What School Should Be: On Teachers

I want my kids to attend a school where the teachers love kids, grasp the content, and bring their “A” game to every class.

Teachers and students are the sine qua non of education. Without school administrators or curriculum publishers or technology beyond wax tablets, Socrates taught Plato who taught Aristotle who taught Alexander. Good teachers are the lifeblood of good schools. And yet the “highly-qualified teacher” movement is tone-deaf. There is weak correlation between research-intensive qualification and instructional quality, especially at the elementary level (though it’s true at the Ivies, too).

Of course, parents don’t want their children taught by ignoramuses, but neither do they want their children taught by acerbic and aloof geniuses. I want a first-grade teacher for my child who is engaging, empathic, and excellent at teaching reading to six-year-olds. If she is bland, impatient, or easily perturbed, then I don’t care about her master’s in instructional technology. She must delight in six-year-olds and revel in their verve. The same is true at every stage of learning. I want my child’s teachers to be doing cartwheels for Algebra and crying when they read King Lear. Uninspiring, dismissive, or disengaged teachers are brooding vampires who must be expelled from the castles of learning.