Contradictions, Convenience, and Cynicism

Advice I've gotten (not all from one person, but all from people I respect):

"Don't reinvent the wheel." paired with "Stop copying what the other teachers are doing."

"Give more homework and the lessons will plan themselves" paired with "Homework shouldn't be mandatory."

"If you leave kids to their own devices, how can you expect them to do the right thing?" paired with "If you never place any trust in your students, how can you expect them to do the right thing?"

To a veteran teacher, the statements above don't contradict each other, but to a rookie like me, they do, and it's confusing. How can I stop reinventing the wheel and stop taking ideas from others? How can I frame my lesson plans around homework and make it optional? How do I know where the balance lies between too much trust and too little trust?

It all takes time, but even with time, it doesn't happen on its own. If you wait for it to happen on its own, you will fall into one of two traps: convenience or cynicism. You will grow from neither.

When presented with contradictory advice, we usually pick and choose. We take the advice that's most convenient for us and ignore the advice that's inconvenient. If there is data going both ways, we cling to the data that supports what we believe and immediately look to discredit the other side.

We do it all the time in politics. There is a slew of contradictory information about what "stimulates" the economy, whether it be tax cuts, tax increases, deregulation, infrastructure projects, austerity, public assistance, etc. We point to evidence that reinforces what we already believe and rarely change our mind when confronted with evidence opposing it. The 1990s were a good period for the American economy. If you're a Democrat, you credit the Democratic president for those years of prosperity. If you're a Republican, you credit the Republican majority in congress. You assume the 90s would have been even better if your political party had controlled both partisan branches of government during that time and assume it would have been worse had it controlled neither.

Same thing in teaching. If you tell a rookie teacher not to "reinvent the wheel," you're telling them that their original ideas aren't important. Someone else has already done it better than they could, so they might as well just see what's out there and take it. Then they run into the other extreme: "Why do you just do whatever your mentor does? It looks lazy and makes the students feel like you don't care." So they start needlessly reinventing the wheel again...because it feels like those are the only two options. Eventually they will either choose the option that's more convenient for them, or they will become cynical and say, "Everything I do is wrong. So why bother? I'm just going to keep kicking the can down the road."

If you tell a rookie teacher to plan lessons around homework, you're telling them that you can quickly and easily plan a complete lesson just by giving excessive homework. So the teacher will give more homework than the students know what to do with, and the results will vary. Some kids will do little to no homework but will then prove on tests that they know the material. So if the homework wasn't worth their time, why should they be punished for not doing it? Some kids will do excellent work on homework assignments but will then show you on tests that they haven't actually memorized or processed any of the material. Why should those kids have been forced to do homework that didn't help their learning?

If you, the teacher, don't like doing homework, this is a dangerous trap to fall into...because rather than empathizing with the kids by giving them less homework, your own unwillingness to put in the necessary planning time outside of class means you've saddled the kids with more homework. It's inconvenient to believe homework doesn't help the kids...because if you believe that, it means you have to loosen the homework requirements, which will mean more homework for you. It's a requirement for you to put in hours of work outside of class so you can be prepared for the lesson. Why can't the kids put in 30-45 minutes of preparation time on their end?

You think like that because it's convenient for you. The kids don't agree because agreeing would be inconvenient for them. If you cave now, you're admitting that you're wrong and the kids are right, which is very inconvenient. So you choose not to believe that, and you once again delve into cynicism.

It takes a lot of patience, assertiveness, and strength to hold kids accountable at every turn, and if you're good at it, then you start to believe that's all there is to teaching...because it's convenient for you to believe that. Watch out, though, because at some point, it's going to look like you're just chest-beating, and that's not helpful to kids.

It takes far more patience, assertiveness, and strength to place trust in your students, but only if it's genuine trust, which needs to come from both sides. Too often, though, we believe trusting our students means saying things like:

"Yes, they're talking, but they're talking about Latin, so it's cool."
"Yes they're really loud, but it's because they're so excited about how awesome Latin is!"
"They can't be this loud forever. Eventually they'll get it out of their system so we can get some learning done."
"They're just kids; they'll grow out of acting this way, but right now, I can't change them. This is just how they are.""

None of these things come from a place of trust; they all come from a place of convenience. Surely we can trust our scholars to do the right thing without turning a blind eye when they do wrong.

When faced with contradictory facts, I try to look at the "inconvenient" facts first. It gives me a much more informed and "fairer" worldview.

Yet every year, in student teaching and in my career, students have asked me what my political views are. When I tell them that's not relevant and we need to move on, they reply, "You're a LIBERAL! All teachers are LIBERAL because it means they make more MONEY!"

They assume I vote exclusively based on my own convenience. If my salary comes from the taxpayers, I must support higher taxes. I've devoted my whole life to helping kids and make less money than people who do comparable work in other professions, but when I get in that ballot box, look out world...because I'm all about ME!

It's my job to purge them of that cynicism, not to reinforce it in a way that's convenient for me.