It's Time to Rethink the Teacher Shortage Problem and It Does Not Involve Pay

 Perhaps the real problem with the shortage of teachers is that fewer and fewer people want to do the work as it has evolved over the past 30 years or so. 

When I started teaching in 1989 teachers operated in classrooms that allowed for independent creavitity, initiative, and excitement. There were no testing surveillance systems. You could operate without the intrusion of administrative experts and consultants who claimed to know how to teach content better than you. Parents were generally supportive of teachers and were not engaged in antagonistic tactics to what you were doing. They came to you if their were problems usually, and the teacher could work with the parent.

Classrooms have become culture war zones. They are places where the teacher often receives less and less professional deference. Instead, there are so many voices out their saying, “No, you need to do it this way, not that.” In a word, teaching has been transformed into a mechanistic scientific management task where one is surrounded by a troup of experts all telling the her/him hot to do the job. 

There is no art to teaching anymore, because the administrators and their cadre of experts have transformed the instructional act into a scientific management work task.

It’s no longer rewarding to be a teacher. So, the answer seems to be in focusing on pay. Certainly you can find someone willing to do this work for the right pay, the idea goes. The problem is apparently you can’t pay enough for someone to do the teaching work today because fewer want to do it.

The reality is, teaching has lost what librarian-researcher Fobazi Ettarh calls “vocational awe.” 

Vocational awe is defined as a set of notions that librians have about their institution and themselves. To have vocational awe, the worker has to believe in their institution’s goodness and rightness. Also, the worker has to believe that their profession, the work they do is inherently good and sacred. In other other words, the worker believes their work is a calling, which means they will endure and persevere in the work tasks because of the good, sacred and worthwhile big picture.

Teaching has lost this vocational awe. Schools are constantly labeled failing by everyone. Even administors focus on the negative always in an environment of so-called continuous improvement. In addition, the teacher’s work is no longer seen as sacred, as special because it has been turned into tasks to be carried out scientifically. The teacher’s institution and the teacher’s work is fundamentally degraded by a system paranoiacally obsessed with trying to improve or change, in the worship of constant innovation.

What’s more, administrators and school HR recruiters can no longer capitalize on “vocational awe” to fill teaching positions. That’s because the “awe of teaching” and “being a teacher” is gone. 

The profession of teaching has been destroyed by politicians who want to cut budgets and continuously impose new requirements on teachers. 

It has been decimated by administrators who think they know how to teach so well, they constantly intrude into classrooms with their so-called coaching and feedback, treating teachers as if they don’t know anything. 

The teaching profession has been decimated by a consultant industry made up of experts who say they know teaching better, even though some of them spent less time in the classroom, and sometimes no time there.

The teaching shortage problem will not be solved by pay alone. 

It will certainly not be solved by relying on the vocational awe myth any more because no one is buying it. 

The teaching problem will only be solved if those who have degraded the work of teaching to the point that no one wants to do it, no matter the pay, are convinced to change their ways. 

No one wants to be a teacher anymore because vocational awe no longer exists.

Teaching Students About AI or Any Technology Just Might Be Shortsighted and Morally Wrong

Should our schools be focused on training students how to use AI above all else? No. Here’s why…

In the 1990s, I taught at a high school located in an area where 3 major fiber option manufacturers had set up shop, and they partnered with our schools to prepare students for the kinds of jobs they had to offer.

I attended multiple PD sessions, guided by district personnel and trainers from these three manufacturers. The goal was to train teachers to teach students the kinds of skills these manufacturers, and others like them, valued in employees.

I went back to my classroom and dutifully and conscientiously taught those skills because it was my job to teach students for the jobs in their future.

Fast forward 7 or 8 years later…the fiber optic industry tanked when demand fell. These manufacturers closed plants, merged and merged again, and laid off workers and shifted jobs to foreigh countries. Many lost their jobs, perhaps even some that I had dutifully prepared for that future.

The point here is business and manufacturing often live and survive in the short term and the now. They no longer provide lifetime careers. If profits can be made by shifting manufacturing elsewhere, they move. That’s how it is.

