It is Wednesday and I am still chewing over the New York Times article, also the actions of the Texas Board of Education textbook decisions, and my needs as an online eTeacher. They all seem to coincide/collide in some fashion. I am excited by the idea of really being able to train teachers with the same skill that engineers, physicists and architects are trained. I am pretty bewildered by why so many people cling to the idea that teachers are 'born not made.' I would guess that they use it to justify their unwillingness to explore and learn new things themselves: if they were born a teacher then they were given all the skills they needed to start with. Certainly I have know a lot of teachers who do not learn new things and are proud of the fact, though I must admit that for some of them it is a result of the inoculation they were given in their university Education classes by some truly appalling instructors and curricula.

My needs as a eTeacher are different than those of a teacher in a brick-and-mortar classroom, not completely different, but many of the techniques that I learned and honed for years are no longer available to me. I relied heavily on interpreting body language, expression and tone-of-voice, none of which are available to me now. Hopefully they will be in some fashion as the technology available to me and my students improves. I am finding that being an eTeacher requires a whole different style of teaching and interacting; often I feel like a first year teacher all over again.

What is going on in Texas appalls me as an historian and as a teacher who tries very hard to instill in my students a sense of ethics and of the need to always be truthful and open in a pluralistic, multicultural society. Where to start? I think I need to start with the concept of democracy, the responsibility of members of a democracy to respect the views and opinions of those in the community whom one disagrees. This can be done without demeaning, demonizing or otherwise abusing the other. It can also be done without having to resort to distorting or lying about historical fact. There is more than enough interpretive effort involved in studying any event that there should be no need to resort to lies or distortions. How can a teacher teach ethics if this is how they see the the people who design their education behaving like this?