Why do we make it so hard?

A conversation with a very close friend a few weeks ago made me really question how I feel about my job as an educator and why I do what I do. It is amazing how someone who knows you well (and is extremely insightful) can ask a few poignant questions that have you wondering exactly what it is that you think and feel about your work.
At the risk of sounding like a whinger (because isn't that how the media like to portray all teachers) there are some things about my job that I find challenging. Most of them have nothing to do with the classroom or the students because generally they are what excite me and buoy my spirit. What upsets me about being a teacher is that when you meet a new person and they ask you what you do for a living and you say you are a teacher, inevitably the first thing out of their mouths will be "oh, you get so many holidays - aren't you lucky!" You know what - we do get a lot of "holidays" and sometimes we even actually have a break during those holidays and take some time off, but I cannot imagine another job that so thoroughly consumes you and makes you desperately await the next set of holidays. I guess the bigger question here though is exactly why it bothers me and why I think in my head whenever someone asks me what I do for a living "here we go!" I think it bothers me because there seems to be an underlying lack of respect for teachers in the general population. When I meet a new person and they tell me what they do for a living, I never respond with a comment like "oh wow - you have it easy" or "geeh - that's a slack job!" I like to think that most people choose jobs that are challenging to them and that they work their hardest at that job, whatever it may be. My theory is that because everyone goes to school (and had varying experiences of education), everyone believes they are an expert and that they are entitled to bestow you with the qualities of their best or worst (generally worst) educators. Maybe this is a pessimistic attitude and I don't for a second think that everyone believes that teachers are slackers but when you work so hard at a job and then you feel like people are judging you unfairly when they have never been taught by you and barely know you, it is a hard pill to swallow. I just smile weakly and say, yeah, heaps of holidays... and generally my husband jumps in and starts talking about how hard it is to be married to a teacher and how many hours I work etc. I feel that if I say any of these things to defend myself I just seem like I am complaining about my lot, which I certainly don't want to do.
I love my job teaching young people. The sort of energy and enthusiasm that a room of teenagers has is infectious. I love the silliness, the seriousness, the controversial discussions, the opportunities for sharing and learning from each other and the way that kids are intensely passionate in a way that few adults ever are.
The thing is, I feel like teaching is a profession that you never feel like you have mastered. No matter how long you teach or how hard you work at it, there is no end point, no magical day when you realise you have made it - there is just a continual quest for improvement. For those who choose to take up the challenge. For some of the others there is the feeling that a life in education has taken from them all they have to give and left them unsatisfied, and angry, a twisted shell of their former selves, with no one to remind them how they used to be. Others still run for cover before they are chewed up and spat out - some of our most passionate and innovative young teachers end up leaving the profession because of a feeling they are not making a difference or a sense that they would get more recognition and more of sense of affirmation from a job that has clear goals and a clear measure of whether or not those goals are achieved.
You see the learning of young people is not something easily categorised and quantified and theorised and standardised. There is no magic wand that can be waved in the direction of the youthful masses that will bestow them with all the skills and attributes we believe they need to become successful adults. Not only is there no magic wand, but there is also no magic set of skills and attributes that each and every child will need to successfully navigate their adult lives. So I ask the question - when the world is changing at a rate that is ever more rapid and our sense of the future changing with equal speed, when will our notions of how we educate our kids catch up?
Can a standardised system relying on fitting every student in to the same box be the way forward? How will we, as educators, ever feel that we are truly making a difference to every student we teach when the system we teach in asks that we teach the masses, not the individual? How do we retain passionate teachers who do make a difference to students and convince them that what they are doing is making a difference, when the outside world still measures education by old standards that no longer ring true to the new reality?
Feel free to agree, argue or just have your say by leaving a comment.

