It Takes a Village Idiot

My tenure as a Pre-IB teacher ended today, not with a bang but a whimper.  The story I've been told (and I believe, for the most part) is that my "demotion" from pre-IB has to do with student and parent complaints about my teaching rather than my outburst in the faculty meeting a few weeks ago.  I can live with that.

My teaching philosophy tends to be "If you're willing to work at it, I can not only teach you a considerable amount of valuable mathematics, I can also show you some of the beauty of the subject along the way." It isn't "I consider it my responsibility to find a way to teach you the bare minimum of mathematics you must know to pass the state-mandated tests, whether or not you're willing to cooperate in that attempt."  That second philosophy is a great one to have -- possibly even the only appropriate one to have -- when teaching a standard course at a school such as the one at which I find myself.  The low-level kids who need to pass the state-mandated test to get their high school diploma are not now, nor ever will be, interested in the beauty of mathematics.  The ship upon which travels their capacity to absorb any but the most rudimentary mathematical concept has long since sailed.  They need a teacher who cares about them, individually, and wants to help by making the math they must learn as digestible as possible. It is a noble calling, and I admire the teachers who heed that call.  But it is a cold and barren field in which to toil for someone who loves mathematics as I do.

I was enormously excited when I learned I'd be teaching all honors courses, including an AP class and two Pre-IB classes.  Here, I believed -- particularly in the Pre-IB courses -- I could loose these students on the subject while acting as tour guide, pointing out surprising depths lurking just beneath the simplest concepts, taking short excursions onto strange and esoteric landscapes (Mandelbrot sets! Riemann manifolds! Mobius bands and Klein bottles!), mapping out tougher but more beautiful trails for the strongest of the group to explore on their own, and generally stoking the fire of their natural curiosity in the hope that mathematics would captivate them as it has me.

In the real world, my expectation that they would take responsibility for their learning -- seeking tutoring when they were confused about something, getting together with other Pre-IB students to help each other struggle through difficult concepts, and going back to the textbook to teach themselves the material they hadn't understood in class -- was met with the reality that their standard reaction to adversity is to find someone to blame, then complain about that person to everyone they can, in the hope (justified, as it turns out) that their complaints will eliminate their adversity by removing the person responsible for it from their path.

It shouldn't be surprising that students complain about the difficulty of their path.  It is, I believe, our job as educators to look for the greater good -- funnel the students who can't or won't make the required effort into other, less challenging courses; inform, as often as necessary, the students who remain (and their parents) that success in the program will require dedicated effort; insist that the resources the kids need (supplies, tutoring help, places for small student groups to meet) be made available; and most importantly, hold teachers, students, parents and administrators to a higher standard of education for these kids, which will necessitate a more difficult path.  In this way, we could be providing our best students (most of whom do not have the option to attend a magnet or private school) the opportunity to truly excel both in high school and beyond.  Why shouldn't our students go on to study engineering at MIT, or music at Indiana, or marine biology at UC San Diego, or economics at Carnegie Mellon?

Instead, parents, school administrators and, I am given to believe, the district honchos in charge of IB, don't want a tough program for elite students.  They want an elite (i.e., high prestige) program that affords its enrollees wonderful benefits without requiring any payment of dues. Unfortunately, I believe all of those constituencies will discover relatively quickly that this is one more arena in which the aphorism "No pain, no gain" is apropos.

It is the students who could have scaled mountains but were directed only to molehills who will suffer.