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Young Teachers Face Direct Instruction Addiction Crisis
When satire runs this close to reality, a satire alert may be in order.
Psychotherapist Joseph Freezo, founder of the Teacher Curriculum Addiction Center, warns that increased reliance on prescriptive lessons delivered over the Internet poses a grave risk to inexperienced teachers. According to quasi-experimental studies, young teachers are much more likely than older ones to suffer from long term physiological and psychological damage.
Young teachers' lesson planning cortex hasn't fully developed yet and they are unable to distinguish between the intimacy and euphoria of student enthusiasm and the feelings of peace and quietude produced by student compliance.
Freezo warns against the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation utopian vision of Internet universalism whose goal is intense teacher exposure to prescriptive formulae that will eliminate teacher need for original, individualistic, spontaneous teaching. "Gates universalism," warns Freezo, "is not just a fantasy but is a threat to the survival of teaching."
Researchers have found that although teen brains are the most sensitive to dopamine, which plays a major role in reward-motivated behavior, at around age 15, teachers revert to this sensitivity in their first week of finding themselves in charge of a group of more than 16 students in a classroom. In their second year of student exposure, teachers' dopamine response is up to four times stronger than that of 15-year-olds.
Teachers' capacity to produce long hours of direct teaching without experiencing burnout makes the teacher brain especially vulnerable to addiction. Direct teaching addiction during the early days of a teaching career is particularly troubling because of the way neuron pathways in the brain form during this period. The circuitry in the brain undergoes an explosion of growth followed by a rapid pruning after year six. Freeze describes this as the "use it or lose it" period of a teacher's development.
Although for most, teaching an occasional canned lesson isn't a destructive force that instantly becomes a downward spiral into direct instruction addiction, a joint taskforce of Concerned Retired Teachers and Mothers Against Teacher Addiction warns, "When Gates universalism and AFT Share My Lesson are ritualized in Danielson rubrics," there's trouble in River City."
"Direct Instruction is not just used as a way of presenting a lesson," warns psychotherapist Betty Buscombe, founder of the Center for Healthy Teaching. "It creates a fetishized, disturbed classroom reality, releasing the same pleasure-reward response by releasing large amounts of the neurotransmitter dopamine in the brain that would occur from a drug addiction." Buscombe warns that Internet delivery of Common Core prescriptions is so powerful that it is literally rewiring teacher brains.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation declined comment.
Randi Weingarten, President of the AFT, said, "Our obligation as a nation, and my obligation as an educator, is to help children achieve their potential, participate in our democracy and propel our economy forward."
Democrats for Education Reform and the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation advised doing whatever Teacher for America wants.
Senator Harkin of the US Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions noted the importance of Surgeon General's report on smoking 50 years ago.
An aide of George Miller, member of the House Education & the Workforce Committee, said he was busy napping.
Asked about whether the Gates Foundation should have a seat at the education policy-making table, Arne Duncan said, "No child in America deserves any less than a world-class education and we must be grateful when philanthropy foundations step in to help."
— Susan Ohanian
blog
2014-01-25
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