I'm no teacher's pet.

As a teacher, and then a parent with children going through our school system, I was often appalled by the level of education of teachers I met and worked with. We encountered teachers who sent home notes with basic spelling and grammar errors; teachers who taught our children about American Thanksgiving traditions but had never heard of Canadian ones; teachers who could not spell Shakespeare or were obsessed with what colour dividers our son used in his notebook; a science teacher who insisted that a computer had a hard disk drive because he “could tell by the size of the case;” an ethics teacher who told his class that homosexuals were condemned to hell;  English teachers who could not name a single Canadian author; a history teacher who had not heard of  the Upper and Lower Canada Rebellions of 1837; a teacher who told me that ect was French for etc. When questioned about these basic elements of their jobs we encountered defensiveness and a dismissive attitude suggested that they were the experts and we were mere parents who couldn't possibly have the expertise to question them.

We have been taught to “respect” teachers as authorities on their subject areas and, to a fair extent, that is a valid position. However, this does not take into account the reality of our educational world. Despite what we would like to believe, it is possible to work as a teacher in our schools with no training or certification. True, that is most often an exceptional case when someone with the necessary qualifications cannot be located—such as an auto shop teacher with a university degree and teacher certification—but, as recently as 1973 I was hired as a regular full-time teacher of general subjects even though I had not received any training as a teacher, nor did I have any qualification other than a bachelor’s degree. Later in the 1970’s and early ‘80’s (after I had become fully trained and certified) I worked with teachers hired on a similar basis.

Historically there were no special requirements for assuming the role of a teacher other than a willingness to spend one’s days with children and to conform to the political and social expectations of the community. In other words, teachers were often young women, teenagers themselves, passing time in the neither world between completing their schooling and marriage. It was not uncommon for someone with a grade eight education to teach grade seven, for example. “Finishing schools,” which developed to educate young women in the ways of marriage and etiquette, became, for many, the de facto teacher-training schools. Teaching, until very recently, was geared towards creating obedient future citizens with the rudimentary skills needed to support their communities.  

Today a university degree and being certified by the state does not ensure that a teacher is competent nor does it mean that anyone without those qualifications cannot be a good teacher. First of all, what kind of degrees do most teachers possess? Generally speaking, unless we are talking of a very specialized subject area, a teacher will hold a general arts bachelor’s degree. What this means is that they have taken an introductory-level course in literature, general science, a second language, a social science course (sociology or psychology), and a “philosophy” course—which these days could mean anything from studying Aristotle to living in a commune for a term. After that, they've taken an additional 10 or so courses to broaden their study of one or more of those general subject areas, but with a smattering of other subjects thrown in. After graduation if they want to become teachers they can take a one-year diploma course on general education topics like education law, classroom management, using media in the classroom, etc.  The other route, generally speaking, is to pursue a bachelor’s degree in education. This degree is virtually identical to a general BA, except that the student takes a few more education-related courses.

Have you spotted the flaw in the system yet? Nowhere, in any of a teacher’s training, is he or she required to study anything in depth. A student can receive a degree without taking anything other than a single entry-level literature course and be fully qualified to teach secondary school English literature. The situation is even more marked when you consider that this person can now teach history in our schools—without ever taking a history course themselves past the high school level. In fact, many of the history and geography teachers I encountered over the years had no training at all in those subject areas and their level of knowledge was about on par with the average senior primary school student—in other words, a mixture of myth and parroted material with no understanding or questioning of the basic assumptions of what they had been presented with by teachers with no special knowledge or training themselves.

Here is a little quiz for secondary level teachers. Any teacher comfortable with his subject area should be able to breeze through such questions without having to stop to stammer. If they are evasive, vague, or dismissive in their attitude, then you might want to look a little more closely at what, exactly, they are presenting to your children each day in the classroom.

Ask your child’s history teacher to name a well-known Canadian historian. After all, if the teacher is not familiar with historians, then where is he or she getting their course material and background understanding from? I would be happy if one of my children’s teachers could name just one from the following list; ecstatic if they could name three or more.

Here are some examples of well-known Canadian historians: Jack Granatstein, Donald Creighton, Jean Provencher, Lionel-Adolphe Groulx, William Lewis Morton, George Ramsay Cook, Pierre Berton, Helmut Kallmann, Peter C Newman.

I would expect a secondary school geography teacher to be able to describe where and what is notable about the following places in Canada: Burgess Shale, Taiga Shield, Qu'Appelle Valley, Ivvavik National Park. They should also be able to name and locate at least ten significant Canadian rivers and I would also expect them to be able to name the capital cities of all Canadian provinces and territories (as my children could by the time they were five years old) as well as be able to distinguish between St. John and St. John’s. 

A teacher of secondary school English literature should be familiar with the works of many of Canada’s authors and poets. Canada is, after all, world-renown for its writers and poetry and I would expect all of the names of the following novelists and poets to be, at a minimum, instantly recognizable to a specialist in literature in a Canadian school.

Novelists: Margaret Atwood, Morley Callaghan, Robertson Davies, William Gibson, Anne Hébert, Margaret Laurence, Gabrielle Roy, Stephen Leacock, Ann-Marie MacDonald, Hugh MacLennan, Yann Martel, W.O. Mitchell, Alice Munro, Michael Ondaatje, Mordecai Richler, Carol Shields. Poets: Milton Acorn,  F. R. O. Scott, George Bowering,  Louis Dudek, Irving Layton, Dennis Lee, Dorothy Livesay, Susan Musgrave, Alden Nowlan, P.K. Page, Al Purdy, Raymond Souster.

Math teachers should have no trouble describing the meanings of the following types of numbers: natural, integers, rational, real, and complex. I expect the teacher to be able to give me an example of several prime numbers and an example of a Fibonacci sequence. I would also expect that the teacher could, without aid of calculator or having to think very hard, tell me the binary and hexadecimal representations of the decimal number 10 (ans: binary: 1010; hexadecimal: a.)

If you think any of these questions are “too difficult” for your teacher, then I would not want that teacher in my child’s classroom. Nothing, in any of the above, is anything that someone with a passing interest in the subject should have any difficulty with—and I want my teachers to have a bit more than a passing interest.