Mrs. Thomas Didn't Teach Him Critical Thinking (Charles Blow)

In Honor of Teachers

By CHARLES M. BLOW

Published: September 2, 2011

Since it’s back-to-school season across the country, I wanted to celebrate a group that is often maligned: teachers.

Gotta love shameless pandering that takes the guise of a bold contrarian espousal of principle.

Like so many others, it was a teacher who changed the direction of my life, and to whom I’m forever indebted.

Yes, you owe your formation to the people who spent the most time with you during your formative years. Bold and daring statements, indeed.

A Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup poll released this week found that 76 percent of Americans believed that high-achieving high school students should later be recruited to become teachers, and 67 percent of respondents said that they would like to have a child of their own take up teaching in the public schools as a career.

Just spitballing here, but one would conclude from those poll results that being a teacher is not actually maligned, thereby undercutting the entire premise of this article. Yes, already. Ironically,  this level of incompetence  is almost certainly directly attributable to Charles Blow’s incompetent English teachers.

But how do we expect to entice the best and brightest to become teachers when we keep tearing the profession down?

Should this same argument be extended to investment bankers? Weapons designers? Bio-engineers for agricultural companies? Medical researchers for Big Pharma? Anyone who works for any profit-seeking entity whatsoever? If so, we’ve successfully negated nine tenths of the liberal narrative.

We take the people who so desperately want to make a difference that they enter a field where they know that they’ll be overworked and underpaid,

Actually, they’ll be underworked and overpaid (more on that later). The worst part, though, is that Blow wants us to genuflect to their alleged selflessness. You want to be a teacher? Great; we need good ones. Just don’t expect me to nominate you for sainthood.

and we scapegoat them as the cause of a societywide failure.

You want to attract the best and the brightest? You need to give them a reason to expect that their efforts will be rewarded and the laziness and detachment of their peers will be punished. They need to feel less like cogs in a machine and more like empowered, individual actors. They need a sense of responsibility for their successes and failings. To this end, student performance should indicate to each and every teacher in America that they are, collectively, a societywide failure. Good teachers and school administrators will view this as a personal failing.

A March report by the McGraw-Hill Research Foundation and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found that one of the differences between the United States and countries with high-performing school systems was: “The teaching profession in the U.S. does not have the same high status as it once did, nor does it compare with the status teachers enjoy in the world’s best-performing economies.”

Boy, that sounds quantifiable. Wasn’t there something earlier about 2/3 of parents wanting their kids to become teachers?

The report highlights two example of this diminished status:

• “According to a 2005 National Education Association report, nearly 50 percent of new teachers leave the profession within their first five years teaching; they cite poor working conditions and low pay as the chief reason.”

Those poor working conditions? Incompetent administrators and union-based compensation systems designed to protect entrenched teachers who are less competent or engaged than new graduates earning half their salary.

• “High school teachers in the U.S. work longer hours (approximately 50 hours, according to the N.E.A.), and yet the U.S. devotes a far lower proportion than the average O.E.C.D. country does to teacher salaries.”

Which is irrelevant because 1)  The average work week in America is 46 hours, with 38% of people working more than 50 hours. In other words, using this extremely generous survey, teachers still fall well within one standard deviation of the mean…when they’re not on vacation. 2) Teachers have an annual three month-long vacation, unprecedented in virtually any other professsion. And no, they do not spend that time updating their lesson plans. 3)  Teachers are better paid, on average, than private sector employees  (In Illinois, for example, the average teacher makes $58,686 versus an average state-wide salary of $53,966.)  4)  Teachers unions intentionally defer salary to benefits like healthcare and pensions, making salary an absolutely terrible metric for compensation comparisons. 5) The rest of us, making less than teachers, don’t get commended for our saintly sacrifice.

Take Wisconsin, for instance, where a new law stripped teachers of collective bargaining rights and forced them to pay more for benefits.

The horrors!

According to documents obtained by The Associated Press, “about twice as many public schoolteachers decided to hang it up in the first half of this year as in each of the past two full years.”

Great! Now the people of Wisconsin don’t have to pay those pensions and the school system gets an infusion of new blood. This seems like a win-win to me.

I’m not saying that we shouldn’t seek to reform our education system. We should, and we must.

Boy, thanks for putting bold new ideas out there, champ.

Nor am I saying that all teachers are great teachers. They aren’t. But let’s be honest: No profession is full of peak performers.

Don’t look now, but that sounds an awful lot like what conservatives have been saying.

At least this one is infused with nobility.

See what I mean about verbally fellating these guys?

And we as parents, and as a society at large, must also acknowledge our shortcomings and the enormous hurdles that teachers must often clear to reach a child.

