How To Tell If Someone Is A Bad Teacher

For the last six blogposts  I’ve been letting Mr. Tram have his say as to what kind of a student teacher I was when he supervised me in his Grade 9 Science class. I think everyone will agree that he paints a horrifying picture of me. I don’t think he was all that fair. I thought I was a good teacher. But that’s not what I want to talk about today.

It’s evident that Mr. Tram thought I was a terrible teacher; but if you read his diary, it’s not really all that clear just what I did wrong. Yes, he talks about how I didn’t submit lesson plans and how I talked about things that weren’t on the curriculum. But isn’t it just possible that someone – not necessarily me, but someone - could be guilty of those two sins and still be a pretty good teacher? So it’s hard to say just what I’m guilty of. Mostly he talks about things that happened out of class…snatches of conversation, mostly taken out of context, that make me look…well, crazy. He mentions three or four occasions on which he felt afraid of me, like the time I “paced past (his) classroom without saying anything”. But what was it actually like sitting in class while I was teaching? If you read Mr. Tram’s diary over again, you’ll find that when you’re done you won’t know much more than you know right now.

Well, it’s my blog, so I suppose I should defend myself and tell you my version of what kind of teacher I was. But every time I do something like that, the haters chime in and complain that I’m just spouting self-serving propaganda, that of course I’m going to see myself through rose-colored glasses. So maybe I won’t do that now.

Instead, what I think I’m going to do is to show you what it really looks like when you write up a bad teacher. If I was really as bad a teacher as Mr. Tram makes me out to be, I wold think he would have a lot more specific classroom incidents that he could describe in detail.  But in fact, he doesn’t provide a single example. Not even one.

I know the haters among my former classmates are already preparing to leap to Mr. Tram’s defence, just as they did when I challenged them to name one single incident that happened at the U of W which justified getting me kicked out of classes. Like Mr. Confused, who self-righteously proclaims "I am NOT a hater" and then gets all indignant that I have the audacity to ask for details of what I did that was so wrong:

You are like a broken record. I saw a guy who questioned the strategies of most instructors to the point where it sucked up valuable class time. ALL OF THE TIME. Can I remember specifics? Nope. You need to stop asking this, we have all moved on and filed this in the 'irrelevant' file.

It’s funny because I don’t have that much trouble remembering details. Professor Bell was a very bad teacher, and I remember details that I can describe to back that up. Professor Metz was a bad teacher, and I can justify that judgment with specific details. Professor Bush was an awful teacher, and I can tell specific stories to explain why. Professor Cantor…well, yes, she was bad too but in her case I might have trouble with details because everything was just so mushy. She was so earnest and sincere, and she’d keep on saying how such-and-such a point was really really important, and I kept waiting to find out just what her point was, and it never really came. But in general, I can come up with lots of specifics to justify why someone is a bad teacher. And if you’re going to kick someone out of his practicum after just six days, I’d think you should have something more substantial than “he paced by my classroom without saying anything.”
 

So just what am I expecting of Mr. Tram? In a word…specifics. The very thing Mr. Confused insists I'm not entitled too. And although I haven’t mentioned it yet, I happen to think Mr. Tram was quite a bad teacher. So I asked myself: let’s say we turned the tables. Could I back up that claim with specific incidents? And when I think about it…yes, I think I can. So maybe that will be my next order of business when we return.

I ought to mention that this might not be the smartest move on my part. Yes, Mr. Tram criticized me in writing, so why shouldn’t I criticize him right back? Well, theres’ a difference. It was his job to be critical of me; so it’s hard for me to sue him, because under the doctrine of qualified privilege, I have to prove that he was malicious. That’s not so easy.

But if I come out in this blog and just criticize him out of the blue, it’s not clear that I have any such defence: this blog is not what they call a “privileged occasion”. He can sue me, and my only defence would be that what I’m saying is the truth. And that’s not always so easy to prove, considering I don’t have ready access to the witnesses who saw it all…that is, the students.