As educators, to prepare students for any jobs that exist currently or even hypothetically in the future is also shortsighted and potentially morally wrong. The current job situation will change when companies find the grass greener elsewhere, and trying to teach skills for jobs whose existence we are trying to predict or guess about is gambling our students’ futures. That is wrong.

The Seers of Silicon Valley have gotten much wrong in the past. I bet their predictions about AI will be wrong as well, or at least far off the mark.

As educators, we need to teach students, not for theoretical futures. We need to teach them everything that will allow them to live, adapt, cope, and survive in uncertainty and be decent, critical human beings.

Obsessively focusing on AI or any technology of the day is as shortsighted as most businesses currently operate. Sure, knowing what AI is, its faults, its capabilities, its limitations, its effects on culture and the environment, are all needed, but not placed at the center of all learning.

The point is, we do not need to do Silicon Valley bidding and teach students to be dutiful users of AI or any technology; we need to teach way beyond that to a world where AI has passed into banality and life has moved on to even greater things.

You Don't Have to Believe All Those Predictions About AI Because We've Been Here Before

There is a perfectly rational reason for discounting all the AI predictions of AI Evangelists and Ed Tech Consultants.

In the mid-90s, the internet zealots promoted the idea that the web was somehow “magically” to bring us all together. It was what Vincent Mosco called “the Myth of the Death of Distance.” The web was going to bring us all together. It was the end of geography. Too bad it did not happen.

Even the economists got it wrong. It was Frances Cairncross, economist for the journal “The Economist” who wrote in her book “The Death of Distance”:

With the web people would be “Free to explore different points of view, on the Internet or on the thousands of television and radio channels that will eventually be available. PEOPLE WILL BECOME LESS SUSCEPTIBLE TO PROPAGANDA from politicians who seek to stir up conflicts.” (CAP EMPHASIS MINE)

What’s more she added this now laughable prognostication:

“Bonded together by the invisible strands of global communications, HUMANITY MAY FIND THAT PEACE AND PROSPERITY ARE FOSTERED BY THE DEATH OF DISTANCE.”

Boy did she get it wrong, like so many other Silicon Valley Seers of salvation by technology. The only bonding that has taken place is social media companies and our personal data.

The web and its demon spawn social media, manufactured by Big Tech, more interested in getting extremely rich, has only made us more polarized and divided than we have ever been. Their algorithms are designed to shove into our eyeballs that which divides us, not bring us together.

As far as the wonderful “bonds of community” wrought by the internet and its technologies with the “Death of Distance? The only thing that has died has been what little genuine human connection we had among many other things.

So, when the AI Evangelists speak of the promise of not having to do those things we hate; when they boast that AI is the educational tool that is going to transform our profession; and that AI will some day figure out all our problems, can you undertstand why one should call them on this nonsense?

The best thing to do is to discount all the prediction nonsense, for no one ever provides the evidence. When they give us a massive list of jobs that will be replaced, consider it nonsense. They never provide any evidence for their assertion.

The last thing educators should do is gamble the lives of their students that all these AI prognostications are gospel. You can’t prepare them for a world that does not exist yet, because no one knows what that world we be like, not even the Silicon Valley CEO Seers nor the Ed Tech AI consultants.

Why the Web Has Become a Garbage Dump?

 Evidence that the internet is now a garbage dump?

As an early user of the web, I used to enjoy "surfing the web." This consisted of  typing key words into a search engine (Yes, I am old enough to admit I used AltaVista, Yahoo, etc.) and enjoy reading through the results, and it was a pleasurable experience. If it was a controversial topic, you often had both sides of the argument for your review.

You could enjoy seeing sites that were interested in to conveying INFORMATION and not trying to game the algorithms by trying to get their slop in front of searchers.

Today, surfing the web has become impossible. There's too much pooh, garbage, and sewage floating around that makes it impossible. To use Cory Doctorow's term from "Enshittification"? The entire internet is "enshittified."

The web is a sewer, a big garbage dump where whoever is willing to pay to get their slop in front of eyeballs gets an audience.

The pay-to-get-your-content-viewed ignores whether such content is worthy of eyeball time at all. No wonder the internet slop problem is so bad.

When the web was transformed entirely into a money-making avenue, that was the death of the old web.