It’s our fault that teachers suck?

Teachers may be the biggest in-school factor, but there are many out-of-school factors that weigh heavily on performance, like growing child poverty, hunger, homelessness, home and neighborhood instability, adult role-modeling and parental pressure and expectations.

Is there a solution to poor education that doesn’t, in some fashion, end up with higher spending?

The first teacher to clear those hurdles in my life was Mrs. Thomas.

Oh Jesus, I thought I was bored before.

From the first through third grades, I went to school in a neighboring town because it was the school where my mother got her first teaching job.

Isn’t it cute how Charles wrote an entire article to defend his mother’s career choices? Also, is it any coincidence that a pampered, entitled government employee spawned a shameless liberal desperate to expand the government payroll?

I was not a great student.

Based on the tortured logic and poor grasp on basic fact pattern shown throughout this article, I believe it.

I was slipping in and out of depression from a tumultuous family life that included the recent divorce of my parents. I began to grow invisible. My teachers didn’t seem to see me nor I them. (To this day, I can’t remember any of their names.)

And yet, they all still got paid using the same compensation structure as Mrs. Thomas.

My work began to suffer so much that I was temporarily placed in the “slow” class.

“Temporarily…” Sure.

No one even talked to me about it. They just sent a note. I didn’t believe that I was slow, but I began to live down to their expectations.

Seriously, this is the guy saying that it’s unfair that teachers are maligned.  Does he really not see the problem here?

When I entered the fourth grade, my mother got a teaching job in our hometown and I came back to my hometown school. I was placed in Mrs. Thomas’s class.

There I was, a little nothing of a boy, lost and slumped, flickering in and out of being.

This depressing story is about a kid dealing with apathetic teachers for four years, not about finding a great one for one year.

She was a pint-sized firecracker of a woman, with short curly hair, big round glasses set wider than her face,

That was probably a function of 80s fashion, but continue.

and a thin slit of a mouth that she kept well-lined with red lipstick.

On the first day of class, she gave us a math quiz. Maybe it was the nervousness of being the “new kid,” but I quickly jotted down the answers and turned in the test — first.

“Whoa! That was quick. Blow, we’re going to call you Speedy Gonzales.”

It’s a good thing you’re black and not Hispanic. That little quip would have gotten her fired. Just kidding; nothing gets teachers fired.

She said it with a broad approving smile, and the kind of eyes that warmed you on the inside.

She put her arm around me and pulled me close while she graded my paper with the other hand. I got a couple wrong, but most of them right.

I couldn’t remember a teacher ever smiling with approval, or putting their hand around me, or praising my performance in any way.

Seriously…THIS is the guy who wants ALL teachers to be universally praised. This guy , who had terrible teachers until the FOURTH GRADE is the great defender of all teachers? Is he blinded by ideology, or just too dumb to actually learn the lessons of his youth?

It was the first time that I felt a teacher cared about me, saw me or believed in me. It lit a fire in me. I never got a bad grade again.

I genuinely doubt that; this column is a C- under even the most generous grading curve.

I figured that Mrs. Thomas would always be able to see me if I always shined. I always wanted to make her as proud of me as she seemed to be that day. And, she always was.

Christ, this is so desperately pathetic.

In high school, the district sent a man to test our I.Q.’s. Turns out that not only was I not slow, but mine and another boy’s I.Q. were high enough that they created a gifted-and-talented class just for the two of us with our own teacher who came to our school once a week. I went on to graduate as the valedictorian of my class.

Your mother is very proud. I think. It doesn’t seem like she was very involved in this story. It’s not my place to say one way or the other.

And all of that was because of Mrs. Thomas, the firecracker of a teacher who first saw me and smiled with the smile that warmed me on the inside.

Do you really believe that the entire school system should be lauded because one teacher corrected the glaring failings of 4 (including Kindergarten) others? Are you kidding me?

So to all of the Mrs. Thomases out there,

By my admittedly anecdotal evidence, that means he’s not talking to 80% of you crappy, overpaid teachers.

all the teachers struggling to reach lost children like I was once, I just want to say thank you. You deserve our admiration, not our contempt.

And yet, he can’t condemn the teachers that ignored him—the teachers that were paid well to fail him. These teachers chief failing lied in treating this particular child like all others and failing to find his particular strengths, weaknesses, insecurities, and challenges. Similarly, children’s interests are undermined by an administrative system and a sycophantic populace that treats teachers as a monolithic bloc of saints. Yet Blow’s story clearly shows the differences between good and bad teachers. Does he really believe that a system of universal praise and seniority-based pay structures parse out the good teachers from the bad? There is a lesson to be learned here; but it is the opposite of the lesson that Blow has learned.