Still, I think I can make out a pretty good case that Mr. Tram was a bad teacher. Not because I want to get even with him, but just to clarify the theoretical point: what does it look like when you compile a list of actual examples of poor teaching? Because I don’t think Mr. Tram has really done that in his diary. Like I say, it could get nasty for me, but hey…what the heck. Let’s see what happens.

* * * *

EDIT: Mr. Confused has written in with a list of my character flaws that supposedly proves I was a bad teacher. One of those flaws is that I'm "so self-absorbed I can't see the big picture". Hmmm...

He insists “I am not a hater”, but later he admits that he was the anonymous poster who called me an idiot.

He admits that it’s obvious that someone must have told Tram to “get the dirt” on me (and who would that be if not Principal Skull?); but in spite of all this, he proclaims that if it was him in my situation, he would have won Tram over with his personal charm. (Who’s “self-absorbed” now?) 

When I first started posting Tram’s diary, he complained that I must be leaving something out because there was nothing in Tram’s account to explain why he was so opposed to me; but later, when it became clear to him that I had left nothing out, he backtracks and argues that according to the Diary, Tram started off on my side, trying to “help me become a better teacher”. 

And after admitting that none of his four CT’s never even asked for as much as a lesson plan (and how much he enjoyed the freedom they gave him), it still doesn't cross his mind that maybe he was lucky that he didn’t have Mr. Tram as a CT.

He criticizes my lesson plans for not listing the SLO’s but admits he didn’t read the introduction where I list all the SLO’s.

When it comes to what happened at the U of W, he admits he can’t remember anything I specifically did wrong at the University, but still says they were justified in “giving me the boot”.

He ridicules me for being so obsessed (“like a broken record”) with getting people to come forward with specific incidents, saying (more or less) “get over it already. Everyone else has moved on. Why can’t you?” Big picture: Yes, Mr. Confused, you’ve “moved on” because you’re not the one who got kicked out of school.  Talk about “self-absorbed”.

He ridicules me for speaking out in class when it was obvious that no one was interested in what I had to say. Self-absorption: just because you weren’t interested, doesn’t mean no one was. 

And Big Picture: not everyone is brought up to believe it is a sign of character to back down in the face of public opposition. My father gave me Ibsen’s Enemy of the People to read when I was a kid. I’m guessing yours didn’t.

He characterizes my public disagreements with the profs as “trivial”, and then proudly says he can’t recall any specific examples because he would always “tune right out” as soon as I started speaking. Let me try to explain to him the Big Picture here: you can say that the things I said were a waste of time, or you can say you don’t remember what I said because you weren’t paying attention; but you can’t say both.

EDIT: A former classmate, Mr. I'm-not-Shari, wrote in below to ask me about a presentation I was scheduled to do in Prof. Bell's class just before I was kicked out. I actually wrote the University VP to ask if they could modify the expulsion order just to allow me back for the just presentation, but after consulting with the University lawyers, he informed me that they had advised against it. 

I think it would have been a pretty good presentation, but there's no point saying that now. Yes, I had planned to use it to "advance my agenda", as the haters have been complaining all along, but what the heck is wrong with having an "agenda" and wanting to advance it? Anyhow, the theme of the presentation would have been how to tell the difference between going through the motions of teaching and learning, versus actually teaching and learning. I was going to start with a story taken from my engineering education background, which I wrote up last year on my other blog over here. It's from the field of structural theory, which turns out to be a feature of the Grade 7 (!?) curriculum. (They deep thinkers in the curriculum branch throw in a bunch of pretty hard concepts involving things like shear and torsion in order to justify turning the kids loose on the spaghetti-and-marshmallow bridge contest. But that's not my point.)

Anyhow, I was going to start my presentation by explaining the Diving Board Problem to the class and asking them to sketch their best guess as to the correct answer. The problem looks like this:

You have to guess how the curvature varies along the length of the board...where is it greatest, where is it least? It's a funny problem and I tell the story about it in two installments, starting with the link to my other blog. The article includes a bunch of stuff about the political fallout that got mixed up in the story, but I wasn't planning on including that part in my class presentation.