Andrew Old is in many ways the dean of edu-bloggers, and has been defending humanist, traditionalist education against the constant rhetoric, condescension, and often outright lies of the well-connected progressivist brigade for as long as I can remember.

His latest post deals with the depressingly familiar issue of progressivists adopting several different and often self-contradictory poses at once, occasionally out of convenience, occasionally out of a confused sense of conviction. It is a phenomenon that I have written about in the past as well, but in this post I’d like to offer a partial answer to Andrew’s query as to whether it is worth dividing what is broadly described as progressivism into its separate manifestations.

I have never wavered from my belief that educational philosophies can broadly be divided into four types. Humanism, a more palatable and accurate term than traditionalism in my view, is an age-old educational philosophy whose western version stretches from Quintilian through (among others) Colet, Erasmus, von Humboldt and Arnold, and which found its finest expression in the last century in Hannah Arendt’s magnificent essay The Crisis in Education.

Instrumentalism, the implicit belief the education has preparation for the world of work as its chief aim, has advanced in parallel with humanism for much of the same period. It found its first western expression in Plato’s Republic (in a perhaps tongue-in-cheek passage, admittedly), and has since found its way, via John Dewey, into the vapourings of every snake-oil futurist in the education firmament.

The libertarian tendency, closely allied with constructivism, stresses the virtues of student autonomy and discovery learning. The debate-deflecting term “child-centred learning” is frequently associated with this movement. The philosophical underpinnings of the libertarian position come ultimately from Rousseau, and while its more extreme modern expression is found in the writings of John Holt, Ivan Illich and A.S. Neill among others, its more acceptable form stems from the constructivist crankery of Piaget – still a revered figure in academia, for whatever reason.

Then there are the activists, the disciples of Paulo Freire in the main, who see education as a form of social liberation and a means to upend social norms. Many education academics fall into this category, and a number of classroom teachers at least flirt with these ideas. When it comes to education policy, however, this trend seems to be a little less vigorous than it used to be.

You will notice that I have not included the idea of education as a therapeutic force here, for a simple reason: every educational philosophy, including humanism, counts personal or pastoral care among its ultimate aims, although they all approach this aim slightly differently. So those who assail the humanists with cries of “trauma-informed”, “needs of neurodiverse students” and the like are really making use of a trope rather than a discrete educational philosophy.

Of the four major strands above, the noticeable thing in education discourse is that instrumentalism, libertarianism and activism are all actively opposed to humanism, but not usually to each other – a point that Andrew makes with typical clarity in his blog piece. This is despite the fact that they are, as Andrew again points out, essentially incompatible. A real instrumentalist should be well aware that a constructivist approach to an important body of knowledge is bound to entail the sort of inefficiency that is anathema to instrumentalism. An activist ought to realise that constructivism, implemented genuinely, may lead a child to a viewpoint far different from the one that the activist seeks to engender. (As those who have met them know very well, activist teachers tend to be the most authoritarian of all.) And activists also ought to actively loathe the instrumentalists, for very obvious reasons.

So what is the point of all this?

What I am suggesting is that humanists should be aware of these different strains of progressivist thinking and their ultimate incompatibility, in order to better pick apart the grab-bag of self-contradictory arguments often advanced by the no-best-way-overall-except-mine crew. Think kids should be trained in those “21st-century skills” for those “jobs that don’t exist yet”? Then you’re engaging in solecisms by spouting constructivist jargon as well. Intending to be a “disruptor” of the established order? Then your convenient alliances with the instrumentalists need to be called out. Believe that children are best served by “productive struggle” and “curiosity”? Then don’t try to enlist the aid in argument of one of the jobs-of-the-future brigade.

One of the most egregious grab-bag pieces I’ve seen recently was one of the many tawdry responses to the Australian government’s welcome, if perhaps blunt, proposals to reform ITE. The very title of the piece reeks of constructivism and there are a batch of constructivist clichés (not to mention absurd misrepresentations) within the article. But one of the activist clichés also makes an appearance:

Education is not about changes in the brain but about changing the world together.

