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A Teacher’s Education in Army Basic Training
By Rich Stowell
An excerpt from Nine Weeks: A Teacher’s Education in Army Basic Training by Rich Stowell
Reprinted with the author’s permission
Have you ever stood in a room with 50 relative strangers, all naked, on display so that a man who is not your doctor can examine you for ticks? It’s pretty awkward.
Basic Training was strange in so many ways, though. It was stranger for me than for almost anyone else in the Army I speak with about it, although most people did roughly the same things, irrespective of when they went or where.
I was inspired to join the Army out of a sense of patriotism and duty to my country, which I love. That love has not waned. To the contrary, in my nearly three years now as an enlisted Soldier, it has grown stronger and deeper. I have met countless Soldiers who are as honorable, selfless, and committed as I could ever hope to be. They inspire me.
After Basic, inspiration of another sort struck. The ten weeks I spent at in Foxtrot Battery at Fort Sill for Basic Combat Training were filled with experiences that were funny, exhausting, maddening, rousing, frustrating, and above all, rewarding. But the educator in me was badly disappointed with the quality of training, and felt compelled to put my thoughts to paper.
Here is an excerpt, from Week One:
Our first week in Foxtrot involved lots of yelling, and we found ourselves in classrooms quite a bit. When I first joined, my recruiter had told me that we would be in classes during Basic. As a teacher and college graduate, that excited me. The more class, the better, I thought. I had visions of erudite lectures, note-taking, question-answer sessions, studying, and tests. Those are the things at which I had excelled.
To my disappointment and everyone’s frustration, Army Basic Training classes were nothing of the sort. What really happened is that the entire battery would file in to an auditorium with folding chairs, take seats, and listen to scripted lectures, sometimes for several hours at a time. The lectures often accompanied PowerPoint presentations that any moron could have read, yet drill sergeants and the other NCOs paraded around with pomp as if they had just delivered the greatest lecture ever. We usually caught barely a word.
Ironically, the science of effective instruction began in the military. In the 1950s, military training commanders were concerned with the amount of information a cold-war soldier, with a greater number of more technical jobs needed to be filled, could master. Warfare in this new age had more in common with public relations campaigns than the bloody battles of the past, and begged a new question: How can the soldier learn to perfection the new demands placed upon him? A new field of study was born trying to answer that question.
Though it sounds logical, backward design is counterintuitive. At least it’s counter-instinctive. Most instructors present information to students who do their part by asking questions. Those queries tend to guide a lecture and choice of examples to illustrate a point. Often students share their understanding of material to enrich the class. When students have learned enough, the teaching stops and the testing begins.
Modern instructional design flips that model on its head. Under the new model, a set of standards or performance objectives are defined. Instructors decide what needs to be demonstrated in order for those objectives to be indisputably performed to perfection. Thus, objectives need to be clearly defined so that even the most casual observer can state without ambiguity whether a student meets the objective. Moreover, the approach is decidedly behavioral. Students are expected to “do” more than to understand. In a theoretical sense, though, understanding is very important because it helps a student do things better.
Drill sergeants didn’t care whether we understood. They had their checklists of extensive performance objectives, upon which they marked the appropriate one of two boxes, “Go” or “No Go.” One can only imagine that the training NCOs had their performance evaluated by such checklists, so they were satisfied that the PowerPoint presentation was merely delivered. We were “instructed” to follow along and learn it, but it was apparent that nobody in charge really knew how to ensure that actual learning occurred. So we sat, ready to do whatever we needed to cope. They expected us to take notes at lightning speed and without desks, on pocket-sized notepads. Any questions? Of course not. Questions were evidence of not paying attention when the information was first disseminated.
The classroom experience at Basic caught me by surprise, but the routine we learned during the first week would be followed for the remainder of the cycle.
By the end of it all, I left a better teacher and a better man. Since then, I have had no situations as awkward, but plenty just as frustrating. To this day, when I look at my classroom full of high school math students, I often recall those moments at Army Basic Training when all of the teaching methods I had learned were confirmed by my own frustrations.
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About the author:
Rich Stowell teaches educational technology at the University of San Francisco and high school math at a charter school in Richmond, California.
He is the author of the book, Nine Weeks: a teacher’s education in Army Basic Training, which combines his experiences teaching in the civilian world and training in the Army.
Rich recently returned from a deployment with the California National Guard in Kosovo, where he worked as a Public Affairs Specialist for Multi-National Task Force East, under NATO command. He was the Broadcast Section Chief for MNTF-E and contributed regularly to the Task Force magazine, The Guardian East. He has also been published in the official nation-wide and state-wide National Guard news magazines.
He still writes about his experiences in the Army on his military blog, “My Public Affairs,” a humorously progressive insight into all things military.
Before deploying, he taught at the high school and middle school levels and worked as a math coach to dozens of teachers across the state of California. Previously, he was a founding math instructor at two charter schools in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Rich earned his Masters degree in Mathematics Education from Western Governors University, where he specialized in standards-based instruction.
He currently resides with his wife and son in Oakland, California.
