Some things in education (or in life, for that matter) never sound right – or improve with time – so when I hear a teacher say, “That’s not the way I do it,” or “I don’t do it that way,” without taking the time to listen to what the other “way” actually is, I have to bite my tongue. And as strange as it sounds, I hear it this every year mostly from our “freshly-minted” teachers.
Many years ago, I was working in a particularly challenging school and was “showing the ropes” to a new teacher (only weeks out of college) who said, “Oh, that’s not the way I do it” while I was explaining a fairly well accepted procedure used by most of the staff. I had heard it before, but this was the proverbial “straw” that broke my silence.
“Not the way you do it? You just graduated. You don’t have a way yet.” She went on to tell me how she “does” this and she “does” that. I knew that most of what she was telling me was what she had picked up here and there, and adopted because she “felt” her class would run most smoothly. The “ways” she was describing to me were not part of her “practice” (how she taught her subject), but her “practice management” (how she ran her classroomI stopped her and said, “