I’m pleased to report that my preparations for a teaching position at a new school have come together to produce that most precious of commodities: the premise for a new reality television show. Yes, if you’ve read the title of this post, you’ve guessed it – Trading Classrooms. And if you’ve heard of television, you’ve guessed the basic concept of the show.

The possibilities are endless and endlessly predictable:

Hey fancy Harvard professor, go teach at this community technical college!
Brush up your Boston accent, community college professor, you’re off to Harvard!

You may be able to teach part-time working students, but let’s see you teach those liberal-arts smartypants! . . . And vice-versa. And so on.

Like most reality television shows, I guess, there’s potentially something legitimately compelling about the concept. The shift of locale and students could end up revealing some fascinating things about the expectations that structure teacher-student relationships.

If, for example, the Harvard professor’s course were too “hard” for students at a less prestigious school – what would make it so. Class-based preparation in high school or other college-level courses? The nature or volume of work demanded out of the classroom? What alterations or restructuring would be needed – if any – to make the Harvard class a success in other schools?

Such a program could test a variety of other distinctions that structure the way we tend to think about schools and teachers. What happens when the beloved small liberal arts college professor trades his or her 20 person classroom for a 250 person lecture hall? How do different backgrounds in research play out as professors trade in their familiar surroundings for schools that have vastly different research expectations for their faculty?

But, realistically, I think, we’d be more apt to get a weekly shorthand version of the variety of teacher stories we already know. (Though as S L Kim reminds us, that’s not really all that bad an outcome.) Who’d be surprised when, in episode one, the Harvard professor goes to the community college and learns some valuable lessons by teaching students who live in the “real world.” (For God’s sake I hope he doesn’t try to connect to his new students by “rapping” part of his lecture . . . . . . Phew.) The students, resistant at first, discover that the professor is wise – maybe demanded more of them than they were used to, which was a good thing in retrospect. . .

I hadn’t intended my new creation this way explicitly, but it turns out that Trading Classrooms is about class. (No, the other kind.) Which makes it, as far as my somewhat limited experience goes, like every other reality show in that respect. On one hand, I suppose that means I’m on the right track as far as my burgeoning TV producer career. On the other, I actually think I understand more clearly than I did before a standard question one teacher might ask another (especially on a job interviewee evokes a sense of interest in his or her prospective employer): “What are the students like at your school?”