Students...

"They don't care how much you know until they know how much you care"

-Anonymous 

The High Cost of Low Teacher Salaries

       I'm very thankful I live in Canada, especially for (but also many more reasons beyond) my education.  Once I'm done university I'll ideally be teaching internationally and then probably return Canada thereafter.
      
       Teaching in the US appears to be a struggle; it seems as though teachers don't get the resources or salaries they need to live off of, let alone successfully teach.

       This editorial in the NY Times describes the very differing opinions of how we view failure in the military and what we do - give more money and resources, compared with failure in education - giving teachers less and expecting them to perform just as well.

Here's a short excerpt and a link to the full article:

        WHEN we don’t get the results we want in our military endeavors, we don’t blame the soldiers. We don’t say, “It’s these lazy soldiers and their bloated benefits plans! That’s why we haven’t done better in Afghanistan!” No, if the results aren’t there, we blame the planners. We blame the generals, the secretary of defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff. No one contemplates blaming the men and women fighting every day in the trenches for little pay and scant recognition.
        And yet in education we do just that. When we don’t like the way our students score on international standardized tests, we blame the teachers. When we don’t like the way particular schools perform, we blame the teachers and restrict their resources.
        Compare this with our approach to our military: when results on the ground are not what we hoped, we think of ways to better support soldiers. We try to give them better tools, better weapons, better protection, better training. And when recruiting is down, we offer incentives.

Full NY Times Article

A position held a century ago; a position even more relevant today.

"With the advent of democracy and modern industrial condition," Dewey wrote in 1897, "it is impossible to foretell definitely just what civilization will be like twenty years from now.  Hence, it is impossible to prepare the child for any precise set of conditions."

Nothing like good ol' John Dewey after midnight.

A theoretical contribution to education

"There is no such thing as a neutral education process. Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate the integration of generations into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity to it, or it becomes the ‘practice of freedom’, the means by which men and women deal critically with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world."

—Jane L. Thompson, drawing on Paulo Freire

Mistakes, Learning; a TED video with a simple message

A lot of this stuff is covered in my education courses in school.  I discussed learning goals in a paper on humanistic approaches to music education.
For example:

Task mastery goal seekers are those that use effective learning tactics to acquire new knowledge and skills even if it means occasional failure or disappointing performance. 

Performance-approached goals are principally motivated to outscore others on exams and assignments to demonstrate their ability; conversely, performance-avoidance goals are principally motivated to avoid failure through self-handicapping, avoiding challenging tasks, and cheating. 

Performance approached goals suppress intrinsic motivation and equate failure with low ability and performance-avoidance reinforces low self-efficacy and stunts intellectual growth.  Mistakes and failure need to be treated as part of the learning process, they are not to be looked down upon, but rather as a learning experience and as progress.  Creating an environment where mastery is the goal is the goal. 

What makes a good teacher?

Often, a question that arises in education classes, certainly at the undergraduate level, is, "What (do you think) makes a good teacher?" 

It's rather easy to think about high school, even grade school, and vividly remember the teacher(s) you loathed.  Oppositely; the teachers you loved.  For most people, I think, it's the teachers that were personable, friendly, helpful, a good sense of humour, and very smart are the words we would use to describe the teacher we love.  I could list plenty qualities of a poor teacher, but I'm sure you could recollect some personal instances that make a much better point than listing adjectives.

It's interesting though, because in the world of educational philosophy (that which I am just tiptoeing into), there is hardly any 'evidence' of what actually makes a good teacher.

     Unfortunately, we are as near to discovering what makes a teacher really good as we are to understanding the mind of God, time travel and belly-button fluff. Clearly, teachers need a certain level of intelligence to impart knowledge. Equally, a brilliant scholar who lacks the patience and empathy to explain concepts to a puzzled pupil will not a teacher make.
     Self-evidently, teaching is a practical profession, like dentistry. Some term it a "craft" because it requires mastery of skills that are best learnt on the job, in front of a class. But it is also more than a craft. Unlike dentists, teachers have to inspire as well as fix. Imaginative dentistry is a terrifying, not to say bloody, prospect. Teaching is both process and vocation. It can be bloody, too, but the pain is usually borne by the practitioner, not the patient.
     So to be absolutely clear: teachers have to be bright but empathetic, patient but enthusiastic, practical but creative, imaginative but organised, confident but not complacent, inspirational but grounded. In what precise proportions, no-one has the faintest idea. Neither is there any consensus over where these qualities should be developed (TES Magazine, pages 10-17).

There's a wealth of material I must read through before becoming knowledgeable on the subject, and I hope to expand and share my thoughts, but one of my education professors (mostly for educational psychology), Dr. Bina John, said that the #1 quality for a good teacher is expert knowledge.  That's #1.  Now, that might send shivers down the spines of some aspiring teachers, because I, do not quite feel like I'm an expert at music.   Considering I'm in "education" at university, there's the stereotype (that's slowly dying [fingers crossed]) that people in education aren't experts at anything.  "For those that can't do - teach", etc.

Philosophers are much more concerned with who educators should be.  The Socratic Method is something interesting that I've just stumbled upon and hope to further investigate. 
My philosophy of education professor, Dr. Elizabeth Gould, let us know that "teaching is impossible."  Which, confused quite a few of the students and left us wandering aimlessly in many articles on educational philosophy.  We looked at a lot of Deleuze.  Anyways, she was interested in us exploring 'philosophy as experience'.  Here's the article she had published discussing this concept.  (I'd search your schools database for the article if you want it to look prettier (I just put it on a google doc so it's accessible for all)).

Anyways, I'm not going to expand further because it's late, and maybe the only thing you got out of this post was the excerpt, and a little bit of thinking.  But I was trying to make things a little more personal.  And once I have a firmer grasps on a lot more concepts, this blog will be a lot more useful.