This is an explicitly activist statement, and, as explained above, incompatible with the constructivist nostrums which animate the rest of the article.

Humanists should be aware of the fundamental, and often irreconcilable, differences between the different strains of progressivism. And they should not be afraid to point them out, the next time one of the progressivist grandees presents an incoherent smorgasbord of ideas.

Next to report writing, the most mind-numbing part of any teacher’s job must surely be producing programs and units of work. Oh, the many hours of my life I have spent filling in all those mandatory little boxes on the template, knowing full well that the nicely rounded sentences I produced, with all the correct terminology, bore virtually no relation to the way I would teach the material in class.

Within a faculty, or a stage level at primary school, program writing can become quite political as well. Who’s going to do the new ones, who’s just going to edit the old ones? Who’s going to get the planning days? Whose resources are going to be used, and whose are going to become optional extras at best?

But more importantly still, program writing, like report writing, requires human beings to produce the sort of wooden, anodyne, off-putting language that they would otherwise never use. The French have an excellent phrase to describe this sort of writing: langue de bois, or wood-talk.

Fortunately, langue de bois is an idiom in which the new AI generators are impressively fluent. You could, in fact, call it their native language.

In the fullness of time, then, program writing could become another time-saving use of AI in education, given proper editing. And if we have taken the idea that far, how about the endless committees higher up in the education bureaucracy, made up mainly of those who have made a shrewd escape from the classroom, at which discussion on how to word a policy or curriculum document can take several well-paid days?

To finish off this little series of thought bubbles on AI’s potential to be a friend rather than a foe to education, I should mention an opinion piece by one of Australian education’s chief wonks in yesterday’s Australian newspaper (paywalled, unfortunately). There is much talk in this extended rumination about the dangers of credentialism, of losing touch with the humanist ideals of education, etc., sprinkled with all the usual nostrums about critical and creative thinking, and all those other whatever-century-we’re-in skills.

All I would say in reply is this: if ChatGPT and its various cousins impel teachers to return to in-person, written assessment as a rule rather than an exception, to ensure that long-form written tasks are completed in a closely-curated step-by-step manner which precludes shortcuts, to step back and consider whether their own practice is filled with similar shortcuts, and (in the case of universities) to openly admit, at long last, that there is an urgent problem with take-home assessments, then the arrival of AI text generators is to be welcomed.

It’s that time of year, teachers of Australia. Mid-year reports are upon us.

It’s the time of year when that bottle of wine in the cupboard becomes a precious companion to us as we desperately search for something distinctive to say about each of our students. After all, they’re all individuals (yes, insert Life of Brian joke here).

Needless to say, report time is also corner-cutting time, and those charged with checking over their colleagues’ comments in order to prevent embarrassment on publication – a job I have done frequently over the years – have noticed human nature at work in some less than flattering ways. A few tales from my own store:

• In my very first year of teaching, I noticed that one of the boys in my “tutor group” had received three identical comments from three different teachers. Centralized comment banks strike again. This was not a good look for the school, needless to say.
• Many years later, as a Year Adviser, I noticed that many if not most teachers had made copy and paste into an art form. The most egregious example was a particular HSIE teacher who had managed to produce the exact same comment for every one of the 30 students in his class. There was a small problem though: the comment had a typo in it, and this required both myself (on paper) and one of the SASS staff (on the computer) to correct every single one separately. The teacher in question, incidentally, is now a Deputy Principal.
• In that same Year Adviser gig, I noticed that members of a certain faculty had clearly been told to produce individual comments. The problem was that in searching for something fresh to say, many of them had often become so tangled up in their thoughts that their syntax had followed suit, with the result that the comment was, in a word, gobbledegook. And the rule was, at this time, that we were not supposed to shoot comments back to the teachers to correct – that task was ours, as Year Advisers (and Head Teachers and DPs, further up the chain). Painful.
• More recently still, as acting Head Teacher, I have had well-meaning teachers striving to produce similarly individual and informative comments, but said teachers’ command of English was not faultless, and once again the syntax became the sort of knot that even Alexander the Great would have had trouble with.

