerry sign posted at the school's student dropoff/pickup entrance. It took complaints to the city council and a TV station report to get it taken down. The school administration never owned up to who put it there.

I'm on record that teachers are the key to better results in schools, but it's stories like this -- and the attitudes they encourage -- that make that position difficult to sell.  I would just make these points:

• Lesson Study -- by getting teachers to work in groups on improving lessons -- can help minimize this kind of error.  What a teacher might overlook due being focused on some other aspect of the lesson (or due to bias, etc.) others can catch.
• Regardless, any superintendent trying to create a culture of collaborative effort to improve lessons is going to have to withstand some criticism when some of the lessons, especially early in the process, reflect poorly on the teachers that designed them.

Comments

[Joe Thomas]

Good point about my choice of words. I didn't mean to evoke "questions worthy of a journalist," but now that you point that out, it is certainly easy to read it that way.

I meant questions that were uncomfortable to read, uncomfortable to answer. As a culture, we are enamored with war. We celebrate the soldier, the victory, and, in general, blowing stuff up. It was no accident that "Shock and Awe" was conducted at night (more theatrical) and with the cameras rolling.

It seems that this "article" has turned quickly into "damaging PR on teachers" but only because we are allowing it to be. There are a wealth of unanswered questions. Do we have the patience to hear them answered? or will we simply jump in and judge?

I truly would like to know what the teacher was thinking when he did all this.

[Dave Shearon]

Joe, I enjoy your website. Don't agree with everything, but really enjoy it!

You are right about the tendency to characterize and then attack. In this case, that's true of bloggers and commenters more than the reporter, as apparently the teacher chose not to respond (or was ordered not to?).

Overall, I'm not sure I'd call what was written to this soldier in Korea about Iraq "tough questions", though, without full context it's hard to say. They don't come across and well-enough researched and expressed to be "tough questions."

[Joe Thomas]

Which story warrants discussion, the teacher sending the letters or the ridiculous responses to it?

The "assignment" is a discussion worth having. The responses ("babysitters", "they want to be secondgraders", etc) are nonsensical and have little to do with the story. Those people held those ideas before the NY Post story broke. Responding to their rants only lends credence to them.

I have never run across a grade school teacher that got into teaching to be a second-grader. That is nonsensical.

I agree that stories, like the one in the Post, can damage the profession, but only if we listen to just one side. We demand that our students look at all sides of a situation, shouldn't we do the same?

Without excusing what the teacher did, does anyone know the intent of the lesson plan? what was the desired learning?

No. We see that soldiers were asked tough questions by young students, and we swiftly condemn.