Ep. 31 "Are Schools Training Kids to be Weak?" - Guest Ted Lamb (Part 1 of 2)

You’ve heard of the 3 R’s… but what if we added a fourth? Resiliency. Ted Lamb — a high school history teacher — has noticed many declines in the school system throughout his 20+ year career. The purposeful formation of strong-minded students has suffered throughout time, causing kids to suffer as a consequence. Ted isn’t letting this stop him from giving his students a quality education, though. In today’s episode, he explains to Melvin that in his classroom, the students are introduced to methods of real learning that help them form critical-thinking skills that will serve them well for the rest of their lives.


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Transcript

Ted Lamb Transcript

Part 1

Interviewed by Melvin Adams

July 2022

[00:00-26:11]

ADAMS: Our guest today is Ted Lamb. Ted was introduced to me a few months ago and I decided then that he should join the conversation we host around reclaiming education and culture in America. Ted is a History teacher. He also serves on his public school board. So Ted, welcome to The State of Education. 

 Well, we’re excited to hear your story today, Ted. Why don’t you just start by sharing a little bit about yourself, your background, and the influences that caused you, first of all, to become a teacher?

LAMB: So, initially I didn’t start out wanting to be a teacher. In high school, just like everyone else, I think [it was kind of like you’re] not really sure what to do but you want to change the world and all of that stuff. 

 But I got a good bearing though because I went to Oklahoma Christian University of Science and Arts. I started out as a social worker, but got there and realized, “No, this is not going to work for me. I’m going to end up probably killing someone.”

 Just because I saw a lot of where secular philosophy was starting to go into social work at that time. I always had a knack for history—American history—grew to love World History as well. 

 And I just had that… you know when you are able to do something well and you can’t explain it? That was it. So after doing a stint of social work for a semester, I thought, “Well, why don’t you do something with History?” 

 And so I got my Social Studies Education Degree from Oklahoma Christian. Several years later, after we got back from Seoul, South Korea teaching English as a foreign language (my wife and I) I got my masters in Special Education. So we’ve been back here ever since. 

So I was a substitute at an alternative school—teaching students with behavioral issues. And currently, I’m in an alternate school. But I teach History to students with special needs but what I really prefer to refer to as behavioral issues. So that’s how I got into education itself. 

ADAMS: Interesting. So give us some highlights from your career as a teacher. Perhaps experiences that help you love your work and maybe you’ve got some things that have challenged your desire and commitment. 

LAMB: Well I have always been one that utilized primary sources and role-play, hands-on activities, and very little of a textbook. That, I think, is more so because I had a 6th-grade history teacher that used those things in class. 

In fact, it was Tennessee History. I can’t even tell you what the textbook looked like. Everything was just done that way. It’s interesting, he was a former CIA agent and he did all the dirty work in Europe. And [he] never told us about that… he just couldn’t. Either he couldn’t or he saw too much and didn’t want to. 

But that really had a profound impact on me. So in my classes we really try to—and I tell my classes at the beginning of every year—that, “You may not like History, but you’ll learn something and if you give me a certain amount of time each day, you’ll pass the state-mandated tests and you’ll pass the course. Not that it will be easy, but you will.”

And so we do a lot of role-play, hands-on activities. And what I mean by that is… because when you say “hands-on” activities, some people might think, “Oh, it’s fun and games.” No, what we do, for example, is we actually act out the continental congress. 

And I will present, say, the different taxes. The tax on tea and the intolerable acts, and we’ll role-play that out. And before kids even know actually what happened, they’re assigned as a colony and we actually debate it out in real-time. 

And it’s interesting to see how, even though we are now 246 years removed, students still come to the same conclusions and arguments as the founding fathers did too. If nothing else, that just confirms what I call our DNA. 

ADAMS: Yeah. 

LAMB: And so that’s what we do with that. I use a lot of primary sources in the class too. Because I think the good, the bad, and the ugly… you don’t have to like what a primary source says, but it is what it is. You don’t have to like the speech of Alexander Stephens—his cornerstone speech that he gave in Georgia right before the Civil War. 

You don’t have to like it. In fact, I was appalled by it. But the fact is, that is history. And that is a part of history that maybe we don’t like, that we don’t want to talk about, but we do ourselves a great disservice and we don’t learn about it and so we’re hampered. 

The second part of your question had to do with what have I enjoyed and what have I seen as challenges? The one thing that I do enjoy is seeing a student, not necessarily grade-wise [or] standardized-test-wise, but a student that goes from point A to point B and they start to get it. 

When they can start actually doing deeper-level thinking and pulling things up and coming up with their own solutions and ideas to the problem. That is amazing. Especially with the population that I serve. 

The challenges… oh, where do I begin and six hours later… The challenges. I’ve started noticing really within the last 12 years, of a 20+ year career, that something was wrong. My students were getting increasingly worse each year. 

And what I mean by that is getting worse because they had no resiliency skills. I mean, they would fall apart at the simple critical at the simple criticism. I noticed how technology was doing more damage. Instead of it being a tool, it was used to start to get to the answer. I noticed that behaviors were getting incrementally worse.

