Teacher Excellence: A Contemporary Oxymoron?

Abstract

Kids love the word oxymoron. Like many of the words they hear in English class (never to hear or see again), it has an absurd, Mother Goose/ Dr. Seuss quality, a truly joyful noise that delights them in the way words once could when they were toddlers. My son used to love to hear the word Pinocchio, over and over and over again. Pinocchio. Pinocchio. He strove mightily to say the word himself, producing assorted comic versions like Pik-o-IK-o and Pin-IK-ee-o until, one grand day, he said it, surprising himself so thoroughly that he cried. Oxymoron. (The adjective form, oxymoronic, is every bit as fun; kids every year say, as if they were the first to think of it: Hey, everybody knows an ox is a moron!) Derived from two Greek roots: oxy, meaning pointed; moras meaning foolish. A contradiction. An incongruity. A ridiculous juxtaposition of terms. Yet, from the Greek, a pointed foolishness. Stephen Douglas: the little giant. Diligent sloth. Grotesque beauty. (One of George Carlin's favorites: military intelligence.) Teacher excellence is an expression that has, in recent years, taken on oxymoronic qualities, at least in the view of the legions of critics who continue to find the news media a willing and eager accompanist for their choral caterwauling. The various reports on public education that have appeared in the past year, largely vulturine in tone (has something died? is something about to?), have all contained the obligatory, gratuitous line: There are, of course, many excellent teachers out there, but ..., the but, for all its three-letter puniness, being the operative word. Teachers, we are to infer-though obviously overworked if