All this is by way of a very long introduction to a suggestion: why not use the new AI generators to help with reports?

Whether the level of detail (or the prissy verbiage) on reports is really necessary for parents is another matter, but while these reports are with us, they might as well be dealt with as painlessly as possible. And those who find the process of producing specific comments so excruciatingly difficult that they dive into their personal comment banks more often than is advisable, or produce impenetrable mush under the pressure of a deadline, might welcome the opportunity to provide prompts instead. Would this be all that different from a comment bank? Perhaps not, but I think it would be easier to provide the level of variety that the often decades-old comment banks would not. I am not an expert in the area, admittedly.

In Part III: another area of education in which the new AI generators could potentially do more good than harm.

The hand-wringing over AI in education continues apace. Most of the opinions being offered, of course, emanate from non-teachers; particularly forthright in this regard have been the hardened futurists who manage to convince themselves that any new technological development (a) heralds a revolution such as we have never seen before and (b) proves they were right about everything all along.

One actual teacher who has weighed in on the rise of ChatGPT, Google Bard and the rest has recently produced two rather doom-laden blog pieces on the topic, concluding with some modest suggestions for adaptation to this brave moderately-new world.

The interesting thing is that both their description of some aspects of the current education landscape, and their envisioned adaptations, suggest to me that the effect of AI on education could be quite positive.

To clear something out of the way first: students getting others to complete their take-home assessments and assignments is, to put it extremely mildly, nothing new. If the current crop of AI text generators have simply made things easier, this is a difference of degree, rather than a categorical change. But at least the ubiquity of such task-avoidance is now harder to ignore. And it is worth focusing for a moment on a particular phrase from the anonymous blogger’s second piece:

To a child though AI is something far more enticing and deleterious. It is a way to more speedily weigh through a mountain of assignments.

I well remember, as a student, the feeling of being swamped with long-term assignments – most of which, as I knew even then, were of no conceivable educational use. Thirty long years later, and very little has changed. For a variety of reasons, most of them not very good ones, the assignment-due-in-three-weeks is still an unwelcome feature of school life. Unwelcome? Yes. Although unconscious bias in questioning may play a role here, twenty-plus years of conversations with students have convinced me that most of these assignments are viewed as nothing more than a pain, and the more recent experience of seeing the assignments of this kind that are given to my daughter (now in Year 8) have convinced me that they are mostly a higher form of busywork.

If the shock provided by ChatGPT induces teachers to move away from such things in the interest of less gameable (and infuriating) forms of assessment, if the mountains become mere elevations, isn’t this something to be fairly cheerful about?

Later on in the blog piece, we have an account of a thoughtful teacher’s adaptation to the ChatGPT age:

Naturally, I am compelled to consider, during the planning of assessment and syllabi, how to minimise both the possibility and utility of using AI, by which I mean uses of AI that replace an essential learning step. Strategies associated with visible learning seem highly pertinent here: short, cumulative tasks completed in class that build one upon the other and show evidence of development. The principle is to break larger, long-form written tasks into steps that can be completed in class, but later worked into more lengthy written tasks. In simple terms, guiding the drafting of written work in small steps renders the use of AI both redundant (the students have already prepared their writing in smaller steps) and tangential to the task. The student has already invested enough of themselves in the task. To go away and get AI to write the task would disrupt their existing workflow and result in a product that bears no resemblance to work done in class.

I find myself applauding in approval. This seems an excellent approach to long-form written work in English and other humanities subjects. Rebecca Birch has written convincingly and often about this approach to long-form writing; it seems far superior to the sort of open-slather “off you go” approach which often prevails. But the author presents this, more or less, as a means of living with ChatGPT. To me, it looks like very good pedagogical practice.

In Part II, a look at how the text generators could make life less painful for teachers, especially in terms of those tedious tasks in which “finding the right words” is so often a source of despair.

