I‘m going to pull a Dan Meyer here and quote someone, then tell you to replace every web tech word with an edu-jargon word, then tell you that I’m in concurrence with that statement. Check the brilliance that is Aaron Halford (on 5am unrest and too much caffeine):

….Jose might be kind to you on this front. I won’t be. Web design takes time, skill, and effort just like any other professional, technical level job. Should a skilled worker work for free? Ever? Jose is not opening up photoshop and playing around with joy and glee for 15 minutes to design you a web site.

Web design is HOURS of HARD work, not half an hour of OSX play.

Should I point you at a 500 page CSS manual? Should I point you at all the complexity of WordPress? Should I break out the Jquery, Blueprint, 960gs, Ruby, and PHP notebooks? Do you want a crash course in box model hacks, IE6 shenanigans, or jquery validation?

No, of course not. Web designer’s obviously conjure magical powers that somehow arrange a pixel perfect web page with minimal effort.

(for more, click here)

As a matter of fact, let me do it for you:

….Aaron might be kind to you on this front. I won’t be. Real teaching takes time, skill, and effort just like any other professional, technical level job. Should a skilled worker work for free? Ever? Mr. Vilson is not opening up his classroom and playing around with joy and glee for 15 minutes to get your kids an education.

Teaching is HOURS of HARD work, not half an hour of child’s play.

Should I point you at a 500 page book on pedagogy? Should I point you at all the complexity of differentiation? Should I break out the Marzanno, Delpit, Understanding by Design, math history, and quasi-inspirational notebooks? Do you want a crash course in algebra 1, workshop model shenanigans, or test prep validation?

No, of course not. Teachers obviously conjure magical powers that somehow arrange a low performing student into a great student with minimal effort.

After this week, I have to say I’ve raised my level of teaching to a whole new echelon. Maybe it’s because I have less classes or because I’m exposed to more (and more meticulous) teachers, but I’ve pushed myself harder than ever to walk the talk. I’ve always worked hard, so Aaron’s quote is apropos to my thinking. A lot of web designers get off doing their wack websites settling for second-rate WordArt from Word, or using a template from Microsoft. Those of us who know better get into a website and crank up the visuals just a bit to match a vision, and go back to the tutorials and books to find the best means of achieving our goals. Even when we’re just modifying a template, we take our best shot at looking at every detail of the site, making sure it works to our specifications.

How’s that for an analogy?

Mr. V, who recently got the news that one of his blog postings is being used in a college class wiki. Nice.