My Oath

While pondering what to write about this week, I Googled the phrase “first do no harm” because I had a vague sense that it pertained to an oath of some sort, but I couldn’t remember what it was called. When Google reminded me that it is from the Hippocratic Oath, my curiosity took over and I looked up the history of the term.

Interesting fact: the phrase “first do no harm” is no longer officially part of the modern Hippocratic Oath, though the intent of that phrase is ever-present. Another fun fact: people love things that come in sets of ten. For example, there’s the Ten Commandments, the Bill of Rights to the U.S. Constitution, the modern Hippocratic Oath, and the teachers’ Bill of Rights that has been proposed in the Tennessee Legislature (SB0014/HB1074) and needs to become law as hastily as possible. As education professionals, we should take a similar oath when we receive our apprentice licenses, which enables us to become full-time teachers. As far as I can tell, such an oath does not exist; therefore, I have created my own, written in the same style as the modernized Hippocratic Oath.

1. I swear to fulfill, to the best of my ability and judgment, this oath.
2. I will honor the gains of those educators in whose steps I walk and will gladly share my knowledge with those who are to follow. 
3. I will always work for the intellectual betterment of my students, avoiding, as much as possible, the twin traps of over testing and teaching to the test. 
4. I will remember that education is both an art and a science, and that warmth, sympathy, and understanding may outweigh the bubble sheet and the homework assignment. 
5. I will not be ashamed to consult my colleagues when the skills of another are needed to help a student. 
6. I will respect the privacy of my students. Most especially must I tread with care in matters of life and death, and I will do everything lawfully within my power to protect a student’s life. 
7. I will remember that I do not teach a data point on which I will later be judged, but a human being, whose desire to learn and become a productive member of society are of utmost importance in the classroom. 
8. I will encourage my students to think critically whenever I can, and I will always look to incorporate ways for students to act creatively. 
9. I will remember that I remain a member of society, with special obligations to the foundations of future societies. 
10. If I maintain this oath, may I always act so as to preserve the finest traditions of my calling and may I long experience the joy of educating those who seek my help.

I believe in my heart that educators are well-intentioned. Sometimes lawmakers and other bureaucrats get in the way of us doing what is best for our students. For example, a person only needs to follow the money trail for a brief moment to discover the foundation of the accountability movement that is so pervasive in every public school in the country. One company or another profits from every standardized test that students take. It’s a billion dollar a year industry that is quite adept at generating a need for its products.

Sometimes, however, teachers get stuck, or groomed, in the mantra of “this is always how we’ve done things” and end up creating work that is detrimental to students’ success. For example, it is common practice for elementary school teachers to assign homework--despite the overwhelming evidence that it is not beneficial to enhancing students’ performance. Earlier this school year an elementary school in Vermont banned all homework and they have already declared the experiment a success--after only one semester! Especially with recess constantly being put in time-out during the school day, it’s more crucial than ever that these young learners have time after school to play, and be curious, and investigate things. After all, the entire concept for this article began when I did that very thing myself. Perhaps if educators took an oath, like the one that I wrote above, it would have a positive impact on how we operate our classrooms. In any case, it couldn’t do any harm.

It's About Them

I watched “A Very Merry Mix Up,” one of those Hallmark Christmas movies, last night. I can tolerate them, but my wife absolutely adores them. In this particular movie, Alice was engaged to Will because their partnership was convenient; they had a similar vision of where their lives were headed. Through a strange twist of fate, when this woman traveled to visit his family for the first time for the holidays, she ended up at the wrong house and met another man, Matt, with whom she truly fell in love. The moral of that movie is that love is all about timing. When Alice broke up with Will, he said he knew it was coming because something didn’t feel right; their timing was off.

Like Will at the end of this movie, something doesn’t feel right to me in the field of education. But it’s not just me. Other teachers feel it, too, and so do the students. We’re all in a partnership together because of convenience. Entire groups of students graduate together because they were conveniently born in the same year and go to the same school. I happen to work at a particular school, which means that I teach this group of students. I’m not chosen to be their English teacher because of my specific interests, skill set, nor my extraordinary teaching talent; I’m their English teacher because I am in the right place at the right time.

Will Richardson, a former English teacher turned speaker and school consultant, at the 2016 International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) conference said that “We are at a point in schools when we have to change our internal reality.” The current reality is that teachers attempt to find new ways of doing the same thing that they have done for years, and a standardized test is given at the end of the school year because it’s an easy and convenient (and unreliable) way to measure students’ growth and, in Tennessee, teachers’ abilities to create that growth.

So what would this change in our internal reality look like? It has to begin and end with the students. At my high school, they go to seven classes a day and experience seven teachers with sometimes complete opposite teaching styles, teaching philosophies, and academic expectations. This student experience is common across the country, and it results in students nationwide being sent the message that the school experience isn’t created for them. They’re correct. It’s interesting, and somewhat amazing to me, that high school graduation rates in Tennessee and across the country continue to climb and are at an all-time high. I wonder if the high school diploma means that we have successfully met the needs of that student, or if the student has done a good job of complacently jumping through hoops. My hunch is that the honest answer is somewhere in the middle.

In any case, we are teaching a millennial, “it’s all about me,” generation and if public education is going to thrive in the future, then we have no other choice but to adapt and meet the needs of our students. Instead of teachers finding new ways of doing the same things they’ve done before, more of us really need to try new things. Some will work, and some won’t, but then the students will see that we’re learning with them. The answer to the question “How do kids learn best?” should drive everything we do in our classrooms. When students ask “Why do I need to learn this?” then the relevance of the lesson isn’t clear, and the teacher should be able to explain it. Since I’m asking questions, I’ll throw one more out there. It’s good practice, I think, for teachers to ask themselves, “Would I want to be a student in my own classroom?” I frequently think about my daughters, who are 11 and 6, when I ask myself this question. I give the great Dave Burgess credit for planting that last question in my brain.

Providing a quality education is not necessarily convenient. Returning to my original analogy: in the education field, it feels like our timing is off, like we’re merely going through the motions. At the risk of sounding cliche, life really is all about timing. It’s time to reduce or eliminate standardized testing, because there’s nothing standard about the students I teach every day. It’s time to reinvent our lessons and try something new. It’s time to put students at the center of our lessons and learn with them.