What was once touted the "information highway" has become a massive garbage dispensary.

Too bad. Web surfing is a lost sport.

#EdTech #Internet #Education

AI Educational Utopian Myths Abound: Be Skeptical

Check to be sure that you have not fallen for the utopian dreams of endless prosperity and freedom offered up by AI Evangelists and Ed Tech consultants. Those will turn out to be empty dreams.

Vincent Mosco wrote in his 2005 book "Digital Sublime: Myth, Power, and Cyberspace:

"American history in particular is replete with visions of technological utopia spun by mythmaking optimists." (p. 36)

Mosco captures in 2005 the same spirit of the so-called "Age of AI." Today, we still have an abundance of "mythmaking optimists" who peddle their "visions of technological uptopia" powered by AI. It is a myth.

Those optimists are at it again, as the Silicon Valley mob share their mythical visions of utopia. But it is an old story:

First, they brought promises of a utopian community through social media that has resulted in a world of massive polarization and division. False promise number one.

Second, they promised an internet that would provide us with knowledge at our fingertips, but instead they gave us a deformed web where paywalls and data extraction/exploitation must be the ransom paid before you receive that knowledge.

What Silicon Valley ultimately gives us is a deformed, mutant versions of its utopian promises.

You can bet Silicon Valley's mythical vision of AI utopia will turn into a mutated version that somehow makes us all worse off.

#AI #EdTech #AIEducation #Education

Are Our Screens and Devices Harming the Very Students We Serve? Perhaps, Here's a Book to Spark Critical Thinking about Device Addiction in Schools

 In order to Disrupt the passive, uncritical acceptance of all things technological into schools, I recommend that school leaders and all educators add Jared Coooney Horvath's "The Digital Delusion: How Classroom Technology Harms Our Kids' Learning—And How to Help Them Thrive Again" to their reading list.

It really isn't about "banning all screens" in schools; it's about not allowing devices and tech determine what happens in our classrooms and with our students.

Horvath rightfully captures how we as educators have been complicit in turning the control of education over to companies who have made big promises that have not panned out. In fact, the evidence is growing, despite dismissal by the tech evangelical movement, that there is some actual harm caused by this proliferation of technologies.

Don't forget, the smartphone and its apps, especially social media apps, are designed to be addictive and to "capture eyeballs" and we have invited these into our classrooms with open arms. 

Horvath is correct in his whole premise that we need to wrestle back control of our education system, our schools, our classrooms, and our instruction from devices.

It doesn't mean a complete ban; it means removing tech from its central pedestal on which we have placed it.

I could see using this book as a faculty-wide read with some powerful and lively discussions on the rightful place of technologies in our schools and in our lives.

Horvath even offers many hands-on ideas to implement a EdTech Detoxification Process in schools or even in our lives as parents.

If we are going to foster critical examination of EdTech and the constant flow of gadgets from Silicon Valley this book is a good place to start.

The Label "Smart" Device Might Not Be a Good Thing: Read Jathan Sadowski's "Too Smart"

 Here is a book to add to your critical Edtech and critical thinking about technology list, even though it goes back a bit to 2020.

"Too Smart: How Digital Capitalism Is Extracting Data, Controlling Our Lives, and Taking Over the World" By Jathan Sadowski

Sadowski takes you through a critical overview of how companies are purposefully making their products "smart" products in order to facilitate data extraction for exploitation purposes. 

When a device is labeled "smart" you can bet it is gathering data about you and not always for your benefit. 

• Free consumer apps companies use this data to sell. 
• Insurance companies use this data against you in their pricing schemes and to manipulate you in your driving habits.
• Government entities use it in their surveillance activities.

After reading this book, when a salesperson touts that a TV or a dryer is a "smart" device, you will not automatically see that as a plus. You will know that it is more of a tactic of exploitation at best and manipulation at the worst.

A lot of money has been spent on convincing us as consumers that the quality of being "smart" is a good thing for our devices. It is not.

Sadowski even suggests ideas of how to disrupt and avoid all this, from turning off these features or anything related to them to the idea of purposefully sabotaging the whole smart enterprise.

There is a lot to be said about shading parts of your life out of reach of Big Tech.