And the expectations—the standards that we hold students to sarted to get worse and that is also how we have gotten to the point of where we’ve gotten to today. People will complain about [how] no one wants to work. Well geez, for the last several years (what most people don’t understand is) that the lowest grade in many schools across the nation—the lowest grade that you could give a student—was a 50. 

So what do you expect? If the expectation is this, you now have people thinking that they can do 50% or zero and be able to survive and live. That really got me challenged with regards to what’s going on. 

And I started looking at different educational models, questioning what I was doing, and really trying to go deeper with how to help this, and I came up with some startling conclusions on my own. Which made me very lonely, too, because they weren’t things shared with other educators. And still not shared today. 

ADAMS: Do you want to talk to us about those things? 

LAMB: Well, for example I just mentioned the 50% grade… Now, granted, I know a lot of educators who don’t agree with that. But they don’t agree with it because if a child didn't do any work they should get a zero. Well yeah, that’s true! We are in agreement there. 

But the fact that this is setting up a mindset and mentality… So even though educators—and not all educators I’ve talked to, but many—even though they didn’t agree with that, they would then turn around and say, “But we have to have more accommodations for students in order for students to help them out because they’re disadvantaged.”

It’s like you’re setting up a values system here that clearly you don’t agree with and that is harmful, but yet you want to go and give more accommodations just for the fact that [the students] come from bad environments or something. 

ADAMS: Let me interrupt you for a second just for some clarity. So what I think I’m hearing you say is yes, there are students who are disadvantaged or come from very difficult home environments or other circumstances that are very challenging. 

But I think what I’m hearing you say is that the role of the teacher should be to take them where they are and to work through the challenges and learn and grow so that they can overcome the disadvantages and bring value, overall, to the culture and society—maybe I’m adding that in here. 

But rather than where they’re just handed a crutch or given another shortcut or something—which, maybe on the surface gives them a grade or gives them something that makes it look like we’re helping them get through what’s required on paper but you’re not actually helping that person work through the real challenges and problems and figure things out as a person. Therefore you are permanently handicapping them. Is that what I’m hearing you say? 

LAMB: You’re making correct inferences on that. And I’ll even go one step further with this: history does not prove to show that this new model works. It doesn’t work. We just got done celebrating the fourth of July. Go and read some of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. 

For example, one person would be John Penn. That’s a name no one probably even recognizes or knows. But if you want to talk about an individual that came from a less-than-environmental upbringing, it would be him! 

But you know today, of course, the conversation is not so much [about] difficult circumstances that you can rise above, now we turn around and we try to justify it, as you know, with things like CRT, Critical Race Theory, the divisions that have developed and so forth. 

So now instead of being able to rise above circumstances, we demonize them. We way that if you’re a Caucasian student, you’re part of the problem because you are the aggressor. And that has just as much harm to a student and their outlook and them rising to a higher level just as well as the Black student or the Asian student when you tell them that they are the oppressed victim. 

So when you add in all of these different things—and even now, out west in Oregon, I believe, and some other western states—they're even now giving certain scores for students based upon your race, or identity, for like higher math. 

So you’re right. And the problem is, instead of actually doing what we need to do, we’ve taken the standards, lowered them even more—and may I say—dummied the system down to make excuses broadly. 

And this is what you’re beginning to see. I think what you’ve seen over the last two years is just the beginning of much worse if we don’t turn this around. 

ADAMS: So do you think that those are common issues that most teachers that you talk to, or at least many, are these similar challenges that teachers are facing, or are there other challenges that teachers are facing? 

And here’s another question because we don’t like to [just] talk about the problems, we want to talk about solutions, right? So here’s the question that kinda ties on to that. How can parents and teachers better work tougher for the student’s benefit? 

LAMB: Yeah. So I am an admin for a group on Facebook, and social media, called Conservative Teachers of America, and so these are like-minded teachers that see these problems and they try to address it the best way that they can. 

Unfortunately, I would say, if anyone has paid attention to education (and usually educators themselves) lean Left. And that would not necessarily be a bad thing if it weren’t for the crazy philosophies they’re not putting in place. 

For example, if you identify as such-n-such, or you want to be that pronoun or so forth, you can. That is what’s become the toxicity of everything. And so some other issues that have come out, especially with conservative teachers, we have tried to sound the alarm. 

And basically what has happened is that we get demonized, we get ostracized, [we get] character defamation in many ways, and we’re forced out. You’re gotten rid of. And that happens in many school divisions, especially out towards the west. 

I’ve heard many stories of that. And in other places, it might just be difficult for you to not say anything either. So! Solutions (I’m glad you said that) Let me give an example of the beginning of the solution process and then we can talk about more details to that. 

So President Dwight Eisenhower, as he was walking out the door, giving his farewell address, he had mentioned in there about being aware of the military-industrial complex. And I would think that for someone of his stature after all—supreme ally, commander in WW2, his career was in the military—I would think he would know the direction in which things were going. 

