I’ve heard teaching and practicing medicine compared before,
but I’ve often stood against the idea of diagnosing an illness in students. I don’t like talk of deficits and what
students can’t do; I like to focus on
what they can do.
But as I listened to Danielle Ofri’s book, What Doctors Feel: How Emotions Affect thePractice of Medicine, I found that teachers and doctors have a lot more in common
than I thought. What started as a quick
$5.00 Audible purchase turned into a book where I found that others expressed
similar frustrations—others in a profession that’s often highly regarded and
esteemed in ways that teaching isn’t lately. This is a book that I’m going to
have to buy in print and read again. Like C.S. Lewis said, “We read to know we’re
not alone,” and after reading Ofri’s
work, teachers will know that they’re not.
When I heard Ofri share a doctor’s reason for staying late
even though it would affect his family life, I paused: “Because it’s the right
thing to do.” This idea appeared in the middle of a chapter that explored the
excruciating amount of paperwork that doctors endure, something that teachers
know all too well. If it’s documenting interventions, signing off on IEPs,
logging and recording professional development hours on paper in addition to
recording them on two different websites (I still haven’t figured out why our
ISD’s site doesn’t communicate with the state’s), teachers often feel
frustrated because they want to do the work that’s at the heart of the
profession: teach kids. This is just like doctors and what they want to do: attend
to patients.
Just last year, a colleague shared a similar idea. She
couldn’t dedicate as much time as a beginning teacher anymore, and she had to
decide what was more important: being the best mom or the best teacher? Teachers or doctors should never have to
decide between being a good parent or being a “good” teacher, but the demands
placed on both professions are so high that there isn’t enough time in the day
to do what’s best and what’s
required. I can’t count the number of times that I’ve asked myself how this
paper, this document, this write-up is actually helping kids and, instead,
another required aspect of my job that’s far removed but mandated.
Ofri also talks about “the damage from unnecessary testing”
on patients. As teachers, we know this all too well. A few summers ago, I read
about construct validity and consequence validity when it comes to assessing
students in Beyond Standardized Truth.
Although we might not physically harm a student with testing, there are
emotional and psychological consequences to the assessments students encounter
and sometimes are forced to endure. This alone needs to be explored more by
both doctors and teachers.
Recently, the Department of Education announced its plans to
move forward with evaluating teacher preparation programs. What complicates
this is the incorporation of value-added theory that a teacher’s effectiveness
can be determined based on standardized test achievement of students and,
likewise, a teacher preparation’s program can be evaluated based on the
teachers’ students’ performance for those enrolled in said program. As
teachers, we know that standardized test scores accurately predict how much
money a student’s family has and has very little to do with the amount of “good
teaching” a student has experienced. And we’ve seen this play out where high
poverty districts become revolving doors for teachers as they get a few years
of experience and then move to more stable, more affluent communities.
Similarly Ofri talks about how it is truly complex to
measure medical care. In a world where what can be measured counts and what can’t
be doesn’t, we often find gross simplifications of complex practice in both
medicine and teaching. She talks about online review sites where patients rate
their physicians. These are akin to sites like Rate My Professors, which
research has consistently shown a gender bias exists. Check out this NPR
article for more information. As teachers, we know that not everyone that was a
student knows good teaching, just like everyone that has been a patient doesn’t
what is excellent practice of medical care. Doctors, like teachers, shouldn’t
be ranked and sorted in trivial ways but instead measured by the quality of
care they provide, which should also take into consideration the patient’s
medical history. Patients, like students, aren’t blueberries.
Ofri mentions that more and more often, doctors are hesitant
to treat patients with complex medical issues. Perhaps teaching is like
diagnosing in this sense, where teachers are practitioners finding out where
students need to go next. Doctors with patients with multiple ailments are
trying to figure out, like teachers and instructional planning, what the
patient will respond to, what they need. Not everything will work and sometimes
we make mistakes, just like doctors. We might underestimate a student’s zone of
proximal development or forget a social or emotional need that must be treated
before moving to an equally complex instructional need.
Doctors also are limited in their continuing medical
education. Like student teachers, there’s a significant shift in undergraduate
educational experiences, where student are exposed to classrooms and
coursework, and then shift completely away from daily continuing education when
in the field. The teachers I surround myself with daily yearn for continuous
and relevant on-going professional development, but it’s so difficult to make
time for it (it often occurs during the day when they, y’know, have to teach
students) or can afford it.
And then I heard this: “[T]he majority of doctors would not
recommend the field to their children, or would quit if they could” (149). The National
Education Association released a survey that showed similar results for the
teaching profession because of high stakes testing, with 45%
of surveyed members reporting they considered quitting because of it.
It’s this last part that forced me to stop and think. If two
incredibly different professions on opposite ends of the pay and respect
scales exhibit the same level of low morale and frustration, isn’t there a
larger problem in the U.S.?
Even though the costlier scrub tops have higher reviews. These are more flattering, but still long enough (always a worry for me). I like all the pockets, too. Comfy and sturdier than other tops I've had in the past.
ReplyDeleteI am attracted by the info which you have provided in the above post. It is genuinely good and beneficial info for us about learn Arabic online Continue posting, Thank you.
ReplyDelete