hat is school for? Socialization? Daycare? Stimulating young minds? Readying students for the rigors of the “knowledge economy”? Instilling habits of obedience in the next generation of clerks, office drones, and baristas? This unspoken question hovers in the background of Thirteen Ways of Going on a Field Trip, a short, bittersweet teaching memoir from Spotted Toad, a pseudonymous blogger and Twitter personality.
Teachers, says Toad, face two fundamental problems in the classroom. The first is one of political authority. Put simply, why should students do anything the teacher says? Holding the attention of a group of children or adolescents is a tricky business. Systems of reward and punishment are blunt or ineffectual. The teacher's status is roughly analogous to that of a boss in the classic Marxist account of the workplace: if the great mass of underage proletarians could somehow unite, the teacher's authority would be untenable.
But if you can persuade your youthful charges that you are, in fact, in charge, you're faced with another problem. Motivation, ability, and personality vary greatly from student to student. Move too slowly and the smarter kids get bored. Move too quickly and stragglers fall away from the column. Looming in the background, especially in stats-obsessed American public schools, are local and national benchmarks, tests, and curriculum guidelines that lay out, often in comically minute detail, what you're supposed to be accomplishing in the classroom.
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