I know rather a lot about teaching people a subject that I am actually trained in.
In college. And, truthfully, good for you; it’s nice to know there are good college instructors out there. Unfortunately for your arguments in this thread, college students are not the same as K-12 students.
It seems to me that most people have agreed that subject matter knowledge is necessary for good teaching.
It’s not clear to me how that supports the assertion that education as a discipline or field is worthless, and that anyone with subject matter mastery may become a proficent teacher within two weeks of classroom experience.
I guess I need to be walked through this slowly. I didn’t get physics in first grade, either.
PE as in physical education? PE is an education degree.
Many teachers teaching outside of their certification are not such egregious examples as English teachers teaching math; rather, it’s along the lines of a math teacher picking up a computer class, or a teacher certified in biology and environmental science teaching physics. furlibusea mentioned that small schools are going to be hurt by NCLB rules regarding certification. A tiny rural school with a student body of 100 can’t afford to hire four different teachers for one or two classes each of biology, chemistry, physics, and environmental science. If they are very lucky, they will attract a candidate certified in all four disciplines. More likely, they will find a science teacher certified in one, two, or with God’s help even three of those areas, who will still take over the other classes.
A mathematician, a English major, even a historian could take on multiple classes and still be within their discipline, but what size school are you planning that you could afford to hire a biologist, a chemist, a physicist, a geo-environmentalist, an economist, a sociologist, and so forth?
Clothahump, do you have any classroom experience yourself? If you don’t, I recommend that you do some observations and do some teaching yourself. Volunteer as a tutor with a nearby school to learn about interacting with different types of learners. Volunteer to teach a computer literacy class for adults to get a feel for classroom management. This is important even if you plan to stick to administration because my observation has been that the most foolish decisions about education do not come from the teachers. They come from former teachers who forgot what it like to be in the classroom, or office workers who never knew.
catsix, I’m not posting this in an attempt to change your mind, because I suspect that your opinion was set in stone during your grade school days (and boy oh boy maybe a class on children with exceptionalities could have helped your teachers relate to you a little better!). But I still gotta say…
Why on earth are these two incompatible? Shouldn’t a teacher have both?
Pennsylvania overhauled their teacher’s education programs in the late '80s. I suspect her experience is no longer relevent.
No prob.
Perhaps not. But it most assuredly does not hurt to set the goal. It would be difficult, but it’s not unrealistic. It’s certainly not unrealistic to make the effort. If we don’t set the bar high, we’re just going to be another mediocre school, and I don’t want that.
Students will respond to the challenge.
I picked the SATs simply as an example because they seem to be the widest known yardstick for measurement. I’m certainly not opposed to using some other type of test. The state will require some kind of standardized testing, such as TAAS, but that’s pretty much a joke.
I have taught academic courses at the college level. In addition, I run a Taekwondo school, in which I teach students from age 6 on up. I am very, very familiar with the different styles of learning and capabilities. I know the class managment skills. I’ve taught students of capability range from superstar down to autistic. I’ve taught kids with handicaps.
Believe me, teaching in a Taekwondo school is no different than teaching in a classroom, other than the physical layout of the room. You’ve got to get their attention, keep their attention, keep them motivated and keep them learning all the time. And with the junior students, you’ve GOT to get the parents involved. In my case, I can get them as students, but even when I don’t, they still help us by emphasizing our life skills themes at home, etc.
Now I’m getting off topic, and I apologize (again!) but this really struck a chord with me. I know what you are talking about. My son (five years old) takes karate and I am so struck by the talents of his teachers there. I mean, they’re great at karate (as far as I can tell, and as their ratings attest) but what moves me is their skills at teaching, at encouraging & motivating students, at maintaining discipline, at seamlesly integrating karate technique with messages and lessons about personal responsbility and morality. I have often found myself wishing these fellows would go into teaching as a profession so more kids could benefit from their gifts.
To get myself back on track here, I don’t think that any of them have “teaching degrees” per se. On the other hand, however, pure knowledge of karate forms is not enough. The school has a very clear philosophy about how to teach, on what kids need to learn well and to develop healthily. The school carefully grooms instructors from among its black belt students. They train for months, if not years, just on the teaching side of things. Good instructors seem to each possess a nice mix of pure karate skills, personal facility in relating to kids, and some carefully-targeted training in pedagogy and child development (broadly defined). Which is probably what makes a good teacher of ANY stripe.
And again, when you’re in elementary education, you’re not always teaching specific subjects. This is where you DO have to know how to “teach”.
You have to explain the concepts of how to spell and add and subtract to young children.
That’s why I opted out of elementary ed. It wasn’t that I was stupid, but I found it hard to explain HOW when it came to phonix and reading.
How do you deal with children with learning disabilities? How do you deal with young children in general?
Again, you teach college. That’s worlds away from elementary school.