Yesterday, I had one of those teacher experiences in which a fairly trivial matter opened up an interesting path of reflections. Ostensibly, it concerned the use of dictionaries in the HSC Latin course; since 2015, students have been permitted to use these in exams and assessments, an innovation which I consider highly misguided.

Bear with me now: some explanation is required.

In an unseen translation task which the students were given, the passage of text (from Horace) contained the word emendo. Now, in Latin this can have two meanings: it can be a part of the verb emere, to buy, in which case it would mean “by buying/in (the act of) buying”. But it can also be the base form of a verb meaning “I alter/correct”, as in the English word emendation.

Now this passage had both a caption and a “lead-in” text appended to it, both of which suggested very strongly (given the subject matter) that the former meaning was required here. The context, too, would have suggested it; in fact, the meaning “I correct” would actually have been both grammatically and metrically impossible, given the rest of the sentence.

Yet all but one of my students translated the word as “I alter/correct”. Why? Because if you look up the word emendo in a Latin dictionary, that is what you will find. To be aware that it could come instead from the different verb emere requires some knowledge of Latin grammar. Knowledge which, however, all of my students possess.

So, as one of them pointedly mentioned when we discussed the paper afterwards, they had trusted the dictionary instead of their brains.

This got me thinking, in a more general way, about the phenomenon of the “open book” test.

I understand the thinking behind it: the idea seems to be that analysing a particular problem or situation properly, or critically, could require information which might not yet be in a student’s long-term memory.

And yet is this really the best way to deal with a complex problem? Endlessly consulting one’s textbook or notes to fill in the epistemological gaps is surely not conducive to clarity of thought in such a case. And the temptation to use the textbook is, in my experience, overwhelming, even when this makes it impossible for students to maintain their train of thought properly. (I have pleaded with Latin HSC students not to rely on their dictionaries in this way for the past seven years, with absolutely zero result.)

The odd thing is that the open-book principle fails on instrumentalist grounds too. Who would trust a surgeon who was constantly consulting their notebook, or an accountant who had to rummage through the tax regulations every ten seconds? But, the argument goes, there will be plenty of situations in the working life of most people in which some time for research is not just useful, but necessary. The counter-argument to this is that, if test situations are meant to mirror any real-life scenarios (and that, of course, is very far from their chief function anyway), they surely relate more closely to those occasions in which the rapid recall of knowledge in long-term memory is at a premium.

So, in all but very specific circumstances, I would recommend closing the door on open-book tests.

Now that I’m about two months into my “new classroom policies“, in particular the no-device resolution, I thought it might be a good time to reflect on the results.

I have implemented this only with Year 7 and Year 8 so far. Since I teach an elective subject, those in Year 9 and beyond tend to be quite motivated (and the class sizes, of course, are smaller), so in general I trust them not to misuse the devices. Also, even with Year 7 and Year 8 I have continued to make an exception for Kahoots, for four good reasons: (a) I have a number of double-periods, for which a Kahoot makes a suitable conclusion when the concentration level has dimmed, (b) the students enjoy them, (c) I enjoy them, (d) if well-designed, they can work quite well as a sneaky type of formative assessment.

By and large: it seems to have worked pretty well. One especially notable change is that without the distraction of opening a device, closing or opening tabs, flicking through a pdf to find the right page, etc., etc., students seem to have less need of reiteration when it comes to simple whole-class instructions (let alone moderately complex ones).

One small downside has been that students now seem to be more likely to do their fiddling with the old-fashioned things: pens, scraps of paper, the clothing of their class neighbour, and so forth. But this is a minor issue.

And the standard of work has been a good deal better, on the whole. Co-operation on exercises and written tasks now takes the form of quick question-and-answer rather than underhand attempts to set up a Google doc.

What of the expected complaint that the use of devices is allowed in other classes? Mercifully, there has been little of this. My school is actually a little divided on the issue, and the students have come to accept a little administrative schizophrenia here.

