Elena Kagan as Dean of Harvard Law School. Creative Commons License. Image via Wikipedia

Joel Stein tackles elitism in The Awesome Column in last week’s Time Magazine, and he comes off sounding – as was his goal, me thinks – elitist. From his lede:

I went to a better college than you did. That does not make me a better person than you. It does, however, make me smarter, more knowledgeable, more curious and more ambitious. So, in a lot of ways, better.

Since Stein has no idea where I went to college, this kind of irritates me, although, in the end, he is right: He did go to a better college than I did, unless he went to University of Oregon. If that’s the case, I definitely went to a better college than he did, because I went to Oregon State. (Motto: Joel Stein may be Ivy League, but our basketball coach is the President’s brother-in-law.)

Anyway, the column hit a nerve because, as a laid-off journalist running up the learning curve of becoming a high school English teacher, I’ve had copious concerns about what I’ve seen in classrooms during my training. One of the points Stein brings up in his piece is that the notion that all people are equal in talent and brains is a bunch of bunk. (We are, however, all equally valuable as humans, in spite of what he says in his ending salvo.)

Humans are all different in brains, ability and innate talent. My daughters both have a better eye for design than I do, and the one who has had formal art training is an amazing artist. I can’t even paint my toenails, much less a self portrait that actually looks like a person. We are all blessed (and cursed) in different ways and as Stein points out, when you’re in need of a great brain surgeon, you will absolutely look at where she went to school before agreeing to go under the scalpel.

Let me say it again: We are not all equal in talent and ability. That said, Stein’s veiled argument that Elena Kagan is qualified for the Supreme Court because she went to an Ivy League school lacks some merit since said education alone cannot make up for lack of judicial experience – at least not in my non-Ivy-League opinion.

But I digress. There’s this idea teachers have to fight against in classrooms, and that is that natural ability trumps effort. We work hard with students who say they “just can’t write” or “just can’t do math” to show them that indeed, if they put in the effort, they can do that writing or math. We tell them that Magic Johnson didn’t become Magic Johnson because he was born with great hand-eye coordination; rather, he practiced for hours and weeks and months and years to get as good as he was at his sport.

Still, while effort – lots of it – can make up for some lack of innate ability, someone with a 90 IQ will not be able to catch up with someone with a 140 IQ no matter how many books he reads or math problems he tries to solve. And, as Stein points out, we do children a disservice when we more or less tell them that there is no innate difference. It is simply not true that a person can become anything he wants to be if only he works hard enough. Success will not come at all without hard work, but you cannot become a brain surgeon if you are horrible at science and have hands that naturally shake. You can’t be an astronaut if you are claustrophobic. You cannot be a calculus teacher if you cannot master algebra.

What we need to be telling students is they can get to a good college if they work really hard in high school (and middle school, and elementary school) and that in getting to a good college (or excellent technical school), they will expand the choices of careers open to them. While certain talents and skills are innate, getting the best teachers in the best schools teaches you to do the best thinking – and sets you on a path you will not travel if you have lousy teachers in a lousy college (or high school, technical school, etc.).

Which is why, dear readers, we need to work a heck of a lot harder to get the best K-12 teachers into the worst schools to turn around more of the students who have been convinced they will never succeed. We need the best teachers with the most educationally needy students to help more students get into the best colleges so they can become snarky columnists like Stein or, better yet, brain surgeons.

As if I already hadn’t said so, teaching is ridiculously hard work. As I come to the beginning of my third week as a teacher’s aide in a high school English classroom (and first official week in a student-teaching internship), that hard work is ever more apparent. But lately, something else is becoming crystal clear: The U.S. education system needs to revamp its curriculum.

I’m not talking about the Common Core or adding more AP science and math courses, either. You’ll get no argument from me that our schools need more well-trained science and math teachers to better engage the bored and battered coming into our classrooms. And with students spending an average of 53 hours weekly (weekly!!) with TV, video games or online, Lord knows we need a serious emphasis on literary analysis and the critical thinking developed by sustained reading and serious writing in English classes. (Side note, a 2008 study on writing and technology revealed that 73 percent of students surveyed do not consider their online writing, such as Face Book updates, “real” writing - although they enjoy it more than most in-school writing.)

