I work with many people across various occupations and teachers seem to have the least ‘common sense’ IMHO. I chalk it up to having to deal with kids all day (on their level) - it really must sku their view of the world.
Hey now.
I’ve already expressed my disappointment with the teacher education program I’m going through. That does not mean that all folks in the program, whether students or professors, are dumb. I’d say fully a quarter of the folks in the program were bright, hardworking, academically gifted people who will make great teachers; and there were a couple of people who were downright brilliant.
Be careful not to assume that anyone who’s smart will stay away from the profession. It’s just that folks who are smart, AND who are motivated primarily by a drive to teach, are fairly rare.
Daniel
If your motivation is to make money, certainly you’re being discouraged. I don’t have a feel for how many choose their profession because of the money they could make vs. doing something they love. One could argue that teachers’ salaries ensure that only people that really love teaching go into it.
I agree–but I think that this is not a good incentive program. If it’s good for teachers, wouldn’t it be even better for doctors? I mean, a bad teacher just wastes a kid’s time: a bad doctor kills people.
But as a society we’ve decided to give doctors a huge amount of autonomy (state medical boards are to a large degree self-regulating), license them to do something that nobody else is allowed to do (can you imagine someone arguing for lateral entry into the medical field? A veterinarian insisting he’s got enough real-world experience that he shouldn’t be required to go through med school?) and large tangible and intangible social rewards (there’s never been a thread on these boards asking about the intellectual inferiority of doctors).
These three factors make medicine an extremely attractive profession to enter. The reason why everyone doesn’t become a doctor is that it’s really fucking difficult: you’ve got to pass a difficult entrance exam, the classes are very hard, you’ve got about 8 years of school (including residency) AFTER you get your bachelor’s.
So the deal with medicine is that it’s a very attractive career with very high entrance requirements. Contrast this to the deal with education: a very unattractive career with very low entrance requirements.
Which model would you say has been most successful at attracting passionate, competent people?
Daniel
Is there a cite for Charlie Brown saying, “those who can’t teach, teach gym.” I thought it was from a Woody Allen movie, and it certainly sounds more Woody Allen than Jim Schultz.
Anyway, onto teachers. . .I wouldn’t phrase it so rudely as “those who can do, do. And those who can’t do, teach.” But there’s something to it.
A high school writing teacher isn’t a writer. Maybe they didn’t want to put in the effort. More likely, they didn’t have the horses.
A high school math teacher isn’t doing math. He might have been just as competent in college as the guy who went on to practice mathematics (but probably not) and just decided on another tract. But, he’s not USING math day in and day out. After 5-10 years, he’s probably forgotten everything he learned that he doesn’t actually teach.
I have a lot of respect for the work teachers do, and their desire to help others (my Mom is a teacher) but you’ll never hear me say they’re as competent in their fields as someone practicing those disciplines outside of teaching.
That doesn’t really apply to college teachers.
Moving thread from IMHO to Great Debates.
I’m not saying that people that choose this profession are not smart-I’m saying that the system as it now stands is not designed to attract the best and the brightest. There are certainly a few greatly talented teachers out there, but if we treated them as if they were the valuable commodity that we claim they are, we would have many more.
. . .or they write poetry and/or short stories. When you’re starting out, writing that kind of stuff pays a salary that’s just barely this side of zilch. And, while you can find jobs in the corporate environment that pay you to write, not everyone wants to be in the corporate environment. Or wants to write the kind of stuff that they want you to write.
I’m seriously considering going into teaching (specifically, secondary education). I’m also very smart. Reading something like this fills me with dread. In other people’s view, is my intelligence going to be negated by my profession? And, if so, what other options do I have, seeing as my funds are limited, and my BA is in English?
It’s been already touched apon, but essentially the answer is that teaching, at least at the pre-college level does not attract the best and the brightest. Money plays a big part. I also have to think that lack of intellectual stimulation plays a big part as well. I mean how intellectually stimulated can you get from teaching the same 8th grade history to 8th graders year in and year out?
I don’t think **deevee ** was trying to imply that teachers and firemen are intellectually inferior. There are probably some very bright teachers and firemen. It’s just that intellectual horsepower is not a prerequisit for those jobs. At least not at the same level as is required to be an investment banker, chemist, engineer, lawyer or doctor.
In other words, you can’t be a doctor or lawyer unless you are motivated, intelligent and hard working. You CAN however be a teacher relatively easily as there are fewer barriers to entry and once you become a teacher, as a profession it is much more forgiving of mistakes.
According to Alex Trebec, FWIW, he often comments on how well Teacher’s do on Jeopardy. I don’t imagine stupid people do well on that show.
