Pompous

I first found out I was joining a profession of dunces when I went to take the GRE. I took it in the testing lab at GMU in the spring of 2001. Upon completion I was given a copy of my scores, as well as a pamphlet interpreting scores. The pamphlet had one interesting item. it showed the mean score for test-takers in a host of different fields. At the very bottom, with an average score over a hundred points beneath its closest competitor was education. The saying goes "Those who can't do teach." I was soon to find out that those who know nothing teach elementary school.
My first few years in teaching the problem wa not so apparent. I was working in a failing elementary school on the edge of the Trinidad neighborhood in Northeast DC. Many of my colleagues were transplants from other careers doing Teach for America or the DC Teaching Fellows as i was myself. I spent most of my free time there hanging out with a guy named Allen who was well versed in politics, literature, and the Elephant 6 Collective. The staff was mostly black, but welcomed us in warmly. Most of us were filled with idealism to save the ghetto, and we were all united against a tyrant principal who once went as far as to force a teacher whose mother had just died to come in and copy busywork for her class before she could leave for the funeral. In a setting where the kids are hanging on for dear life the people who were there belonged. They were talented, devoted people trying to be parent-figures, social workers, educators, and friend all at once.
Then after 3 years I came to Virginia. It was there that the low-brow reality of elementary school faculties became clear. I worked with one 4th grade teacher who tutored one of my fifth graders. This woman complained to me that the homework I assigned the kid was too hard for her to help him with. He would get everything wrong on an assignment he had done with her, and that she had checked. This woman had a master's in education, but was unable to convert fractions to decimals.
Now and then in team meetings we'd be discussing the next story or book to assign kids. I'd sometimes joke and say something like "It's time we had them read The Sound and the Fury. " A typical response would be "never heard of it." I found that in Virginia our elementary English teachers were completely ignorant of all writing more complex than the latest Judy Blume. They were charged with creating good writers, but most of them could barely write themselves.
The grasp of history, geography, and economics is just as weak. I witnessed a 2nd grade teacher (with a PhD) tell her class the other day that Christopher Columbus was the first European to encounter the Powhatan Indians when he reached the New World. Not wanting to embarass the lady I bit my lip until it bled.
This brings me to today. My school district decided after analyzing all my college transcripts that I was highly qualified to teach English and History, but not Mathematics or Science. So in order to meet the requirements of No Child Left Behind something had to be done to make me "highly qualifed". The answer, take a 120 question test called Elementary Content Knowledge. If I could make it through this grueling exam in the eyes of the state I would be ready to impart wisdom to the youngsters (of course I have gone 7 years without this test, but NCLB now demands I prove my worth). So I arrived at the testing center this morning. In a room in which I was the only male, I sat and listened to the nervous pre-test chatter of those around me. One of the things I heard most often was someone saying they had already registered for the July administration of the test in case they failed today. More were talking up their joy at being allowed to use a calculator on the math portion. They were starting to make me nervous, as I had no calculator and it had never occured to me that failure was possible.
So on to the test. On the social studies portion they checked to see if I knew Mt. Everest was in the Himalayas, that the President is the commander in chief, and how to use latitude and longitude to find a point on a map (why do we even teach kids to use latitude and longitude on paper-it is a measure of a spherical surface, but anyway...) The math portion required me to be able to find the median of a set of numbers containing only 5 numbers! I had to be able to find percentages when given a numbers of things within a group, and be able to find a coordinate pair on a graph. Science required me to demonstrate that I could tell how many atoms of hydrogen were in a compound that had the subscore 4 next to the H.
Anyway. Battery is dying, but elementary ed is a black hole.