This Friday, I had my Year 7 classes working on a task which did, unfortunately and unavoidably, require the use of a device. It was noticeable how my initial instructions were either misunderstood or forgotten, while distractions from the task at hand were common. And perhaps more importantly, due to the inability of students of this age to use Google remotely effectively (as one of those who replied to that tweet pointed out, making the most of Google requires background knowledge), some of the “information” which the students garnered for the task was outright inaccurate.

Overall, then, I’m happy with my current anti-screen policy. Further updates later in the year…

The acronym GPT in ChatGPT, the new chatbot which is currently generating acres of copy for edu-futurists worldwide, stands for Generative Pre-Trained Transformer, which sounds a little like the name of an early seventies prog rock ensemble. I would like to suggest the alternative abbreviation Chat-Geppetto, in honour of the creator of Pinocchio in Carlo Collodi’s much-adapted novel. It seems appropriate, since Geppetto was a woodcarver by trade, and pretty much everything produced by ChatGPT is decidedly wooden.

Reaction to ChatGPT from the various heirs of St. Ken of That TED Talk has been, well, effusive. We need to “shift public education towards the future” as a result, it seems. More than one pundit has used it to spruik, yet again, the “Khan Academy” model of so-called flipped learning. It would be hard to find a better example of a non sequitur.

Best of all, we have a pundit from the impeccably right-on Atlantic getting properly starry-eyed:

If you’re looking for historical analogues, this would be like the printing press, the steam drill, and the light bulb having a baby, and that baby having access to the entire corpus of human knowledge and understanding. My life—and the lives of thousands of other teachers and professors, tutors and administrators—is about to drastically change.

Self-satire is alive and well.

In this post, to some extent I actually come to praise ChatGPT, not to bury it. The sudden realization that take-home assessments are no longer liable to be the students’ own work, and that therefore we ought to rethink them, may be about 20 years late, but it is welcome. Sadly, most pundits have failed to draw the obvious conclusion: namely, that proper, supervised written (or practical) assessments constitute the only fair means of judging students against either a norm or their peers, and that therefore they should be prioritized in the future. Instead, we have had the usual warbling about collaboration and critical thinking, and a complete inability to face the facts.

Thankfully, those actually responsible for education at secondary and tertiary level, rather than those who are paid to emote about it, have been somewhat more sanguine. It was pleasing to note that the universities, after decades of sweeping concerns about essay farms under the carpet, have been goaded by ChatGPT into looking towards old-fashioned, reliable forms of assessment. This is a welcome development.

And what of schools? ChatGPT has the potential to be modestly helpful when it comes to designing programs, units of work and the like. And if it results in teachers of humanities subjects moving away both from gameable assessments, and from the robotic essay formats which have become so ubiquitous in recent times, there is reason to feel cheerful.

So then, two and a half cheers for Chat-Geppetto. As long as we don’t listen to the predictable blatherings of the edu-futurists, it could engender some small improvements in education.

2023 is likely to be my last year of full-time teaching for a while, but I’d still like to give the students my best, and to act in their best interests. So here are three quick New Year’s resolutions for my teaching in 2023 (there are some non-educational New Year’s resolutions as well, but they relate mainly to my eating habits):

1. Have students use devices as little as possible

Yes, I already follow this as a principle in class, but given school policies, parental expectations and the like, I have sometimes taken the easy way out up to now. Not any more.

Google Classroom is an excellent and valuable tool, but I’ve decided to use it only for communication, reference and homework in 2023. The issue of collaboration on a Google doc (for classwork) is not new, but there are all sorts of other issues which can arise when students undertake individual work on devices; some are obvious, some only really become apparent when one spends some time in a classroom.

The instrumentalist brigade always like to remind us that the students of today will probably be working in front of devices for much of the time in the future. Not only is this not necessarily true, but how many Australian students (even the relatively underprivileged) don’t spend a fair number of their out-of-school hours glued to devices anyway?

