Too smart to teach?

A longer than anticipated rant loosely based on teacher education.

Representatives from Teach for America were on campus this week and were hosting a number of different events. Unfortunately I could not attend most of them due to other commitments, but on Tuesday I went to an informational meeting. Although I have a few years left to think about TFA, I had heard some criticisms recently and wanted to hear what they had to say. Mainly the criticisms I've heard have been "what makes these random college kids qualified to be teaching in the areas that needs the best teachers to begin with?" I was lucky enough to hear from a panelist who briefly touched on just that topic. A TFA alum, he now runs a charter school in Chicago. He is in charge of hiring teachers for his school, and out of 18 spots this last year, he only hired one with no TFA affiliation (he also made note that this teacher was for special education and coming from Peabody at Vanderbilt- the top special education graduate school in the country). He claimed that he has found that TFA teachers are just more efficient, and have more success in the classroom. I stopped him afterward and asked him to elaborate, and he was strong in his support of the TFA Summer Institute training and that being in TFA gives teachers more real-life experience and that they are able to be in the classroom making mistakes and learning from them and ultimately refining their skills more so than the teachers who are coming out of four years in a classroom...as students.

So what do I think of this? Obviously I haven't been through TFA training and the people at the information session were biased, so I can't speak for that. But I definitely think a major contributor to the trend of teacher ineffectiveness we are seeing is the quality of teacher education. I went to a pretty low-achieving, rural high school and every year dozens of my seemingly unmotivated, middle-performing classmates enter into the field of education. I recently heard a story that still causes my blood to boil when I think about it. A former classmate of mine is dangerously close to failing out of college already, so she switched her major from broadcasting to education "because it will be easier". (Excuse me for a minute while I go off to bang my head against a wall.......). I see other students posting pictures of (in my opinion, poorly-made) computer graphics that say "Ms. So-and-so's Room!" with hearts and pencils all over and claiming that was the assignment for their education class. Seriously?!! Yes there are definitely benefits into creating a rich classroom environment that engages students....but this was an 8.5 x 11 piece of printer paper with a name on it made in Microsoft Word. That does not qualify as engaging. Over the summer I worked at an educational day camp where all but two counselors, including me, were education majors. And they had no motivation for making engaging lesson plans and spending the summer teaching children. So if this is who wants to be teachers, no wonder our education system is unsuccessful.

I hear people all the time tell me I'm "too smart to be a teacher". Why would anyone want someone who is not smart trying to teach children?!! I have never understood why teaching in the US is the way it is. When did we become more focused on the products of a solid education (such as doctors and lawyers) instead of the very people who taught them and hopefully helped put them in those positions? In short, I think teaching needs to be regarded as more of an honorable profession (like in Finland). To do this, we need to make the teacher education more rigorous. I get the impression from many people that teachers enter the field expecting to love children and have these picture perfect moments where they change the life for every single student. That's all great but teaching is not a fairy tale. We need to be preparing future teachers for the hardships and challenges and teaching them the truly important skills, not how to make Word Art. Put these future teachers out in the trenches and show them what it means to change lives. Make them prepare better lesson plans, make them take chemistry and make sure that everything they do develops them into smarter, more motivated human beings to be leading children. I predict that more rigorous teacher education = more competition among the best students = better teachers = better students who work to become teachers along with doctors and lawyers and engineers and scientists and artists and every other profession. And here's the real kicker... more rigorous teacher education will probably lead to higher pay for teachers.

Based on what I have seen of teacher education and the people who want to be teachers, and comparing that to the students I see applying for Teach for America and the students I see actually accepted into TFA...it makes perfect sense that one might prefer the driven, high-achieving student over the standard "teacher". Now, I do not in any way think that "anyone can teach", but the qualities TFA supposedly looks for seem like solid teacher qualities to me.

the beginning

It's pretty much impossible to pinpoint the beginning of education, as it is not a tangible, controllable thing. I suppose you could look at it that way, defining education based on classrooms and tests, but maybe that's our problem. Education, or learning, is the process of aquiring new information. This in no way adds a disclaimer like "must be in a building with four walls and a roof" or "only measured by tests and homework". Obviously these things can be of great assistance, but true learning happens every minute of every day in every place, all over the world. And the more we try to contain our definitions of learning to include certain criteria, the more difficult it becomes to nurture people into becoming great learners. 

Discere est vivere. Please excuse the pedantic-ness of it being in Latin...everything I thought of was already taken. But it means "to learn is to live". Learning opens so many doors for thoughts and questions and ideas and everything that makes life meaningful. So my goal with this blog is to talk about the things I find most interesting- what is working and what isn't in the world and especially the American education system. These thoughts may be theoretical, psychological, political, but whatever they are I hope they emphasize creating students who are true learners.

Welcome, and I strongly encourage thoughtful and engaging discussions.