So You Can Cook Meth, Doesn't Mean You're a Chemist

            A reference to Breaking Bad, huh, I see where this is going. That’s right. We’re talking about teachers today. This actually applies to many professions, but teachers are one of the most pronounced examples. Let me set the scene. You are a meth cook who has proven a nuisance to your boss. Being the best meth cook around, you assume your safe, after all who would cook the meth if not you. However, it seems that a coworker has learned your method from watching you. Fearing for your job and your life, this is the meth business after all, you begin to explain the complex nuances to the chemistry of meth production that this amateur cook could never even begin to understand. Your boss lets you keep your job, murders the other guy, and everything is right with the world. That’s how it happened on television anyway.

            Anyone who actually watched the show knows, maybe the boss should have gone with the first guy. But why not? I mean it’s just a process of mixing, heating, extracting, etc. With some practice, anyone could make a high-quality product, as long as they follow the proven recipe to a T. Well, what happens when conditions change. Maybe that proven recipe isn’t applicable anymore. Maybe the DEA has caught on and put a mass restriction on one of your core ingredients. What can you substitute? Maybe you had to move to a new lab that has poor ventilation, how will you compensate? You might be able to follow an established recipe and cook meth with the best of them, but that doesn’t mean you have the base of knowledge that an actual chemist would. Your skills begin and end with that one recipe under a constant set of conditions.

            I thought you said we were going to talk about teachers?

It’s a metaphor okay? I’m getting there. First I will make a small detour and talk about pilots. You see pilots have a unique set of skills that most other people do not have. The ability to put a 450-ton steel contraption 3,900 ft. in the air and then bring it back down safely on the other side of the planet. Ask your average Joe if he thinks he could do the same with no training, and he would tell you of course not. He’s not a pilot, and thus does not know how to fly a plane. Ask him to teach thirty 9-year-olds to read, however, and you might get a different response.

This same guy that was not a pilot, is also not a teacher, yet, for some reason so many people believe that anyone who knows how to read can teach others to do the same. What’s the only job you can get with a fourth-grade education? Teaching third-grade. This is another example of the meth cook trying to be a chemist though. The man would, of course make better progress teaching reading than flying a plane, since the man himself knows how to read, but does not know anything about aviation. However, pit him against a trained, seasoned teacher, and the differences become very readily apparent. Can the man differentiate between upwards of six different grade levels? And that’s just in a first-grade class. What if one of the children is autistic, or an immigrant with limited English. Perhaps one child is deaf. Does the man know the most current best practices for teaching reading? Of course not. Should the children be grouped within their skill level, or low with high. Does the man even know to break the class up into groups, because no teacher in their right mind would do whole group only reading instruction anymore.

            So the next time you hear about new math and think, that’s not how you should teach math, you might as well be telling your doctor that this new procedure isn’t how you should be treating illness, because bloodletting was much simpler and worked just as well. Rest assured, that these are evidence based practices that are specifically developed to address the issues that plagued older methods. So even though you might not understand it, your children will soon be doing math circles around you, then subsequently analyzing those circles to postulate new applications of pi. For those of you who may not buy into what I am saying, keep smurfing pseudo while the real chemists put you out of business.

            -AMS