The Wisdom of Spotted Toad

The good old days of blogging when just about any blogger could, at least until he ran out of ideas, be somebody has come and gone. So the few new bloggers who have made an impact in recent years have had to be awfully smart. Ranking up near Scott Alexander of Slate Star Codex among the top new voices of the 2010s is Spotted Toad, the pseudonymous quant-intensive public policy analyst.

Spotted Toad has now written a short, nonstatistical, elegantly oblique memoir of his decade, 2000 to 2010, as a public school teacher: 13 Ways of Going on a Field Trip: Stories about Teaching and Learning.

While Toad abstains from citing data in his new self-published book, his Thoreauvian reminiscences are informed by the latest findings on genes and IQ, which makes for a subtle and unusual literary combination. Most schoolteachers would rather not think about 21st-century intelligence science, but Spotted Toad can’t ever stop thinking.

For example, he recalls naively offering to a fellow teacher who had been a Peace Corps volunteer in New Guinea the famous assertion in Jared Diamond’s 1997 best-seller Guns, Germs, and Steel that New Guinea natives must be more intelligent than Americans.

“Well…” she says, and then tells her own story about how she had bought an electrical generator to run a refrigerator to store medicine for a jungle clinic she’d opened for her Papuan students. But one of the native teachers figured out how to reconnect the generator to a TV. Soon the medicine had spoiled and all the Papuan teachers were sleeping through their classes because they’d been ogling Baywatch all night long.

Yet, Toad demonstrates, being well-informed about IQ science doesn’t make him nihilistic about the value of teaching. He notes that perhaps the single most enduring trend in pedagogy in recent decades, Lucy Calkins’ “workshop model” of individual writing assignments and silent reading, is:

…in many ways a realistic resignation to the fundamental challenges facing American teachers—the vast range in ability, particularly in reading, that confronts teachers within an ordinary classroom….

In 2000, Toad had gotten a job as a Bronx middle school science teacher through Teach For America, the once-fashionable charity that recruits graduates of elite colleges, gives them a mere five weeks of training, and then has them work for a few years in downscale public schools.

As you may recall, after the economic crash of 2008, TFA had been constantly featured in the press. High-IQ teachers with no experience were going to save America by Closing the Gap!

Also, post-2008, public school teacher was seen as one of the few old-fashioned jobs still with pensions and strong health insurance. So New York Times subscribers were constantly forwarding admiring articles about TFA to their underemployed children.

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