2. Don’t be afraid of tangents

The principle I outlined some time ago about limiting the time spent on extraneous material in class is still, I believe, a fair one. But in recent times I’ve found myself getting perhaps a little too dogmatic when it comes to limiting the time spent exploring an intriguing tangent. If the students are still following, if the topic can still be considered relevant, if the discussion (or the monologue, but discussion is, of course, infinitely better) is opening up areas of interest and curiosity which underline the breadth of the subject area at hand, I’ll try to “let myself go” a bit more.

3. Do more for the drifters

The aspiring teacher’s pets are easy to spot, in a new class. The troublemakers announce themselves within the first couple of weeks. The perpetual excuse-makers can be picked out early on. The quiet achievers usually make themselves known after the first assessment task. But what about those who do the set work only reluctantly and perfunctorily, and who waver between occasional interest and apathy for most of the year?

These are often the ones who get ignored, even though they might be pushed towards the interest side with a bit of extra effort and attention from the teacher. I’m aiming to identify the drifters a bit more swiftly this year, and make them aware that they are not just filling up space in the classroom.

All the best to everyone for 2023.

(A brief skit more in the spirit of Lucian than Quintilian)

Recently the ABC hosted a colloquium on the NSW teacher shortage, in which Gerry Grimface, the host of the current affairs program The Tambourine, welcomed to the Ultimo studios a number of key stakeholders (for WH&S reasons they were not permitted to bring their stakes into the studio) in the education debate: the education minister Ms. Chillmet, head of the parliamentary inquiry into the teacher shortage Mr. Maltha, Teachers Federation representative and Twitter legend Ms. Gulen, and recently-retired teacher Mr. Frank.

Grimface: Ladies and gentlemen, thank you all for attending.

Chillmet: Thank you. Are my glasses the right colour?

Maltha: Woke indoctrination!

Gulen: More pay!

Grimface: Ah, right. Ms. Chillmet. Let’s start with you. The teacher shortage is obviously a serious problem, what is the government proposing to do about it?

Chillmet: Well, there will be a press conference this afternoon. <smiles triumphantly>

Grimface: And…might we know the substance of the announcement to be made?

Chillmet: Oh, that. Erm…we will be announcing a program to recruit thousands of teachers from overseas to fill vacancies in our hard-to-staff schools.

Grimface: But…you announced that at a press conference several months ago, and it didn’t work.

Chillmet: Oh I know, but the lighting was terrible, I was having a bad hair da…

Grimface: Er, no, I mean the policy came up short, not the press conference.

Chillmet: Oh.

Gulen: More pay for teachers!

Maltha: Marxist nonsense!

Grimface: Hold on, I’ll come around to you soon. Now, Ms. Chillmet, I believe the government also has plans to address the behaviour issue?

Maltha: Send them into the army!

Gulen: There is no behaviour issue! This is all about controlling us!

Chillmet: Yes, well, we intend to appoint someone. <smiles triumphantly>

Grimface: Someone whose job will be to…

Chillmet: Assess the extent of the problem, design an overall strategy, create professional learning opportunities, build capacity, embed evidence-based…

Grimface: And will they be working directly with schools?

Chillmet: Oh, of course! They’ll be sending out group emails under the new Department banner every few weeks. Isn’t it great?

Grimface: Well, I would have thought that there would be more hands-on involvement…

Chillmet: You know, the little curve, and the way it incorporates Indigenous art…

Grimface: I’m sorry?!

Chillmet: The Department banner!

Grimface: Ah, I see. Now then, Mr. Maltha.

Maltha: Are you trying to censor me?

Grimface: Well, not deliberately, erm…what have been the findings of your inquiry so far?

Maltha: This shortage is a result of the vaccination mandates, another example of big government flexing its…

Grimface: But, erm, how many actual teachers have left the profession due to those mandates?

Maltha: Thousands! Just look at the submissions to the inquiry!

Grimface: Were they all from teachers?

Maltha: They’re from people who are well aware of the dreadful impact these mandates have had on all sectors of society.

Grimface: That’s not what I asked.

Maltha: Are you trying to censor me?

Grimface: <sighs> I think we’ll move on.

