Stay On Target – Mechanical Sympathy

You want to talk about extracurriculars? About how teachers should do them for the love of their job? How they should sacrifice their own family lives so that they can ‘save the children!’ The politics around this are thick, and they do a great job of hiding the real problem.

Education isn’t about extracurriculars, extracurriculars are about education. Royan Lee, the education ninja, asked the question that got right to this during TVO’s The Agenda, last week. He then blogged about it, which might help all those people so tied up in the politics that they’ve lost the plot.

We’re not in education to enrich those students wealthy enough to enjoy extracurriculars. I didn’t do a lot of extracurriculars in school – I had to go to work every day after school from the age of 10 onwards. If you think you’re saving the kids by coaching basketball after school, you’re only saving the ones that can afford it. The fact that extracurriculars usually cost money (bus costs, equipment, etc) many families can’t manage further underlines this unfairness.

Education should offer everyone equal opportunity. It should be the most liberal of social exercises; opportunity for all, regardless of socio-economic status. There is an inherent classism in extracurriculars, but I’m sure all those passionate teachers who are rushing to pick up ECs again don’t want to think about that, they just want to win a few games and demonstrate their ‘passion’.

The teacher as evangelist isn’t helpful in any of this. The martyr teacher only wants to emotionally show how much they care. As a parent, this isn’t what I want from my son’s teachers. Passion is great, but if that’s all you’ve got, then quite frankly, you’re creepy, and ineffective. I’m looking for my son’s teachers to be professionals who are always looking to improve their practice. If they are so thick as to believe that doing extracurriculars doesn’t impact their ability to maximize classroom learning then they have already demonstrated a lack of understanding around the use of limited resources in a time sensitive environment. Zoe mentioned this in the Agenda show, but was quickly shot down by edu-babble around ‘best practices’. There are no ‘best practices’. Teaching is a constant development of a very complicated process. When I see teachers throwing out edu-babble to simplify our work and support political motives, it strikes me as a professional failure.

The Spicy Learning Blog

Royan’s blog post raises the question of what is so special about ECs. If the list to the left are what make ECs so valuable to students, why aren’t these things happening in classrooms? The target of education should be learning. If ECs offer advantages, why aren’t they being integrated everywhere?

As I said in the comments of his great post, the education ship is rusty and running poorly. It’s covered in barnacles like extracurriculars, standardized testing, reduced professional development, government and union politics, social opinion, poor teacher standards and weak administrative development. While Royan is asking why we don’t fix the ship, the other teachers on the show instead go on at length about how important the barnacles are.

Extra curriculars shouldn’t be extra. We shouldn’t be waiting until after school to offer this enriched learning environment to the few students who can or will take advantage of it. We need to fix the damn boat, not get wrapped up in the union/government politics.

If that Agenda episode showed me anything, it’s that teachers are just as caught up in the politics of distraction as the media, government and public are. Stop crying about what the rich kids are missing out on and integrate what makes extracurriculars so fantastic into a public school system everyone can benefit from.

Thank goodness Royan Skywalker got his proton torpedoes on target.