Teachers at a Crossroads

With the arrival of the plague, things have become clearer. An opinion piece on the current state of education during the current state of emergency in el HOY. The extended English here and the published Spanish version below, or click on the link.

I had always thought that primary teachers would be one of the last standing professions that would survive the wave of automatization that is erasing the jobs our forefathers did from our collective memory. Who remembers the lamplighters who manually lit up the evening? Then there are the jobs that are on the brink of extinction, like farmers, bus drivers, McDonalds workers and even my own profession, language teachers. Jobs that may exist for the time being, but that are just one technological innovation away from being relegated to that lengthening list of jobs that the world no longer needs. 

But primary teachers?

No matter what technology brings, I had thought that our children would always need that all-important figure to inspire them, instil curiosity and shape the way that they see the world. I had always thought that while driverless taxis would soon take us to airports and drones would deliver our packages, that the primary teacher would always be with us.

That is, until the coronavirus. 

Overnight, our world changed. No more dragging sleepy children to school, no more ridiculously heavy backpacks to lug back and forth. Here in Spain, the kids don't have lockers or places to store their things and are forced to schlep everything they need on their backs. In order to flatten the curve of this deadly killer, kids and their teachers around the country were ordered to stay home and many of us would soon follow. Overnight, teachers, some of whom had, literally, been doing the same thing year after year for the past quarter century, were told to react and adapt.

The initial message from the ministry was to readjust but this was understood by most to continue on as normal. After all, wasn’t this the digital age? Weren’t we all digital experts? Overnight, parents’ inboxes were filled with instructions from homeroom teachers, math teachers, English teachers and even the Religion teachers had to predicate. Page number after page number were assigned and the next day saw the same. Parents who were fortunate enough to find time between teleworking themselves struggled through the never-ending gap-fill exercises with their kids, while those who didn’t have this supposed luxury hoped that their kids would be able to answer the questions on their own. 

Understanding that the situation was extraordinary, parents initially tried to be comprehensive and sent cooperative messages to teachers to please try and rationalize the amount of work that they were sending or coordinate among themselves so that the amount could be somehow more balanced. But the teachers too were feeling the pressure, to keep going like the rest of us.

News of the growing discontent must have reached the ears of those in charge and the tone from above changed over the weekend, recognizing that not everyone is a teacher and during this crisis, things couldn’t possibly proceed as normal. The deluge of homework that normally weighs down their backpacks was already leaving kids without similar opportunities and socio-economic classes behind before the crisis. What would happen when kids did go back to class and a third of the class was still on the page where they had left off while the others were seven units ahead? Would the classes have to be split in two? Would the already obscene dropout rate grow even higher?

But even after the official tone changed, a growing number of digital options offering the same gap-fills emerged and the page numbers continued to add up. It’s then that parents started to realize that this was, in fact, the normal. Some may have suspected it for some time, and some may have even complained to the deaf ears of education inspectors, but as the pages added up, the realization became clear. This manic page turning is what the great majority of students in the country were doing every day.

Burdened under the weight of an extremely bloated curriculum, rather than exploring concepts, testing hypotheses and putting knowledge into practice, classes had become slaves to turning the pages in colourful coursebooks.  Even the teachers who were inclined to try teaching with projects found themselves forced to resort to simply turning the page in order to try and ‘cover’ the immense amount of material that the curriculum requires. Parents who might have initially encouraged deeper involvement in discovery, in actual learning, also start to get nervous in March or April. They begin to worry about their child’s results because, even if they did agree with a more active enquiring methodology, they know that the year-end exams their children face is not based on understanding and cooperative learning skills, but on how much they memorize and how well they fill in the blanks. 

What happened to inspiring students to explore, gently pushing them beyond their comfort zones, scaffolding their learning and guiding them up the learning ladder? What happened to the modern skills of taking acquired knowledge and putting it into practice? When did teaching become reduced to assigning pages full of gap-fills or closed questions on a blinking screen?

It wasn’t until I was shown an English homework assignment that had been sent that the root of the problem began to show itself. The homework consisted of the student having to copy grammatical rules in a notebook like medieval scribes. No additional checking their understanding or putting the concept into practice, just the manual equivalent of copy and paste, spelling mistakes included. It was then that I realized that it wasn’t necessarily the teacher’s fault, this is what they had been trained to do. This is the system that they had come up under.

This doesn’t mean that the universities aren’t doing a good job or at least a better one. The problem is, that no matter how up to date the material prospective teachers study is, or even how modern the teaching methodology, every potential teacher knows deep down that they will not be given a job based on their understanding of teaching or indeed how well they teach. Their job prospects have nothing to do with how well they understand project based learning or the amount of empathy they possess. No matter how many workshops they attend or classes they observe, they know that their chances of getting a permanent position is solely based on a system that Cisneros or even Plato would be familiar with, the oposición. An untranslatable word.

Rather than being hired on their understanding of teaching and on how they put this understanding into practice, teachers are offered jobs on what they able to memorize and then quickly forget. As one student once broke my heart by telling me, “I don’t need to know why, I just need to say it correctly.” The cognitive dissonance gap between how teachers study to get their positions and the methodologies they should be using to help their students navigate the skills that the modern world requires is simply too wide to bridge. Especially when you consider that the teachers of today know that if indeed nothing does change, the pupils of today will also have to face this all important yet completely pointless test in the future. Whether consciously or not, all of this directly effects how they teach and present their material because it is through this koranic process, this rote learning, that they became teachers.

This rote learning, however, isn’t in their DNA. The majority of teachers do want to effect change, they do want to be able to comply with the curriculum and make project based learning part of their daily classroom routines. Many are desperate to colourize this black and white image of Spanish classrooms, with children sat in rows as they were in the 1930’s and bring them into the new millennia. That said, it takes courage to be, as the Japanese proverb states, the nail that sticks out that begs to be hammered down. These rebel nails need to be encouraged while those that resist change need training, mentoring and guidance to help them too colourize their classes.

Lamplighters didn’t go completely extinct, they saw that the world had changed and evolved and they became electrical engineers. If, however, the system fails to recognize that the way that teachers are currently chosen belongs to the past, they can change the education law another eight times and the result will be the same. The success of an educational system comes down to three things: teachers, teachers and teachers. And if these teachers fail to adapt and evolve beyond assigning pages and designing online gap-fills, they too risk being automated. Thus turning a once noble profession into a job done by robots while someone or something keeps order in the classroom.

There is talk that after this crisis there will be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, an opportunity for deep, profound change across the board. A chance to reflect and realize just how important public services are. Why not take this chance to deeply revise the way that teachers, so essential to our future, are chosen and thus ensure that they will continue? Medieval scribes copying from one book to another ceased to exist long ago and there are more than enough reasons that the tragic figure of the opositor should too.