I Couldn't Have Said It Better...

I stole this from another blog, but I thought it was cool because I always make the teacher/doctor analogy...

He had just come from a faculty meeting, and it was clear from his demeanor that things had not gone well.

“What happened?” I asked.

“I listened as long as I could,” he said, “but they could not get off their blame-the-the student shtick. Finally I said that they sounded like doctors in a hospital saying, ‘Don’t send us any more sick people–we don’t know what to do with them. Send us healthy patients so we can look like good doctors."

Parker J. Palmer shares this anecdote in his book The Courage to Teach. He carries the analogy further by sharing how it helped him come to this crucial understanding about teaching:

The way we diagnose our students’ condition will determine the kind of remedy we offer.

He goes on to say that we spend little time thinking about the maladies that our teaching is meant to cure and that we allow our treatment to be shaped by the thoughtless stereotypes we have of our students. Palmer’s thoughts on this remind me of the other book I’m reading, Never Work Harder Than Your Students & Other Principles of Great Teaching by Robyn R. Jackson. The first principle in this book is to start where your students are. As I read her thoughts, I couldn’t help thinking about how important it is for us to value our students no matter where they come from. When we don’t value them for who they are, it is much like what Palmer’s friend says. We are like doctors who don’t want to work with sick patients. It is important for educators to stop seeing the students who enter our classrooms as deficient. We should be like House and his team. We should embrace the maladies of our students and work diligently to find cures. When one remedy does not work, we need to try again until a cure is found.

We need to work together to diagnose our students’ maladies and work together to cure them.