The immensity of being a teacher
A dear friend and guide was once riled that I was nitpicking on a sentiment. I struggle with that quality of mine — sweating over details rather than focusing on the sentiment. I have had little students come and share their “I luv u sir” cards with me and have me gently correct their spelling and grammar only for me to smack my head later on regarding what I did. But somehow, children are more forgiving and they nearly always are happy to hug and forget my faux pas (for which I always apologise). Adults tend to remind me of my idiosyncrasies! This post is to clarify my position regarding the sentiment and why I nitpick. Please humour the mental writer.
There are teachers.
There are those hired in a position of a teacher.
This is true about nearly any occupation. Fortunately, they do not come with tags like “noble”, “respectable” etc. Hence, they have apprentice, novice, junior, senior, expert, journeyman, master, fellow, etc. as titles (or title prefix) to clarify things about the individual ability. Add to this that the number of years as a teacher is no indicator of advancement in the journey! Nor are degrees and doctorates.
There is a journey involved from where I am to where I can be considered a teacher. There is no one clear instant when that happens. It is a nebulous phase (as poorly indicated in the picture above) after which I am considered a teacher although there will be many more advanced in their journey than myself. I keep advancing. But till I am anywhere near that nebulous zone, I am merely an aspirant, a novice, a person hired in a position of a teacher. My being hired into that position, doesn’t make me a teacher even though I would like to claim all of the nobility and grand heart etc..
If we agree on this, let’s proceed. Else, please read another post.
Philip Johnson (and others, perhaps), I believe, initiated this claim that teachers make about 1500–3000 decisions per day. Some school arithmetic was invoked. It is still propagated and every teacher, wherever they are on their journey, happily consider it applicable to them. Makes them feel grand — I am a novice but I agree to (and imagine the weight of) making thousands of decisions a day!
The sentiment is that being a teacher is a very mentally taxing job. I do not (entirely) disagree with that. I think it is a very mentally stimulating job in that it requires me to use my critical thinking nearly nonstop. I am excited to understand the ways in which my mind works and that of the student in front of me and hence, do not find teaching taxing. But I was puzzled by the no. — 2000 decisions per 6–8 hr day is a lot per minute. I asked teachers — “What were the decisions you made in the last minute?” and they either said none or gave me one thing. And when I asked them for the minute prior to the last (and so on) they ran out of decisions that can be made!
Dan Meyer recently claimed that the amount of data being processed is in petabytes. I get the sentiment; I question the hyperbole — a petabyte can store in the range of about 500 billion pages of text. The world record for maximum pages memorised is in the range of 15k-20k pages (not repeated for another set of 15k-20k pages) which is a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a petabyte performed once without guarantee of reliability. Most human beings struggle to memorise even 5 pages of random text (not a song).
I think we are attempting to present the complexity of being a teacher. How do we do that without resorting to such numbers and claims, is the question. In my head, it is actually very simple.
We are dealing with the invisible and merely inferable (i.e. you cannot know the real thing but only make inferences about it). Intelligence cannot be palpably isolated. We are still in our infancy in knowing about how the human being fashions intelligence of all the stimuli received and how that is managed in their viscera.
Every teacher must operate in identifying, engaging with and verifying that which cannot be seen or felt (tactile) or heard or tasted. What is in the child’s being (brain+rest of body) is not available in a readily representable manner. Imagine driving a car you cannot see (but yet you believe is a car) whose information and design is unknown even to the manufacturers who believe they created “it”. When I say “lush” I do not know exactly how the student heard it, what picture it invoked (and even if he articulates it, it is a function of the child’s ability and accuracy), what is it associated with and so on. Some immediately see a picture of “lush” as a field of gently swaying grass, some as the back of a well-shampooed retriever and some as soft microfiber comforter while some see the letters “l u s h” or a representation of the same word in a different language. Similarly, 5+3 takes different forms as it heads its way to becoming 8. Was it a rule? Was it an incremental movement of 5 towards 8? Or of 3 towards 8? And were they 5 strokes imagined or fruits or candies? Would the mathematical process change if I brought in aliens with less predictable behaviours? The simultaneity of all of this is what makes the particular demand on a teacher unlike in other fields. I recall reading somewhere that it is like trying to keep 30 pieces of cork under water at once (but that analogy is not a productive one). And in such a world, a teacher must understand where the child is, where to go, how to help the child go (because the teacher demonstrating “going there” is not the same as transferring that ability to the child with their personal proclivities and nuances) and then (because the child looks the same whether they are “here” or “there”) find means of inferring that the child has “gone there” and can “go there” again and has the unique abilities, attitudes and perspectives of one who “is there” based on all of those who “were there” earlier. That this particular student has something in addition (or lesser but inconsequentially so) to that has to be dealt with on a case by case basis.
If the previous paragraph didn’t make any sense, then please understand that this is merely a glimpse of the complexity that a teacher (not the one who just got recruited) has to deal with on a daily basis. Multiply this by 25 or 30 or 40 to create a classroom. Add to this the fact that a good portion of that classroom is in peripheral vision. And now grapple with the extent of signals (and not to mention, noise, literal and figurative) that a teacher has to deal with in order to make the class an effective one. Even a surgeon has visible and audible cues to a range of things they need to monitor while going about their delicate task.
If we have the visual coding algorithms of the human brain as well as language models that are identical to that of any sophist, then amount of data storage will fall (because storage space is a function of compression, format and encoding algorithms). It is also not just about making decisions.
Most teachers have not been educated into this. A tiny portion of them will evolve into this as part of their journey — either on their own or by observing a master teacher. Not all teachers do what I attempted to describe. Not all teachers always do what I attempted to describe. Being human beings there will always be a fluctuation in their “performance”. There will be days when they don’t feel like it or they’ve hit a low etc.
Master teachers were always a rarity. There was never an era when a master teacher was available at every turn of the street. Technology will certainly make a common teacher more commonly available with all the human inconveniences removed — no sick leave, no hormonal issues, no sudden absences and whims and no mortality. Technology might also make the journey to teacherhood a little more accelerated. If technology makes a one to one tutor easily available with all the VR effects one wishes to imagine, then the other demands on the teacher (in handling more than 1 student at a time and their dynamics) are eliminated. Pupillometry scans added to content knowledge and pedagogical knowledge can provide significant data to translate into requisite guidance as a one on one tutor does, bringing a viable solution to Bloom’s 2-sigma problem. When will we achieve it, would it require a generation’s turn before the normalcy of it removes cognitive dissonance, etc. are questions that I have not had the time or inclination to research.
In summary, a teacher’s expected work is very demanding in that there is a lot of stimuli to process into signal and noise along with demonstrating content and pedagogical knowledge on a periodically changing group of individuals. Any simplification of the task would be a representation of not understanding what it means to be a teacher. Any assumption that all teachers are delivering on this is purely naive. I would wager not more than 0.001% of them do but that is merely an armchair resident’s guess. And any attempt at representing all of this as decision point numbers and storage capacities and other such measures of striking awe continue to befuddle me.
