Common Sense (?)

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bandarq terpercayaHave you seen the big, full-page ads of Linda McMahon’s head? If you’ve missed them, she’s running for Senator, hoping to unseat Chris Dodd. Now I’m no cheerleader for Dodd and I won’t even begin to be an apologist for the sweetheart real estate deal he received that has gotten voters so disgruntled recently, but McMahon’s campaign bothers the heck out of me. If you recall, McMahon is the wife of Vince McMahon and past President and CEO of the World Wrestling Federation. She was involved in a federal investigation of steroid use by WWF wrestlers back in 1993 and prides herself on being the force behind the WWF’s literacy and voter registration campaigns. Earlier this year Governor Rell appointed her to the Connecticut Board of Education, citing her business acumen as her defining qualification. Most recently it has been revealed that the senate hopeful has been rather lax in exercising her own right to vote. She was forced to admit on her campaign blog that she has missed many votes, notably the 2008 Republican primary and the 2006 general election. Yet she has given very generously to both Republican and Democratic politicians, as well as to many political causes. Both Joe Lieberman and Jodi Rell have been the beneficiaries of McMahon’s largess.

I was outraged by Rell’s appointment of McMahon to the Board of Education because she has no qualifications. She has never taught and never served on a local school board. Other than the WWF’s literacy campaign, McMahon has no claim to qualification, and Rell’s citing of her business acumen is specious, at best. One, education is not business. If education were run like business the first thing we’d all do is fire our raw materials providers and get new ones that would send us higher quality students to work with, and then we’d layoff most of our teachers and outsource our teaching services to a second- or third-world country with a so-called emerging economy (that means they have weak labor and environmental laws and a low tax rate). And two, if we were to run education like the WWF, we’d pump the teachers and students full of steroids, dress up everyone in sexploitational clothes, and beat each other up. And all the matches (read, tamat assessments) would be rigged for entertainment value and not for the assessment of the actual performance skills of the participants. No. McMahon was appointed to the board because she donated a ton of money to Rell’s campaign. Period. I’m not naïve; I know how this is how government works on both sides of the aisle, but I get particularly upset when these political behaviors end up affecting education.

And now the woman is running for Senator, and she doesn’t even vote. Of course, she doesn’t have to vote. She exercises her political clout by waiting to see who is nominated or elected and then giving them lots of money. To paraphrase Leona Helmsley, only poor people vote. If the Republican Party of Connecticut has any sense or sense of decency they will at least put their money and hope on Rob Simmons. At least he has served in the House of Representatives and is married to a public school teacher (who happens to be a Teacher Consultant of the CWP-Storrs, by the way). Unfortunately, Simmons probably doesn’t have enough money.

One of my students stopped by my office a few days ago to chat. She was upset because three of her five professors this semester are not very good teachers. One has yet to give an assignment, and the student has heard from others who have taken courses with him that he never returns any papers anyway. They just get an arbitrary grade at the end of the semester that is based on they-know-not-what. Another professor up and assigned a book that was not on the syllabus nor ordered and stocked in the book store, and then spent all of ten minutes discussing it but still assigned a paper on it. Part of my student’s visit was to ask if she could talk to me about the book so she at least had someone to bounce ideas off of. The third professor is four weeks into the semester and hasn’t gotten out of chapter one of the first book yet. The other day he realized how far behind he was and so assigned an unreasonably large amount of reading for the next class so they could all catch up. It wouldn’t be so bad if the students had a syllabus and so were ahead in the reading, but he never handed out a syllabus; he just tells them daily what to read for the next class. (I should note that the same student had similarly critical things to say about a couple of her high school English teachers, including one who spent thirteen weeks reading a play!). My student said to me, “You’d think it would be common sense after all these years of teaching certain books to know how to teach them and when to move on to the next chapter.” And I said, “Well, that’s one of the big problems with public education and the public’s perception of education. Everyone thinks teaching is easy, that it is common sense.” And when you see or experience a teacher who does it really well, it seems easy, it seems like common sense, it seems like anyone could do it. But we know it’s not. This is why great teachers are so rare and memorable.

But this prevailing public attitude is why Governor Rell can appoint Linda McMahon to the Board of Education with little public outcry and a 34-1 vote in the Democratic-held senate and a 96-45 vote in the Democratic-held house. People think that if anyone can teach, certainly anyone can serve on the Board of Education. Who needs training, experience, or credentials? Those are for medical doctors and lawyers—maybe. Certainly not for teachers—or politicians, for that matter.