Our goal at TSFires is to prepare as many teachers as possible for the future of our profession. The need for teachers is just as strong now as at point in history. But there are some unfortunate truths that we must face if our profession is to move forward. This post is about the often denied reality that we are teachers, not masters of content.

There was a time, both simple and sad, when the schoolmarm for the village was the master of basically all academic knowledge. If anyone had a question about math, history, or the few scraps of science that were known, they took their question to the marm. If you were a super classy village maybe you had a lawyer or an architect in which case they were also content masters, but wouldn’t share their knowledge for free, so, back to the schoolmarm with any questions.

Until quite recently this was still fairly true. Within any school the teachers were still masters of their content area, and students relied on teachers for any fact checking or question seeking. Then, as now, better schools tended to have better masters of content. Richer districts have people with masters and doctorates in their content area, while poorer schools have people with a bachelors in the same or at least a related field, and the poorest schools have substitutes and unlicensed teachers.

But now those degrees, that hierarchy of content knowledge being fully owned by the teachers of the school, that is all meaningless in the world of smartphones. Whether you have a doctorate in American studies from Harvard, or a bachelors in political science from a community college, the student with a question about the civil war can now find their answers and supporting evidence during their passing period.

For each fact or law we dispense about spelling or physics, students can easily find a counterexample or the exception to the rule. They can also stay up to date with changes in a given field faster than any full time teacher can keep up with them. Students simply don’t need teachers for content mastery anymore.

This realization might seem alarming, possibly even depressing. If we as teachers really bought into the mentality of standardized tests – the idea that our only job is to fill students with a set of academic facts and that, having learned those facts, students were ready for life – then yes, the need for teachers would have apparently died with the rise of the smartphone.

But at TSFires we find the same realization not depressing but invigorating. The fact that teachers inarguably

are not in the classroom to simply share facts lets us all boldly define our jobs by what we actually do.

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