Imagine that you are hiring a new English teacher. None of the people who apply have any of the qualifications to teach English. No teaching degree. No English degree. No experience in the classroom. Would you hire any of them? Probably not. Now here is the irony. Many of the people making curricular and legislative decisions about education don’t have the qualifications to be hired within education. This is a problem. In this episode, we hear how standardization, high-stakes testing, and policy decisions made by non-educators may be contributing to teachers’ decisions to leave education.
Music:
Theme Song By Julian Saporiti
“So Stark (You’re a Skyscraper” by Matt LeGroulx is licensed under a CC BY-NC-SA license.
“Cat and Mouse” by Scott Holmes Music is licensed under a CC BY license.
“Space (Outro)” by Andy Cohen is licensed under a CC BY license.
“Home Fire” by Nul Tiel Records is licensed under a CC BY-NC-SA license.
“Press Conference” by Blanket Music is licensed under a CC BY-NC license.
“Things Change” by HoliznaCC0 is in the Public Domain.
“Living Life” by Scott Holmes Music is licensed under a CC BY-NC license.
“Boulevard St Germain” by Jahzzar is licensed under a CC BY-SA license.
“Hungaria” by Latche Swing is licensed under a CC BY-NC-SA license.
“Business Getaway ” by Scott Holmes Music is licensed under a CC BY license.
Transcript:
I used to listen to the Dixie Chicks’s song “Wide Open Spaces” before wrestling matches because I would get too wound up. It helped me slow down my breathing and relax.
In junior high and high school, I was fixated on winning and losing. I’d get a pit in my stomach, psyche myself up and out, all to my detriment. I was terrified of failing, of being a disappointment or an embarrassment.
Then I went to college. I walked-on to the University of Wyoming’s wrestling team. During my meeting with Steve Suder, the head coach, he told me, “You know, you’ll be walking into a room with a bunch of state champs. Are you worried about that?” I told him, “No, I’m not” because those were the guys that I wanted to be wrestling against. I was a two-time state placer and I had nothing to lose. Suder said, “Good,” and then told me that he never won state either, but he ended up being an All-American for the University of Wyoming, so there was hope for me.
During our conversation, in between adjusting this chewed up yellow cushion he used as a back support, he told me that I was like the pretty girl’s funny friend at a party. I’m not someone he noticed right off the bat, but once he got to know me, he was happy to have me around. He meant this in the best way possible, and I didn’t mind.
I made the team, worked my butt off, won some matches, and lost more than I won. And I hate losing, but it felt different. I was excited to be wrestling, not nervous. Suder made it clear that his expectations were low, but he was happy to have me. I focused on gaining experience and the process and growing as a wrestler and a person. And I got to wrestle a guy named Brent Metcalf, who is the only person I wrestled that had a documentary made about him. When someone asked Metcalf why he didn’t celebrate wins, he said, “I don't want to give my opponent the satisfaction of watching me celebrate, which would make it look like a big deal that I beat him.” This dude is a monster.
It was an extraordinarily humbling match. I had no control of my own body - his fingers were in my mouth at one point, but I learned what it was like to wrestle the best. It was eye-opening.
My tenure as a collegiate wrestler only lasted that year,but I remained in contact with Coach Suder off and on until his passing in 2019. And I had changed. My priorities shifted from valuing product to process.
When I became an assistant high school wrestling coach, the head coach had also wrestled for Coach Suder, and so we continued his tradition of emphasizing process. And what I noticed is that the wrestlers felt less pressure. They only tried being better today than they were yesterday. And when they have that mindset, success, though not guaranteed, is more likely. They are wrestling to compete and to score points. And even if they don’t have success, they do the best they can do at that moment, and that’s always worth being proud of.
In education, we focus on the product, on assessment. There is an obsession with passing or failing and we seem to have forgotten the value of process, which is where many teachers live. So today, we are going to look at how a structure of education that values standardized assessments could be contributing to teachers deciding to leave the profession, and because some of the frustrations with standardized assessment is a federal issue, which is too much to address here, we’ll explore a possible solution to the high stakes assessment issue in Wyoming, which would hopefully keep teachers in education.
This is Those Who Can’t Teach Anymore, a 7-part podcast