But what I’m talking about are things like logic and personal finance and playing nice with others. Plenty of students can write a basic MLA-cited research paper, but it becomes obvious in class discussions they don’t grasp logic. They can parrot talking heads from “news-talk” shows, but they don’t know how to analyze media and, unless they hail from a foreign country, they know little to nothing about current events and how to read a newspaper. They know how to use an ATM, but not make a budget or reconcile a check book – let alone read the fine print on credit card interest rates.

They don’t know how to cook, grow their own food, sew on a button, and, hard as it is to believe in a supposedly post-racial society, they don’t really know how to get along or disagree with respect. Fewer and fewer have dinner with their parents nightly (or even weekly), so they lack basic manners; more and more come from divorced homes steeped in poor communication skills. In spite of living in a world where extremists have made religion a top-of-the-food-chain issue, all but a handful know anything about the history of religion, especially in the development of this country. Add to all that, only a teeny tiny percentage of our students are anything close to fluent in a second language and many way too many are fat.

Therefore, if I ran the world – or at least the Department of Education – I would change the required-for-graduation high school curriculum to include:

4 years of physical education – the kind with standards to meet, not just “grab a ball and play.”

1 semester of personal finance; final semester before graduation

1 semester of what used to be home economics. Students would learn the basics of nutrition; how to cook at least five balanced meals; how to mend clothing, and read a sewing pattern. This class would be responsible for the semester’s care of the school garden. First semester of senior year.

1 semester of economics and one semester of business math or statistics; senior year in lieu of 4th year of math. If the high end math kids still want Calculus AB and BC, they can have it, as well. But econ and business math are the requirements.

1 year of current events, taken concurrently with U.S. History during junior year. We’ve got a whole generation of kids growing up ignorant of what is happening round them and thus, unable to truly participate in a democracy (or know what we should be watching out for internationally).

1 year of a logic-media analysis class in lieu of the fourth year of English. (Yes, I know this is heresy for an English teacher-in-trainig, but I think that a logic/media analysis course would be heavy on writing/reading/analysis/critical thought, a senior English standard.)

1 year of a life-skills course, which would focus on interpersonal relationships, communication, manners, racial-cultural-religious relations, and communication with young people in other parts of the world.

1 semester of community service: Every student would participate in a semester-long community service project sometime during junior or senior year. The easiest option would be tutoring underclassmen or working with the special education classrooms at their school. But there are other options as well – and the students could come up with ideas. We need to help students become “other focused.”

As for that second language? In a forward-thinking country, a second language – most likely Spanish for the U.S. – would be taught from kindergarten on, just as English is taught as a second language in most developed countries beginning in elementary school. By the time these kids got to middle school, they’d be taking Spanish conversation and able to add a third language and learn it much more quickly, and continue through high school.

What do you think is missing from the high school curriculum?

Monday begins my second week as a volunteer aide in a high school English classroom in preparation for student teaching in about 16 days. During a faculty meeting my first week there, one of the experienced teachers gave me a copy of NEAToday Go!, which is advertised as “The magazine for new teachers.” It had a number of interesting articles, but the inside back page is what most caught my attention. It was a photo of a young teacher holding himself up on gymnastics equipment, captioned “Holding Your Own.” Attached to the photo were some stats from NEA’s recent report, “Status of the American Public School Teacher.” I’m sure you’ll see why I was intrigued:

The percentage of teachers saying they work more than 60 hours a week in the ’70s was 5 percent; in 2006, it was 20.

The percentage of teachers who get a full hour for lunch in the ’70s was 9 percent; in 2006, it was 1 percent. (At my school, teachers get 30 minutes – as do the students, and, especially for the students who buy a lunch, it ain’t enough time.)

The percentage of teachers who became teacher because they like kids was 72 percent in the ’70s and 71 percent in 2006.

The percentage of teachers who said they chose the career because they wanted job secuity in the ’70s was 16 and in 2006 it was 17.

The mean (or average) class size in the ’70s was 27; in 2006 it was 29.

And finally, the creme de la creme: The mean salary for new teachers in the ’70s was $23,153. In 2006, adjusted for cost of living, it was $24,700.

Sigh.