Oh the Things You Can Learn at a Teacher Conference!
In today’s Pope Center piece, Mary Grabar writes about her experience at a teacher conference in Georgia.
Such conferences are not about mundane pedagogical matters like how best to teach arithmetic or to write good paragraphs. Instead, they’re about how to smuggle a lot of leftist notions into the classroom.
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The teachers who are actually concerned with pedagogical matters of the classroom no longer attend those conferences; no longer enroll in graduate programs; do not trust those who left the classroom for graduate school; and, do not trust those who go to such conferences. Teacher education should concern itself not with the digital, racial, or gender divides, but with the divide between those who call themselves teacher educators and those who are actually teachers. Unfortunately this concern will not come from the discourse of teacher education.
What the author is describing is also spreading beyond the liberal arts. Last November I started teaching AP Chemistry for the first time (at an elite Catholic school in D.C.). Consequently, I joined the American Chemical Society so I could go to their meetings and learn things to enhance my teaching. I just came back from one of their teacher’s workshops in Delaware. I was hoping to get some ideas for labs, but I was bitterly disappointed to find the entire workshop dedicated to using a new constructivist technique for teaching chemistry called “POGIL” (Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning).
We experienced the process by playing the roles of students. To its credit, there is a reasonable degree of guidance on the part of the teacher and I saw no evidence of social justice indoctrination (other than the delusion that it’s usually the chemistry teacher’s fault that so many kids hate chemistry). I would even venture to say that this technique has its merits for enhancing student engagement -but it is useless for me, because it would only allow me to cover a fraction of the material that I normally teach in the 40 minute time slots that I am alloted.
Later that day, I attended a research presentation by a Chemistry education specialist who presented compelling data linking the decline in chemistry scores to a declining emphasis on computational skills (multiplication table and long division). In a conversation with him I was gratified to learn that he was also a big fan of E.D. Hirsch (author of “The Knowledge Deficit”). Consequently, he is addressing the American knowledge deficit that is currently resulting in (what I call) the sinification of our science departments. Not a bad thing in itself, but a result of a bad trend -in that not enough qualified students can be recruited from the U.S.
It is refreshing to see people crossing disciplines to foresee what education theorists have in store for them.