Things I've been reading

Over the holidays and amidst my planning for next year, I did some professional reading. I am planning to start my Masters in Education this year, and I feel like in some ways I am emerging out of a vacuum that I placed myself in at my old school, and searching for new ideas, new pedagogies and a new way of thinking about education. I feel that I was stuck in a rut before, and that I had stopped learning and challenging myself to a large extent and part of my inspiration for getting back out there has been the learning networks I have found on twitter, and the blogs I have found because of them.
Finding Twitter and Fellow Bloggers changed the way I think
in a professional sense because suddenly I was in contact with people who were way more creative, engaging and challenging than I was and this has been inspiring me to do some higher order thinking. To this end, I have been collecting books that I have come across through blogs and I would like to share my thoughts on some of them as a way of synthesising the important messages for me within their pages.
The New Rules of Engagement - Michael McQueen

I heard about The New Rules of Engagement through twitter from @andrewdouch whose blog can be found here. I have been following Andrew for a while - I first heard about the work he was doing with podcasting in my early years of teaching and recently went to see him at a presentation at CSE which was engaging and illuminating and really got me thinking. So anything that Andrew recommends is interesting to me - his comment was that it was a really interesting book that he read in a day because it really sucked him in.

I have long been fascinated by the idea that we can profile a generation and make an fairly accurate assessment of the way they view the world and go about their work and life. I'm still not convinced we can, but in this book McQueen explores the generations, and the factors and experiences that formed the collective "identity" of each generation. Reading the description of Gen Y really resonated with me. This book would appeal to anyone who is interested in generation profiling or who wonders why it is that their parents or kids are the way that they. He also gives advice on dealing with the different generations in the workplace, particularly Gen Y which I found really interesting. This book had me wondering about the way I spend my free time and what I expect from education - and whether these expectations match up with those of my students, or even marry with what I am creating in my classroom. Certainly an easy, engaging read if you are interested.

Another book I read over the holidays is
Yong Zhao's Catching up or Leading the Way

I heard Yong Zhao speak at an Innovations and Excellence event and thought he was insightful, engaging and he challenged some of the ideas I had about education. Zhao questions the education reform based on data and test based performance as an indicator of learning, explaining the Chinese education system (which he experienced first hand) and comparing it with the American system his children are experiencing. He believes that the Chinese system has been creating students who can memorise information, and that due to the fact that it the Chinese system does not value individuality or creativity, the students are not successful in the global workforce, which is increasingly calling for innovative, creative and divergent thinkers. He believes that education systems that value the individual and that focus on building student's individual skills and tap in to their creativity will prepare students betterfor a future of global enterprise than schools that focus on a systematic "one-size-fits-all" model.
I feel that there is a real tension for me between the push for data-based practice and educating according to the system, and the push to differentiate and cater to personal differences and encourage every child to develop their own skills and attributes creatively. Many still focus on what is necessary for the exam at the end that will determine where the students end up. And will this content that we are teaching them actually give them the skills they need for the workforce, or is the focus merely on winning the competition? If a university education is the end point and we decide that the system is good enough because it gets them to university then what will happen as university degrees become increasingly redundant, as many suggest is already happening? I wonder if we will ever really do the students justice whilst we still have a system that is summative - that aims to reduce a student's knowledge to a single test result or assessment task. No matter how hard we work to convince the students that it is learning itself that matters, and the skills they accrue that will make the difference in the wide world, whilst the judgement at the end of 13 years of schooling is so reductive, will they ever be able to see the bigger picture? Will teachers?

Linked with these ideas is Daniel H Pink's A Whole New Mind

(pic from Amazon.com)
The subtitle of this book - Why Right-Brainers will rule the Future really sums up the essence of the book. Pink argues, with interesting anecdotes, that "The Conceptual Age" demands right brain creative thinking, rather than the left brain, systematic, logical thinking that was valued in the past and is what the education system is based on. Pink believes that the "Six (high concept, high touch) Senses" he discusses are senses which we all possess, but do not develop and encourage because they have not traditionally been valued, and offers ways that the reader can begin to redevelop and encourage these senses and therefore become more right-brained. My summary may be a little reductive, but I found the novel really interesting, and the sentiments being discussed by Pink are similar to those being discussed by others such as Ken Robinson in this summary of one of his speeches created by RSA:


Perhaps the things I have been reading and watching are all predominately focussed on the failures of the current education system - I would love it if people have books they would recommend that might balance out the scales, but I feel that at this point I am looking for a better way of doing things and wondering if education will ever catch up with the modern world. How do we know what is best for our students when we don't even know the types of jobs they will be doing out there in the workforce of the future? Is content obsolete and should we be testing skills? Or should we be testing at all?
Hopefully my masters, if I can work out what to focus in on, will help me gain perspective.
I would love other people's ideas, thoughts and opinions on this and other ideas of what to read. Let me know.