And so he told us to be aware of that. I would say, today, beware of the education-industrial complex that has developed. And the problem with that is (and this leads into the solutions a little more) is the fact that for the average parent out here that just wants to live, supply for their family, trust the teachers that they give their children to, the education system—to educate them… 

The problem is, it has become so advanced, it has become so large, that it’s difficult for the average parent to actually understand. And where do you start to begin with all of this nonsense? A local school board budget could be several hundred pages long. 

And yet, as a school board member myself, when I was on there, you know, I would get a 178-page budget. And I would read through it, line item by line item, [for] several hours. Most people don’t do that. 

So for parents, we have to start to understand a couple of things. Most parents believe I think, that if you just change the school board locally to fit what we want, then everything will be ok. No. Because the federal and the state and the local are so intertwined that, unless you understand the policies and the education law coming from the federal and from the state, you’re not going to be able to shift or change this. 

So we have to start attacking the elephant in the room one chunk at a time. And it’s a huge elephant. So I would say small baby steps as we go along here. So as parents we need to be, we need to get engaged as much as we can. I know we’re busy and I know some of us are single parents and some of us are grandparents—which is to the benefit of the system because they know that you can only do so much. 

So we need to educate ourselves about what this looks like, get a true assessment of what’s going on, and even if that education means that parents have more time to be more involved and to gain more information to help those that can’t, we need to start doing that as well. So we need an accurate picture of what we’re facing. 

ADAMS: Yeah, yeah. That’s true. So, let me just throw in here that’s one of the big things that we try to do here at Noah Webster. Is to try to provide resources and tools so that parents, grandparents, educators, and even legislators, can be more aware of issues, and hear perspectives on issues. 

We try to focus on foundational practices, you know, those core principles and best practices in education. And so through our blogs, through our podcasts, and so forth, these things can be very helpful and insightful. 

But nothing replaces parents getting to know their teachers [and] parents getting to know their school board members. Would you say that’s a true statement? 

LAMB: Yes. And I would even go further and say that ultimately, one of the roles of being a parent is that you are responsible for the education and the upbringing of your child. Where we have gone wrong is that we have said, “Oh, teachers [and the] public school system know what to do because they’re the experts.”

So we have piled a lot of things onto this system that was never intended to be. And so over time, unfortunately, school board members, administrators, and teachers said “Leave me alone. I’m the expert in this field and so let me do what I need to do. We go this all backward and skewed. So there’s room for growth. 

Teachers need to understand their role, parents need to understand their role, and both of them need to start working interchangeably. Because I tell you that if parents actually knew what was going on, we would have a serious, dare I say, revolution on our hands. 

In fact, I think you’re already seeing it in many places now, parents are taking their children out. And if they actually, really, knew what was going on, you would see a watershed. And that day may still be coming.

ADAMS: Yeah. Well, I think COVID brought the school right into the living room and created a much greater awareness of some of the realities in our schools, some of our schools at least, and so has also helped to activate parents and get parents involved. Which is a good thing! 

Because ultimately, education is about our children and their future and we have to put our children first and make sure that their needs and what is good for them are taken care of first. So we applaud all of the efforts that are being made, at every level. 

Because at the end of the day, we have to have what’s best for the kids. Let me switch gears just a little bit. Ted, what prompted you to run for school board? 

LAMB: Wow, that was back in 2012. I initially started looking at running for City Council and someone wiser than me said, “If you do that, you’ll split the vote [and] we’ve got a better candidate” so that really helps my ego, right? 

But they said, “You know, you’re a school teacher and you’ve done well with neighborhood watch so why haven’t you thought of that?” and I said, “Well it’s because I’m a four-letter word in education, if you will, even though I’m public school teacher, we homeschool.”

And of course, anyone that has experience knows that homeschoolers kinda… there’s the unwritten tug-of-war there. But I listened and I’m glad I did and took their advice, so I dropped out and in the next election cycle, I ran for school board with the help of many. 

And I got on there and I thought to myself, “Oh, this is going to be easy because I’ve already been a teacher for 16 years, this is going to be a piece of cake! I mean, what is there to learn anymore, you’ve done this!”

I got in there and even though I’ve got my undergraduate and my master's, I felt like I got a Ph.D. because, for 8 years, which ended in 2020, I had no clue what actually happened outside of the classroom that affected the classroom. I mean, I had an idea and I knew things but that really opened my eyes to how expansive things are. 

And so what prompted me to do that—it was a person that made that phone call. You know, it’s politics [and] things happen like that—and I’m so glad they did because I was able to learn and I think it’s the reason why I am where I am today—being able to explain to parents how expansive and difficult things are right now. 

And you’re right. I don’t ever want to see anyone get sick and die, COVID’s a horrible thing. But I think the silver lining is exactly what you said, Mr. Adams, and that is that parents actually got to see what was going on. 

Because again, that was Pandora’s box, the lid just flew open. Even though you had some teachers trying to say what was going on, I think parents were like, “No, it can’t be.” or, “Not in my district.” When they saw it, it was like, “Oh, wow.”