Sorry to bump this so late, but I have a related question that someone here may know the answer to: How does the US rank against the rest of the world for the quality of pre-college public education? Any sites with cites would be greatly appreciated.
Well, before anyone jumps in here (and now that I think about it, you might want to just start a new thread) I will point out that public school systems in some other countries are pretty different, maybe different enough that it would be hard to say how “good” one is compared to the other.
The U.S. system isn’t that differentiated–students with very different aspirations may attend school under the same roof. So high schools offer a basic curriculum that has to cover the bases from vocational ed and basic general education to college prep. How much a particular school offers of one of the other is going to depend on the population of the school, of course. But a lot of schools have to do all of it. Especially since college attendance is generally thought of as a normative thing, the American Dream of bettering oneself, yadda yadda, and the U.S. has a commensurately high college attendance rate.
In other systems, students without college aspirations may peel off and go to a different sort of school altogether from the ones who plan to go to college.
I think you could probably make a good case that on average American high schools don’t prepare students for college as well as high schools in many other developed countries, but you’re not comparing apples to oranges because such high schools may be “specialized” towards college prep in these other countries, and they’re not trying to prepare such a vast number of students (of greatly varied abilities) for college.
So… no study cites from me, but I’m expecting any study is going to have caveats, and I’m curious about all that!
Oh, and similarly, I think we might find that students who enter the working world right after high school may also be “better prepared” than U.S. students, but for the same reason–that they went to high schools that focused on that very thing.
I’m glad the thread was bumped. It’s made for some interesting reading overall.
Anyone who wants to open a private accredited school will learn quickly that she or he can’t abandon professional standards. Those organizations which determine accreditation will be examining such factors as the certification of the teachers.
Some of my education courses were a waste of time, and I went to one of the best Teachers’ Colleges in the country. (I still had a double major in English and Speech/Communications/Drama.) Other courses were well worth the time.
I could be an expert in Language Arts but that wouldn’t do me a damn bit of good if I didn’t know how to teach it. We’ve all had teachers who knew the material but could not inspire us to make the connection. On the other hand, they can’t teach it if they don’t know it. “You can’t have one without the other.”
Some people are natural born teachers. I can see it in my seventeen year old granddaughter. She has the gift. Education courses will help her and certainly I have confidence in her abiity to handle the subject matter.
Well, not exactly. The actually “teaching” part may be the same. But that’s the easy part – the best part. Could you teach Taekwondo if you also had to have three long forms calling for detailed information on your students ready to submit at the end of the hour, write four hall passes, change five absences to “tardy,” have you class interrupted three times by announcements and paging, settle a disruption in the hallway, find some material for the teacher next door, submit a list of students who are absent from your class but who are not on the absentee list, assign makeup work to eight students, check vacination records, explain to the angry parent who comes to your door why she will need an appointment, deviate from your lesson plan for some students and not for others, examine Chi Chi’s back for chicken pox and send her to the clinic, and sell candy to anyone who comes to your door to raise money for the Junior Prom?
That is also part of the reality of the classroom. I do not exaggerate.
So there are other classes that I think would be valuable in addition to education and subject matter: 1) classes on maintaining your own focus and balance and 2) self-defense.
It was 24 years ago this month that I was beaten by a trespasser who was there with six of his friends. My “methods and materials” teacher had told me that I wouldn’t have any discipline problems if I had good lesson plans. She called me while I was in the hospital to tell me that she remembered me.
Catsix, you are obviously bright and more than a bit stubborn. Are you completely self-educated?
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I have to write the ‘lesson plans’ (which the State Dept. of Ed and our accreditation board calls course outlines) for our approval to grant degrees, yet I have absolutely no formal training in education.
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“Lesson plans” and course outlines are different things altogether. Lesson plans are what you use on a daily basis in the classroom. Often you can’t plan more than a day or two ahead with much detail because you have to readjust your plans based on evaluation and reteaching.
The desire to improve public education is a worthy goal. We all tend to see ourselves as having a little expertise on the subject since most of us have been in a classroom for 12 or more years. There is a lot more to teaching than what goes on inside the classroom.
Interesting points. And a good reinforcement of why I am trying to do what I am. The vast majority of things that you listed are things that should NEVER happen in a classroom. Example: “explain to the angry parent who comes to your door why she will need an appointment”. How did that parent get to your door in the first place? Why didn’t the office stop them and schedule the appointment instead of allowing your class to be disrupted? Etc.
Part of what I teach in my school is a seminar called Disruptive Student Management. It was developed specifically to give teachers means to maintain control and discipline in a classroom. But a 7-on-1 scenario like you described is a totally different animal and I must say, Zoe, that my hat is off to you that you continued teaching after that happened. A lot of people would have changed professions so fast that the dust would have hung in the air for hours after they left.
No argument there. I just happen to think that there are better ways to educate our kids and I want to explore them. Thank you for your insights.