teaching careers.
Guess which college majors get some of the lowest scores on American college exit tests such as the GRE , GMAT , and LSAT ? That would be the education majors. Even the hungover popped-collar biz bros have better scores than America’s future educators. 21 Which students get the highest scores on these exit tests? Everyone’s favourite joke majors: philosophy, English lit, and humanities, along with respectable pursuits such as physics and math.
If the ed majors I’ve encountered are any indication, teaching does indeed draw too many not-so-scholarly young women who just looove kids but are not so crazy about learning. Kids don’t need teachers to teach them how to be kids or to coo over how cute and special they are. These women should certainly open awesome daycares or have their own lucky broods. They’re perfectly fine for the first couple ofalphabet and number years, when kids should be having fun while they learn, but there is no way they should be responsible for grade 5, 8, or 12 English or science or history.
Caring about your subject matter is much more important than caring about the children. We need teachers who looove English or science or history, which is not always the case with ed majors. This is another real problem, one that starts with the way we educate our educators. Many choose to teach and then pick teachable subjects, which seems totally bass-ackwards to me. To be fair, universities often err in the opposite direction, hiring prolific researchers who have gone so far into Etruscan pottery or quantum physics that they can no longer remember how to explain it to someone meeting it for the first time. Those professors stink too, but they don’t do as much damage as the teacher who is totally dependent on the answer key and discourages any deviation from it.
Standardized testing regimes, perversely, reward these uninspired, ill-informed “just following orders” teachers. This is pretty funny when you think of every beloved movie teacher ever. Hottie or zany charismatic or inner-city hardass, beloved superstar teachers succeed by making their own rules, by caring more about poems or the kids than The System, man. The public eats up this heroic teacher myth with a ladle. Then they vote for pols who push standardized schemes that ensure their fantasies will remain exactly that.
This isn’t just movie myth, either. If you ask most people about their favourite teachers, they will usually describe a devoted weirdo or a classic disciplinarian, someone whose enthusiasm for the subject was infectious or whose willingnessto impose stringent standards made it clear that learning matters. When people complain about the teachers they hated, you often hear about the boneheads who just repeated the textbook chapter and verse, who were unable to cope with any questions the book did not answer, who squelched the curiosity that drives genuine learning.
A bad teacher, or a system that encourages bad teaching, does serious damage to scores of kids. Happily, the reverse is true too; a couple of good teachers can help make up for a multitude of childhood challenges and set someone off in the general direction of a better life. I was lucky enough to have several really great teachers, arch-conservatives and radicals, old-school hardasses and eccentrics, who convinced me that teaching was the most awesome job in the world. I still feel that way. And I know a critical mass of other profs and teachers who feel the same way, and suspect that you might know or remember some too.
That is why, even though I am concerned about the deleterious effects of passive, overly testy education, I am suspicious of “school sucks” stories. They obscure real problems in the school system that could be ameliorated with political will and some cash. I don’t want to make this sound easy-peasy; it’s difficult to agree on educational standards, and even harder to implement and assess them. It demands a lot from
Guess which college majors get some of the lowest scores on American college exit tests such as the GRE , GMAT , and LSAT ? That would be the education majors. Even the hungover popped-collar biz bros have better scores than America’s future educators. 21 Which students get the highest scores on these exit tests? Everyone’s favourite joke majors: philosophy, English lit, and humanities, along with respectable pursuits such as physics and math.
If the ed majors I’ve encountered are any indication, teaching does indeed draw too many not-so-scholarly young women who just looove kids but are not so crazy about learning. Kids don’t need teachers to teach them how to be kids or to coo over how cute and special they are. These women should certainly open awesome daycares or have their own lucky broods. They’re perfectly fine for the first couple ofalphabet and number years, when kids should be having fun while they learn, but there is no way they should be responsible for grade 5, 8, or 12 English or science or history.
Caring about your subject matter is much more important than caring about the children. We need teachers who looove English or science or history, which is not always the case with ed majors. This is another real problem, one that starts with the way we educate our educators. Many choose to teach and then pick teachable subjects, which seems totally bass-ackwards to me. To be fair, universities often err in the opposite direction, hiring prolific researchers who have gone so far into Etruscan pottery or quantum physics that they can no longer remember how to explain it to someone meeting it for the first time. Those professors stink too, but they don’t do as much damage as the teacher who is totally dependent on the answer key and discourages any deviation from it.
Standardized testing regimes, perversely, reward these uninspired, ill-informed “just following orders” teachers. This is pretty funny when you think of every beloved movie teacher ever. Hottie or zany charismatic or inner-city hardass, beloved superstar teachers succeed by making their own rules, by caring more about poems or the kids than The System, man. The public eats up this heroic teacher myth with a ladle. Then they vote for pols who push standardized schemes that ensure their fantasies will remain exactly that.
This isn’t just movie myth, either. If you ask most people about their favourite teachers, they will usually describe a devoted weirdo or a classic disciplinarian, someone whose enthusiasm for the subject was infectious or whose willingnessto impose stringent standards made it clear that learning matters. When people complain about the teachers they hated, you often hear about the boneheads who just repeated the textbook chapter and verse, who were unable to cope with any questions the book did not answer, who squelched the curiosity that drives genuine learning.
A bad teacher, or a system that encourages bad teaching, does serious damage to scores of kids. Happily, the reverse is true too; a couple of good teachers can help make up for a multitude of childhood challenges and set someone off in the general direction of a better life. I was lucky enough to have several really great teachers, arch-conservatives and radicals, old-school hardasses and eccentrics, who convinced me that teaching was the most awesome job in the world. I still feel that way. And I know a critical mass of other profs and teachers who feel the same way, and suspect that you might know or remember some too.
That is why, even though I am concerned about the deleterious effects of passive, overly testy education, I am suspicious of “school sucks” stories. They obscure real problems in the school system that could be ameliorated with political will and some cash. I don’t want to make this sound easy-peasy; it’s difficult to agree on educational standards, and even harder to implement and assess them. It demands a lot from
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