One thing about being the parent of teenagers is that you're rarely bored.  Mad? Often. Exasperated? Even more often. Bored? Very rarely.

One reason is that they lead lives that can best be described as bizarre which leads them to regale their parents with stories.  Disturbing stories.  Frankly we often dismiss their stories as gross exaggerations based on our long experience with hearing grossly exaggerated stories from them, but lately we've discovered that our three teens will corroborate each other's stories at different times and that's caused us to come to the conclusion that every once in a while our kids aren't full of crap.

An idea that's entered my head is that it would be great if we could have one of those tiny cameras, the kind that all the TV stations use when they're doing undercover investigations of tanning salons, attached to our kids so we could see what they see during the day.  The idea flies away as soon as I remember that I really don't want to know everything my kids are up to since I'd likely ship them off to military school or a convent as a result, but there's one part of their lives I'd really like to see from their perspectives and that's the classroom. Based on the stories they tell about their classes I'm fairly well convinced that they have some outstanding teachers, some average teachers and the occasional nutjob thrown into the mix. Their classmates are equally diverse, ranging from your classic honor roll student to your honorary members of the Charles Manson Club.  I'll be the first to tell you that it takes a special person to get teenagers to sit up and listen, and I'd love to be able to see the teachers from the kids' perspective since we all know that the presence of an adult would skew everyone's behavior. I'd love to be able to see how some teachers really get the kids engaged and how others bore them to tears.

I'm writing about this now because I recently sat through a business seminar that was being run by two professors from a local university. It just astounds me that anyone who is a "professional" educator could be that unengaging or that bad at relaying information.  And let's be honest – if you're handed an audience of adult professionals who willingly enlisted for a seminar that's about as easy as you're going to get as an educator.  Hell, one of the guys played about five minutes of a CD of a fairly prominent business speaker as part of his presentation.  What next, a film strip?  I haven't been that bored since college and unfortunately this experience reminded me that in my four years of college I could count on one hand the number of professors who truly inspired me.  The rest should have gone into business as sleep therapists because their greatest talent was their ability to put even the hardiest souls to sleep.

From a parent's perspective the fact that teachers can be that boring is particularly galling because our kids feed us a regular helping of some variation of this line: "I'm not doing well in <fill in subject here> because the teacher is SOOOOO BORING! And he doesn't even know what he's talking about – when we ask questions he can't help us understand and he just says what it says in the book."  Of course our first reaction is to say something along the lines of "I'm sure you're exaggerating, but even if it's true you need to find a way to learn and you need to focus harder on the subject."  Obviously they could be, and often likely are exaggerating, but there's also a grain of truth to what they're saying.  

Teachers are no different than the rest of us – some are good, some aren't – but I'd argue that the consequences of a teacher's ineptitude are more far reaching than most other peoples'.  How many of us directly influence the development of hundreds of kids each year? How many of us can directly impact the future success of hundreds of kids if we don't do our jobs?

As a parent I'm more than willing to take responsibility for my and my kids' shortcomings; if my kids get bad grades I know that we have a hand in it. On the other hand I think educators (not just teachers, but everyone involved in education) have to take responsibility as well. The education of our children is too important for us to continue to treat teaching as just another job and education as just another industry – in my mind it's a profession as important as the law or medicine and I think it's about time our society starts treating it that way. Frankly I think it's a miracle that we have as many good teachers as we do because we sure don't treat teachers as anything special. We send them kids of all stripes – motivated learners, stoners, jocks, products of abuse, products of broken homes, etc. and ask them to perform the miracle of preparing them to compete in the global workplace.  That would be fine if we gave them the necessary resources to do it, but we don't.  

I don't have the answers, but I do have the benefit of seeing the little corner of the educational universe that my kids populate and it worries me.  My kids have the advantage of going to one of the better public schools in the area, but they have classmates I think hardened criminals would steer clear of, and teachers that I think have a hard time inspiring themselves to get out of bed much less inspire dozens of kids to learn.  My kids also have the benefit of two parents who are willing to push, cajole and aid them as much as possible in order for them to succeed and learn.  What happens to those kids who don't?  

Education is too important for us to keep on keepin' on, so I think my germ of an idea – put hidden cameras on my kids to see what they see – might actually be the way to start this whole process.  What I mean is, let's look at education from the end user's perspective.  I honestly don't think you could put a bunch of adults in classrooms to observe because of the observer-expectancy effect, so I truly think it would be of great benefit to get unobtrusive observations' from the kids' perspectives.  This might not be a possibility due to legal/privacy concerns, but if it is possible I think it would provide incredible insight into the reality of our education system.

Now that I've written all this I have another thought – maybe someone's already done this and I'm just blowing a lot of hot air.  Wouldn't be the first time, and it's probably not the last.