Compromising in Education: My account of D.C.

Walking around our nation's capital this past weekend made me think about the foundations of our government—compromise. Our education system should be no different.  

From my column in Technician last week you will recall my excursion to Washington D.C.  for a discussion with the Department of Education. This discussion was centered around the "Race to the Top" program, which is meant to encourage school systems to meet a certain criteria in order to receive federal money all with the intent to win the war on education. The document outlining this criterion is called the RESPECT program: Recognizing Educational Success, Professional Excellence and Collaborative Teaching. (Funny how authors of these types of programs come up with such clever titles.)

In a nut shell, the Department of Education is attempting to pose the challenges in education and the vision for fixing them all while trying to alter how the teaching profession is viewed. The key word in this is vision. As with any federal program, the policy makers create loose, interpretative solutions to the issues so states are able to create the details—American bureaucracy at its finest.

This program is designed to give Title I money (the one weapon in the Dept. of Education’s arsenal worth anything, a topic for another blog post) to schools who uphold the key points of the program. While I found this program as the pillar of idealism for educational improvement, the weight it holds falls flat and will merely result in another NCLB. However the program itself was not the impressive part about the Department of Education visit, but the discussion itself was the highlight.

A Federal agency is making an attempt to reach out to those who will be directly impacted by the implementation of such a program. The RESPECT program, unlike its predecessor (NCLB), has been continuously adapted based on input from retired, current and future educators and administrators. Understanding the concerns of those who will be affected by these changes allows for a more accurate representation of them and their concerns.

I admire the Dept. of Education’s attempts to make itself as a resource for educators; however, their implementation of this mission is a bit beyond their purview.

This component aside, the trip overall was a success. I am a firm believer in “What is Past is Prologue,” and “Study the Past,” phrases etched in stone statues guarding the U.S. National Archives Research entrance.  Even as a future math teacher, one of my many other passions is history. And having never to been to D.C. as such a history nerd I was in hog heaven.

Walking the National Mall from the Lincoln Memorial to the Washington Monument, I couldn’t help but feel overwhelmed by such a tremendous historical presence. Seeing memorials for World War II and the Korean and Vietnam Wars filled me with a sense of patriotism and empowerment.

Throughout my visits to the Capitol, the monuments, Arlington National Cemetery and some interesting encounters on the Metro, I reflected back to our conversation with our good friend Ed.

We all (Federal, State and local governments) acknowledge the problems with education; however, our stubbornness is the wall we hit when trying to solve them. The Federal government wants to prepare our students for the global market, achieving this through comparative results with other countries. Our State governments want our students achieving on grade-level and beyond, to become competitive on the national scale. Local governments are motivated to push the students to success. The Dept. of Ed. demonstrates this “chain of concerns” in a graphic displayed in the front entrance of the building. While RESPECT outlines the problem with education, the solution they pose is only a fraction of the issue. The end-all solution is to compromise. We must “Collaboratively Teach” together.

Some might say this is more idealistic than the RESPECT program however; this solution is motivated by something we all can agree on—improving education for the students’ sakes. After all this is the reason for education.

I may be biased, because I consider myself the Henry Clay of today’s society (another history nerd joke); however, this trip affirmed by beliefs. I was able to see the foundations of our country’s government all around me and formulate a philosophy on education. Yet another teaching moment for my own benefit, which will spill over into my professional life. Education is important, and compromise is our best option to ensure our students succeed.   

What are "Those Teaching Moments"

Throughout my years of primary schooling, my teachers would make a mistake and they would shrug it off as a "teaching moment," and go on with the lesson. I never understood what this meant. What made one moment better to teach than another? At my first job, my boss had just opened up her business and described the experience to everyone as "a learning curve for all of us."

As I have gone through various seminars, forums and classes in my teacher education program, I have had professors and even administrators discuss these "teaching moments" as moments where one messes up and uses it as an example for some great life lesson to impart on all those bearing witness to such a moment. However, I finally am beginning to understand what exactly these moments entail.

From time to time we all have little parts of our day disrupted by the chaos of everyday life. Some, like myself, can get very bent out of shape when plans don't go accordingly (Type A). Why spend so much time planning, if you're going to get off course? Others take the approach, "just roll with it," (Type B). And then there are few who combine the two ways of thinking to create a middle ground of annoying level-headedness people. No matter what category you might fall into, they all share this one type of moment in common.

One way of looking at these teaching moments is where you openly admit you're unprepared to handle an issue, whether that be to the lack of planning, for the Type B people, or the inability to tackle a small disruption, for the Type A people. When you acknowledge this type of moment you're able to use it to your advantage and present it as one of those times you must put yourself in check and merely state the facts so others may benefit from it.

The other, is to take hold of the moment and use it as a demonstration to prove your point. This is the Type A way of thinking about the first method of dealing with these moments. Think about it, using something unplanned in such a planned manner, people think you actually planned it out, how very Type A. Regardless, it is possible for you to intentionally seize a moment and display it for others to learn from it. After all that is what teachers hope to accomplish everyday, teaching something students actually learn.

That's what this blog is meant to be about, those moments where you realize you can take hold of a piece of time and demonstrate its importance to others in the hope they learn from it and apply it to themselves.