Stories from getting my elementary education license:
-The professor teaching a course on literacy who gave us one book to read on phonics. But reading the whole book was too hard, so she only had us each read a chapter. But reading a whole chapter was too hard, so she had us work in groups of four to each read a part of a chapter. But reading that part of a chapter straight through was too hard, so she had us stop every 5 minutes or so to draw pictures of what we’d read on a big poster, with the idea being that we would come together as a class, view everyone’s posters, and magically understand how to teach phonics thereby. It was like getting hit over the head with a wiffle bat every five minutes. God, she was awful.
-The professor teaching children’s literature who had zero classroom management skills, who was clearly intimidated by her students, who let class go early nearly every night because of the whining, who taught us virtually nothing. When she saw I was a serious student, she asked me why I was going into elementary education: “You should go to grad school,” she told me, “and become a professor.” This wouldn’t be so bad, if it weren’t a professor in the education department who was trying to steer good students away from the field.
-The other professor who did almost exactly the same thing.
-The professor teaching literacy (yes, I had to take a lot of literacy courses) who in one session teaching us how to teach students to use dictionaries made about half a dozen mistakes: vt means “verb tense,” the verb “record” has the accent on the first syllable, and I wish I could remember the others. To be fair, she’d suffered a terrible car accident a few years earlier and may have suffered brain damage; she was very sweet, and the problem was more with an administration who kept her on.
-And my favorite, the psychology professor who showed a New Age Spirit-Channeling movie in class without ever screening it first.