Tinker's Rule

By Donald W. Thomas

When I applied for my first teaching job, the interviewer--a Mr. Tinker by name--told me that it took five years to make an English teacher. At the time, I thought this extravagant, ostensibly the boast of an elder anxious to magnify his labors. For my part, with a master's degree in hand, the arrogance of youth at heart, and a whole semester of student teaching under my belt, surely I could be exempted from Mr. Tinker's rule. After all, one need only codify one's accumulated notes, peruse the assigned texts, and get a decent night's sleep to ensure the obedience, awe, and devotion of one's prospective students. The rest would come to me as the need arose.

But nearly 40 years of teaching have convinced me that Mr. Tinker was right, indeed, profoundly optimistic in his assessment. I have been reminded of his rule in reading about the current controversy over teacher preparation and testing. I have no quarrel with tightening the standards maintained by our higher institutions of learning, to say nothing of our lower institutions of learning where I continue to labor, "doomed," as Dr. Samuel Johnson once characterized himself, "only to remove rubbish and clear obstructions from the paths of Learning and Genius, who press forward to conquest and glory without bestowing a smile on the humble drudge that facilitates their progress."

Be they ever so humble, is it too much to ask that our teachers become literate and more than modestly informed, not only about their chosen fields of study, but also about the world at large? Clearly not. But let us not dismiss the problem as one of standards alone, no matter how much such standards may be in need of repairs, whether in schools, colleges, or graduate schools of education. No, the difficulty runs deeper than this. What we have here is a structural problem inherent in the way we...