Teaching is great—kids are great, math is great, school matters—but I frequently find myself both embarrassed and disappointed by education, a field which seems committed to finding the dumbest possible way to do every single thing.
Take the education conference. “Conference,”a great word. It suggests professionalism, expertise. Maybe a large oak table is going to be involved—not saying it will be, but it could!
Well, that all sounds nice, but be honest, doesn’t it also sound a little bit boring? Wouldn’t you rather have a sort of goofy Instagram thing? Wouldn’t you like to go to a day party that is just one large photo booth with props, but that you can also describe as “energizing” and “inspiring” and “Professional Development”?
Do you like dancing? I sure hope so, because there is going to be dancing at these conferences! And there will be sparklers and people telling you to STAND UP if you are READY TO MAKE A CHANGE TODAY!!!!
Also, ladies and gentlemen, put your hands together for Montell Jordan!
Now, I obviously hate all this stuff, but I do feel for conference organizers because the economics of these events are brutal. As has been explained to me multiple times by those involved in the planning, big conferences happen at hotels, and you have to reserve floor and room space well in advance. To make it all work, you need to guarantee that a lot of people are going to show up. You simply need a lot of people to travel to your conference, and—thanks to the internet—people don’t like showing up to things anymore.
So, let’s make it fun!
But it’s not just conferences. It’s books, it’s articles, it’s speakers. It’s this weird anti-intellectualism that needs to constantly masquerade as intellectuallism—which is maybe why everything in education needs to be “research-based” though everyone has astonishingly little interest in what that label means. Productive struggle, California Mathematics Framework, Thinking Classroom, all deeply unserious about the research they obsessively cite. It’s not just bad—it’s weird, and hard to understand.
I guess I’m thinking about all this lately because of the collapse of my internet (it’s not just Twitter). I don’t know if everything is getting worse or that my particular bubble is dissolving—probably both—but it feels like the little pocket of air which I was drawing from in education is spent.
And the truth is, I get it. Teaching is both a job where you need some knowledge but know-how is hardly enough. You need some patience, resilience, reserves of good humor to work with children. This is emotional work, and thanks to AI a lot more of you are going to have jobs that need it in the future, so get pumped!!!
Yeah, it’s been a rough few years, and even those outside the classroom are starting to notice that our profession is falling apart. Here’s the list that Matt Barnum, the best data-driven edu journalist, came up with: “higher turnover, lower morale, declining interest in the profession among college students, persistent shortages in certain subjects.”
Under these conditions, you should probably expect a blossoming of inspirational fluff.
Still, I personally need a place that’s more than that. Just a few years ago I remember having long, like hundred-tweet long conversations with people about triangle congruence proofs—I think those days are over. And I’ve benefited tremendously from being online-adjacent to academics and researchers over the years, but I can’t see that happening on Threads or whatever.
Everybody is writing obituaries for the internet these days. (Ryan Broderick’s are the best.) I guess this is mine.
But with the internet changing the rest of us have no buffer from the insane unseriousness of education. I sure hope you like words like “Thin Slicing” and citations of memes and goofy hats and confetti and “inspiration.” And until some of us figure out a way to create a viable alternative to this suffocating madness or the conditions of teaching improve, it’s all we’re going to get from this very silly, place.
This resonates with me. I think the education PD world became so unserious because of a toxic combination of the mission-driven aspect of the profession and the tendency to drastically overpromise ("No child left behind"). How about a fitness analogy? It's like if I spent a month telling my family that I was going to get *super* serious about working out and was going to work towards having an amazing body, without
A) having any realistic plan to schedule the required number of hours into the day for exercise, &
B) also without even knowing which exercises are the good ones that produce results.
I can keep up the positive talk for about a month, but after that I'm gonna have to either tell my family that I'm adjusting my goals and trying to figure out what's realistic, or (and this is what the education world did) I could just declare something ridiculous like a "contagion theory" of fitness in which I work out only one muscle group in the belief that those muscles' fitness will naturally spread to the rest of my body without my effort. So I just keep walking around saying, "Do you SEE these toe muscles! I can feel it starting to spread to my calves, too. I predict that by December it'll be up to my abs!"
In education, the overpromising was the first mistake. The mission-driven rhetoric and tradition then made it impossible to backtrack or rethink that overpromising. It's tough to say, "Yes, some kids are inevitably going to get left behind" or "In order to address problem X, we'd have to withdraw resources from our efforts to address problem Y." So instead people started saying, "Actually, kids who don't know their multiplication facts are learning something equally important...how to deal with real-life stress when you lack key knowledge." They just started gaslighting themselves and others. And once you've set yourself on the the path of being ridiculous, it's **really** hard to admit it and get back to reality.
However, I like "thin slicing" and think I don't do it enough.
Here's a related question: do you like Abbot Elementary?
So a quick story: I once intersected with a friend at an NCTM conference. She was not part of the MTBoS and we rarely talked about teaching things, but when we compared notes about what workshops/talks we were going to, I was really surprised that she was going to all the ones I actively avoid because they seemed incredibly fluffy and other than mentioning inspiration, passion for teaching, and reimagining education, had nothing specific or tangible going on. Meanwhile, she rolled her eyes at my nerdy-ass sessions on the minutiae of Desmos Activity Builder, or whatever. But when we talked more, she revealed how burned out she felt from teaching and that she was deciding whether to leave education or if she stayed, how to get through the next 10 years until she could get her pension. And I realized that she needed sessions that made her feel like teaching was worth it, something that gave her motivation and energy to keep going, whereas that wasn't why I was at the conference and not what I needed to get out of it. My point with this story is that maybe the rise of explicitly "energizing" and "inspiring" conferences is due to how burned out teachers are post-pandemic and the decline of teaching as a lifelong craft in our society. I'm just coming back to blogs and talking to Math teacher friends on the internet again this year - that's how long it took me to love teaching again after the year and a half I spent teaching over Zoom and then another year with everyone spaced out in rows and no group work. I was very close to leaving teaching altogether and probably not in a great headspace to nerd out over congruence proofs or even check Math Twitter. If people don't love teaching and aren't excited to improve their craft, if younger intellectuals aren't drawn to the profession, then we're not going to have a critical mass to write blogs and discuss and have interesting conferences.
And by the way, I hear your criticism of Building Thinking Classrooms, but their conference was the first time in a long time that I saw lots of other Math teachers excited about teaching and sharing with each other. Sessions were more focused, helpful, and nuanced than many I have seen at NCTM. Yes, there's some unfortunate edu-celebritizing that happens, but that happens in every community so I don't take it too seriously, as long as there's also useful content and pushback. And for the record, I don't think the MTBoS was ever very research-based - it always felt to me more like a teacher lounge with people sharing what worked for them and asking good questions. There were just enough people doing interesting things and pushing back on each other's thinking in a helpful way to make it a place that improved everyone's practice. I hope that can happen again.