“Respect the Teachers”
No. Question *everything*. We should be teaching our children to do the same, versus bowing obsequiously to the whims of authority. We should also be teaching them that having respect for people isn’t mutually exclusive with questioning them.
More broadly, we ought to question whether the aggressive acceleration of standards-based testing actually produces results as theoretically desired: does it improve the intellectual acumen of the nation’s children, or does it rather act as a gating function? Does it imbue young, impressionable minds with the great mysteries of learning and instill a deep and lifelong love for it? Or does it instead function as a sort of cruel Sorting Hat that scolds children over arguably trivial “inabilities” early on, dissuading them from further exploration in any number of subjects beyond the already naturally esoteric (without our “help” in over-complicating it even further) realm of math — a field that desperately needs to inspire a wider swath of today’s youth instead of truncating them out of the distribution prematurely via the sting of shame.
If the distinction is pedantic enough to warrant an “adult lookup” to produce the insight about how it relates to computer science, then how critical can it be for an 8-year-old to grasp in order to appreciably “understand math”? We have to be very careful about retroactively applying our adult insights as being foundational for children’s engagement in the educational process. It’s very tempting — and I suspect a good deal of that mentality (produced largely by highly-paid educational “consultants” on the dole from the Gates Foundation at the top layer, and sped through the tangle of state-specific red tape by an army of administrators on the wings of hundreds of millions of dollars of “take it or leave it” funding before ever trickling down into the hands of Actual Teachers with current and practical, hands-on interest in pedagogy) went into the production of the debacle that is Common Core.
Granted we don’t have all the available information about the situation that the teacher was privy to (and unfortunately we can’t ask them about it because the screencap has been appropriately anonymized) — and in our general lack of understanding regarding the complexity of both the issue at hand and the historical development of these curiously powerful and pervasive new standards, many of us manage to shoot the messenger. The teacher in question is probably more likely to be exasperated and confounded by the requirements of “teaching to the test” than we laypeople are (and harried in the process) — and you *are* right (despite my conveniently-placed argumentativeness up top for the sake of making the point that “respect” should not imply “silence” or “obedience”), they should be treated with respect, which is sadly a bar that seems far too high for today’s level of internet discourse (perhaps some standards-based testing ought to be applied here as a palliative as well! ;)). But we can both treat them respectfully *and* apply critical thinking to the question of whether or not this newfangled style of education — heavily influenced by the personal fortune of one man, well-intentioned though it may be (unlike some, I don’t really doubt the sincerity of Mr. Gates’s intentions — but if we’ve learned anything from the decades of well-intentioned interventionism around the globe it is that “good intentions are not enough”)— is either an appropriate or an effective way to prepare America’s children to face the considerable challenges that previous generations are leaving for them.
