When I announced to my friends and family that I was going into teaching, I encountered a lot of well-meaning praise along the following lines. “Oh, that’s great! All the current teachers are dumb – asses, you are basically performing an act of martyrdom!” People seemed to hold several notions about teachers and teaching, which, as a teacher, I can see are frankly untrue. These include “teachers = stupid” and “good at performing in an exam based school system = good teacher”.

There are several different reasons used to argue that teachers are stupid.

Argument Number 1: Anyone clever enough to study anything else, would.

This is what it has come to – teaching is so poorly regarded as a profession that it is seen as a last resort, perhaps slightly better than telemarketing, but probably worse than mucking out pigsties. In a way, the lack of respect afforded teachers is a self perpetuating stereotype.

The problem with this stereotype is, that while it seems to make sense, it just isn’t my experience. In my seven years as a teacher, in public, private and international schools, I have always been surrounded by many intelligent people who wanted to be teachers for reasons other than “well, I couldn’t get into any other course.” I’m not saying these people don’t exist, but I am saying that I doubt many of them made it through university, and if they did, I doubt they would last very long as teachers.

Argument Number 2: Teaching can be done by anyone (see above), and does not require any special skills.

What does it mean to be intelligent? To be stupid? Is it automatically to be assumed that people who can perform well in exams that require a lot of memorization are intelligent? Are those who excel at art, or sport, or languages, but struggle with calculations stupid?

Teaching does require special skills and depending on the children and the subjects you teach, those skills will vary. Teachers do need to understand, or have the capacity to understand, the principles of the subjects they teach, but this is really just the very beginning of what it means to be a good teacher. In fact, knowledge of the actual material that is being delivered is, in a way, the least important focus when we think about what we mean by a good teacher. Delivery of this material, the ability to connect with students, to make learning engaging and relevant – this is where good teachers shine. In fact, some of the best maths teachers I know struggled to understand maths when they were at school. Some very knowledgeable physicists I know would most likely have difficulty teaching even basic algebra to year 8 students.

So even if sometimes teachers are people who have failed to achieve great grades at high school, the people who become teachers are by no means “stupid” or “unskilled”. Teaching is not a profession that “just anyone” can do. Teachers do definitely require special skills… which brings us to…

Argument Number 3: “When I was in third grade my teacher told me that the sky was blue because of the reflection from the sea, and I just found out that’s not true. What a dumb-ass!”

Yes, your teacher has either

a) made something up on the spur of the moment because they fear saying the three most dreaded words of past-teacherdom “I don’t know”.

or

b) repeated a “fact” they have gleaned from nonsense sources without checking it.

These are both poor teaching practices. In my classroom, I would first ask other students if they knew, and then look up the answer on the internet, displaying it on the digital projector, taking the time to read it carefully and explain any nuances the student had missed. Or, if we didn’t have time, I might set it as homework to find out. Or I would tell the students I’d find out, and then report back to them the next day. But, your third grade teacher didn’t have the internet 20, 30, 40 years ago, and if this was their only transgression they may be forgiven for not knowing all there is to know about the visible light spectrum.

If your third grade teacher pulled these kinds of stunts all the time, taught you to measure distances with your ruler starting at the one instead of the zero, said Sydney was the capital of Australia and that nouns were describing words, then I understand your anger at that particular teacher. But it is still not fair to take that anger and transform it into a lasting disrespect for the entire profession.

One last lament…

When I was in year 9, Mr Williams told our class that we had to study hard and do well in our exams, or else we would end up as a teacher like him. Even then, at the age of 14, I viewed his urging not as an incentive to do well but as a sad reminder that teaching is so badly respected that even Mr Williams, my favourite teacher, had no respect for the job he was doing.

Anyway, thanks for reading my rantings, at the very least it’s helping me to calm down. If you would like to comment below please feel free to do so. I trust you’ll use small words that are sure to be understood by my teacher’s brain.