Very Funny. And Possibly Defamation

I am in possession of a valuable e-artifact: a screenshot of Marmot’s sitemeter registering its 5 millionth visitor, on Jan 5th, 2009. That works out to about 3,800 visits per day, 2009 year-to-date. (If anyone wants to buy it from me, just let me know. Just to sweeten the pot, it has a picture of B. Carr on it.)

Many of you seem to think teaching is not a legitimate profession.

It’s not. And I say that with all due respect, but the word “profession” is misapplied to teachers.

Accountants, lawyers, pilots, nurses, actuaries and engineers are professionals. They must learn a body of knowledge that defines what their job is. You cannot be an accountant without learning the accounting system, you cannot be an engineer without learning the physics and design of structures. Testing people on their knowledge and application of knowledge in these fields is sufficient to determine that they are qualified for their jobs and deserving of the title ‘professional’.

This isn’t so for teachers. Anyone can do it, and except in extreme cases, there is no objective way of determining who is a good and who is a bad teacher. Some schools or school systems may insist that they only hire people with a BEd or a MEd (or even a Masters in TESOL), but that doesn’t make teaching a profession, it just means that those schools have make their own selection criteria for their employees.

This is a bit silly, but let me put it this way: What if I walked into an airline office and said “I want to be a pilot. Put me in the cockpit right now.” What if I walked into KPMG and said “Show me a spreadsheet and I’ll take a stab at closing last year’s accounts for a blue-chip company.” (Korean inside joke – What if I said to a construction company “Put me in charge of building that department store”).

With teaching, there is no objective way that anyone with a 4 year BEd and 20 years of classroom experience can claim that they are any better or any more qualified to do their job than any schmuk who walks in off the street and wants to give it a try.

That is not to say that training doesn’t help. I got a CELTA in 2000, and I highly recommend it. It’s actually very much a leadership-training sort of course, and you are hands-on in front of a class from Day 1. I definitely became a better teacher after taking it, but also a better (business) presenter and time manager. Maybe the best thing was that it relieved any stress I may have had about my job – after the CELTA, I could handle ANYTHING.

Ya got me there. Even worse, I have nearly 3 years of laboratory experience – should have intuited that experiment automatically.

Professions get to define the standards of their titles, because no one else is qualified to. To be called an accountant, I have to convince a governing body of accountants that I have mastered the book learning, and then I have to work under someone who has earned the title for a certain period of time, and then I have to meet licensing requirements set by that body. Think ‘articling’ or ‘residency’, etc.

This can be more useful in some professions than others. It’s reasonably fair to say that 100% of pilots are good pilots, given the extremely low incidence of air traffic accidents and the even lower incidence of pilot error. Take something like a CFA, however (certified financial analyst). The designation was created due to the rather poor analytical skills possessed by many people with MBAs (management is also not a profession, btw). CFA education is difficult and the test rigorous, with a high fail rate. You also don’t get the designation until you’ve actually worked in a financial services firm in a practical capacity. These people are wicked spreadsheet jockeys who can produce amazingly intricate analyses of various investment products, and make insightful recommendations for action. But you can still lose a ton of money by taking their advice. In fact, it’s common. But pilots don’t crash many planes.

Note that teachers’ unions tend to resist attempts to apply standards of testing to their ‘profession’. This is too bad. If teachers want more money and more recognition, they should come up with a way to measure their value. The fixed pay tables they work on (years of experience on one axis and years of education on the other axis) don’t measure anything of value to their clients.

“Professional musician/artist/dancer/athlete” is a misuse of the term, but I’ll allow it on practical grounds, because it usefully identifies the limited number of people who get paid to engage in these activities, as opposed to hobbyists and wannabes.

TLDR warning: likely to be found long, boring and semantic

Granfalloon’s response was a good one, and I am partially won over. But there are still a couple of things bothering me. The first is output – what the professional produces.

Architects, engineers, builders and surveyors must be able to read one another’s work. It enables the system to function. I could come up with an excellent system for rendering a building drawing, but without the network effects of a shared body of knowledge, my new system isn’t much good. The best thing about the 4 standard accounting statements is that other accountants, investors, lawyers and analysts know what they mean, and that shared knowledge is necessary for many systems to function. Again, I could come up with a different system for illustrating a firm’s financial condition, but it wouldn’t allow anyone to compare that firm to other firms that don’t use my system. Police, lawyers and judges similarly rely on each other’s paperwork outputs, and even their personal actions (how a search is to be conducted is an arbitrary regulation, but standardization is still needed).

It’s a little stickier in the medical field, where there is plenty of leeway for personal judgment, but the complexity of the field and the large volume of knowledge needed for surgeons, anesthesiologists, nurses, paramedics and pathologists to even communicate effectively with each other I believe clearly justifies the establishment of professional associations and licensing requirements. There may be several ways to treat a particular wound, but somehow the whole medical system has to operate as a system. One problem with the DiCaprio character in Catch Me If You Can (what Darth says he can do) is that he was unable to communicate with other medical professionals.

Some jobs need to become professionalized as technology advances and specialization increases. It was possible for amateurs to slap up most structures at one time (in my grandfather’s day, farmers in treeless Saskatchewan ordered entire pre-packaged houses from the Sears catalog, and nailed them together themselves). These days there is a clearer need (perhaps largely thanks to litigious lawyers?) for rigorously trained and licensed professionals to be in charge of various aspects of construction, so that the physical outputs of their work are useful to the other professionals whose own work articulates with those outputs.

I clearly have to yield the point on training, because y’all are correct that current teacher training does mirror the training programs of other professions.

But that brings me to the second thing that still bothers me – the concept of “capture”. It goes like this: There is typically only one employer for teachers: the government. Teachers form unions to increase their bargaining power with the government. One thing that it behooves a union to do is prevent the employer from hiring outside the union. Since all teachers within the existing workforce have been through the same BEd training program, it makes sense for them to insist to the government that only teachers who have been through the same program be allowed to teach. The union has ‘captured’ the regulatory regime controlling entrance to their turf. And I’m not sure that there are any obvious systemic benefits, because no other profession articulates with what the teachers are doing.

My CELTA course was rigorous, if only a month long. Any reason I shouldn’t be allowed to teach ESL at a public school in Canada? I have a Masters in Biochemistry. Any reason I shouldn’t be allowed to teach science? I have an MBA – unfortunately, VERY unfortunately, there seem to be rather few public schools with any interest in offering those sorts of courses. When I say “anyone can do it”, this is what I’m talking about. Why should a BEd exclude me, and does that exclusion benefit the students, or the existing unionized BEd-holding teachers?

So, in sum, I’m halfway there, and will henceforth cease insisting that teaching is not a profession. But I’m still not convinced that it IS a profession. I agree that the way it is currently set up seems to mirror the professional training regimes of other professions, but I suspect that such training may be more a result of union capture, rather than a genuine oversight function played by a professional association, and therefore, that the current BEd training may not be all that essential to producing a ‘professional teacher’.

We need photos.