Maltha: Political indoctrination! Critical Race Theory in our schools!

Grimface: Now, Ms. Gulen, thank you for coming.

Gulen: We need more than thanks!

Grimface: Erm, quite so. Now, what is the union’s position on the government’s new proposals?

Gulen: All distractions! We need more pay, more time, respect as a profession! Workload is unmanageable! I work 60 hours a week or more! You have no idea how much time it takes to fill up my Twitter feed adequately with all the wonderful things I do as a teacher and working parent. And to retweet everything from Angelo.

Grimface. I’m sure. So does that increased workload include the teacher accreditation process?

Gulen: That’s a vital component of our professionalism and we will not have it taken away.

Grimface: I…see.

Maltha: Perverted agendas!

Chillmet: Evidence-based…

Grimface: Now Mr. Frank, I believe you have some other suggestions for alleviating the teacher shortage. Could you elaborate?

Frank: Well, yes. For one thing, the new rules regarding suspensions are going to make things even more difficult…

Chillmet: This is about creating inclusive and respectful schools! You can’t be against that, surely?

Gulen: The union also supports respectful schools. And more pay for teachers!

Frank: A postgraduate requirement of two years is something of a disincentive for…

Gulen: Teaching is a complex job requiring a high level of professionalism! Two years is the minimum required!

Maltha: Lazy teachers, just one year of postgrad? Bunch of wimps.

Frank: There are some teachers who have made efforts towards a collaborative bank of quality resources, which could help with workl…

Gulen: Trying to dictate to teachers! We will not accept intrusion on our autonomy!

Chillmet: Don’t you know that we are producing a bank of resources through an external provider as well? I’ve been told this will be ready as early as 2030!

Frank: And then, I’d be happy to come back to teach here and there, but with the accredit…

Grimface: And I’m afraid that’s all we have time for.

Chillmet: Best practice.

Gulen: Working all through the holidays!

Maltha: Woke elites!

Frank: Oh, and one more thing…

Fade to black.

The enthusiastic reactions to a true red-flag tweet from a gentleman who manages to be both an “Educator” and an “International Keynote Speaker” (danger, Will Robinson!), suggest to me that certain less experienced teachers ought to be initiated into the often deceptive world of teacher advertisements and interview questions. Senior executive have become quite adept, over the years, at disguising their intentions behind a number of stock expressions. Herewith, then, in the tradition of the Progressivist Phrasebooks, a look at some of the common items of advertisement and interview patter, and what they actually mean. Translations in italics.

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a passionate teacher: a teacher who will be expected to work beyond what can reasonably be expected, generally for the greater glory of me

a teacher willing to think outside the box: a teacher willing to (a) go along with any new fad going, (b) teach outside their subject area, (c) react enthusiastically to any hare-brained ideas from senior executive

a teacher who loves kids: a teacher who buys into the teacher-as-superhero cult, and is willing to forego their own personal life if I expect them to

a teacher who embodies the ethos of the school: a teacher who can recite (or react to a recitation of) phrases from the school’s prospectus at assemblies while keeping a straight face

a teacher who is prepared to embrace X: a teacher willing to suspend disbelief about X

a teacher prepared to go the extra mile for their students: a teacher prepared to buy their own stationery

a teacher willing to prepare students for the 21st century: a teacher whose IT skill level won’t make the students laugh

a teacher who prioritises engagement with the school community: a teacher who can intercept a nightmare parent before they go up to exec level

Interview

What can you bring to this position? – What can you contribute to my CV?

Describe your best quality. – Show me how convincingly you can lie.

What are the areas in which you feel you need to improve as a teacher? – Keep lying, you’re doing great.

Describe a situation in which you really made a difference to a student’s life. – Give me a nifty story I can use at the next conference.

Are you prepared to teach X if required? – You’ll be teaching X.

We have a holistic vision of education at this school. – You’ll be taking sport, debating, camps, and heaven knows what else.

Is there anything you’d like to ask us? – How good are you at subtle flattery?