Teaching is one of the toughest professions in the world. To explain why, I will use camels as a metaphor for a teacher’s burden. If you are a plumber, engineer, chemist, veterinarian, or what ever that is one hump—a dromedary camel. If you are teacher, that is one hump—another dromedary camel. As principle or head master of a school or Dean of a college your job is to evaluate teachers; promoting the best, pay the best teachers the most, and discharge the in effective ones. Without establishing a meritocracy, you would fail as an administrator. It is a biological fact they if you cross a one-hump camel with a two-hump camel you never get a three humped camel; you get a camel with one big hump.
We demand that teacher know how to teach. That is an ability they all should have in common. It is not Maya Angelou simple—“If you learn tech”. Teaching is a learned skill with an innate component. Some people have teaching ability and other do not, society expects those without teaching ability would find another profession; it is the job of the educational administer to help them make that discovery. Now add expertise in the subject taught to teaching ability; there are not as many people with these abilities as might be supposed. In the lower levels of education, the subjects are classically reading, writing, and arithmetic, and then get narrower and narrower as they increase in depth. The expertise in discipline is the second hump on a two-humped camel. Therefore, an educational administrator has to find teacher with two humps. This is a difficult task.
When we enter into higher undergraduate education, University administrations try to add a third hump to an already over burdened camel. That hump is research. They do this by establishing a misdirected meritocracy. For example, a university hired me as a professor. The department head made a point of telling me that he rewarded merit. I was elated and looked forward to the challenge. My understanding of a University is that it exists for teaching and that is the core of a professors job; therefore the better my teaching and the more I knew about my subject, the better my standing. What a shock it was when I learned that research, grant writing, and publications produced are what the administrator rewarded as having merit while graduating 72 well-educated students really didn’t count. Educators have established that there is no such thing as three-humped camel—the myth of a great teacher being a great researcher has been repeatedly been debunked; admittedly, there are rare exceptions, but they are so extraordinary they are astonishing. I should point out that many great researchers think they are great teachers but they are not. The corollary is if you want great teachers do not hire Noble Laureates.
Think in terms of the logic of it. If an administrator interviews and hires a teacher the interview should be to find out if the individual is a good teacher and whether he or she knows his subject matter. If the interview is done well, the administrator will end up hiring a teacher. In contrast, if the interview deals with grant writing ability and number of publications that administrator will end up hiring a researcher and not a teacher. Would they ever end up with a three-hump camel? The answer is simple, no, because there isn’t any. A university filled with three humped camels is not a university, a teaching institute, it is an research institute.
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