Teachers are much smart that the average person. Of course, we here at the SDMB are also smarter than the average person. To us, professionals like teachers, cops, firefighters are “just regular folks”. To me, it’s computer engineers, accountants and teachers, but it’s the same thing- professionals. If you were really talking about “ordinary people” it’d be waitresses, Walmart clerks, and machinists. However; dudes who post on the SDMB don’t usually hang out with people who- don’t read, rarely use the internet, and have an average IQ. Thus to me- with an IQ of 145, a professional job, and a college ed- teachers are “regular people”.
The other part of it is the new Right wing “war on teachers”. Since teachers unions vote heavily Democratic, one of the tools of the religious right is to denigrate teachers. Besides; teachers teach evolution and Sex-ed, and those are evil. :rolleyes: If you don’t believe me, look to your comic pages where a certain right-wing duck is constantly attacking teachers. I don’t know how one can profess to be pro-education and also anti-teacher; but these dudes aren’t really pro-education.
Teaching has many UL’s. There’s the “teachers are underpaid” ; they aren’t, they get paid slightly more than another government worker with the same education and experience. That certainly isn’t a lot, sure- and teachers are clearly NOT overpaid. Of course, as with many government workers there is a certain exchange of higher pay for job security.
There’s the whole summer vacation thing- teachers claim they don’t get paid for the summer break, but as their salary is a yearly salary, they indeed do. And, when I compare a teacher with another professional-type gov’t worker, we compare annual salary, of coure. True, in some school districts it used to be common for no checks to come during that period- but then all that happened is that the teacher got their 12 month salary divved by ten pay months- same annual pay.
Teaching is an honourable profession. You do exchange some pay and some ambition for Tenure. However, you also get the satisfaction of knowing your job really contibutes to society.
Well, that’s true to a point. But the show rewards rote memorization, not analytical thinking.
And I’m as qualified to point that out as anyone. 
You can safely ignore a lot of the comments in this thread. If you choose to stop using your intellect, you are able to do so while still functioning as a competent teacher. You don’t have to be using 100% of your intellectual ability every working minute to be stretching yourself in many ways while teaching.
Librarianship! Er, but don’t judge the profession by your fellow library students. Most of the professionals I work with are smart, professional, and cool besides. Many of the people I went to library school with were stupid, irritating, and exasperating.
You can’t beat the job, though, if you love knowledge.
I think the teaching profession attracts people who don’t know what else to do as a career. I know a couple of people who fall into this category. They originally had their dreams set on medical school or a cushy job right out of college, and when these things didn’t come through they decided to become teachers. Are these people geniuses? No, but they aren’t dumb-bunnies either. They are just “regular” people.
To me, regular people are those working in professions they don’t necessarily love or hate. They have no real passion driving them to become experts or the top of their professions. Basically they just want a paycheck, a place to go to during the day, and a basic sense of purpose and usefulness.
(Sometimes I wonder if I’m a regular person disguised as something else. I have no burning passion for my work. I’m not particularly ambitious. If someone forced me to do something completely different than what I’m doing now, I wouldn’t necessarily feel a great loss. FWIW, I consider myself a smart person. I don’t think being smart and being “regular” are mutually exclusive.)
Teaching attracts a lot of “regular” people because it’s relatively easy to become one. It’s also relatively easy to skate through just doing the bare minimum. One of the people I know who just became teacher isn’t a dumb guy, but he isn’t very sophisticated. He only reads fishing and sports magazines and doesn’t possess a huge vocabulary. But he’s a middle school biology teacher. Chances are no one will ever find out that he’s not well-read scholar. But then again, there are probably a heap of physicians and lawyers who aren’t particularly well-read and perhaps don’t know stuff that they should know (a pre-med student once asked me if rats were just big mice). It’s just that everyone assumes that doctors and lawyers are smart so they escape some scrutiny.
Certainly not, I was focusing on teaching out of my own personal interest rather than saying cops and firefighters are intellectually inferior, if I gave you that impression, I apologize.
Personally I have not had much interaction with cops or firefighters nor do I know what it takes to become one*, so I could not even attempt to make that kind of judgment. As for teachers, I know it requires at least a bachelor’s degree and used the quote from the other thread as an introduction to the other comments I have heard regarding teachers.
Left Hand of Dorkness and cerberus, your comments reminded me of the response I got from a local certification program. They claim that all I would need is a couple classes to cover what my bachelors in engineering didn’t and the teaching courses. At the time I argued with the woman because I thought I should get a degree in the subject area first, which she claimed was unnecessary. Then, while looking over the academic programs I noticed that the rigor of the “teaching option” was significantly less. The mathematics requirements were less strenuous, there was no foreign language requirement, less actual scientific courses, etc. Of course, I’m too thick to become a certified teacher that way, mostly because I like contingency plans and would like to leave the door open to do other things.
*Actually, I know a little about what it takes to become a cop, because my brother is interested in becoming one. He’s certainly not someone I would consider academically challenged as he was a National Merit Scholar and took as many of the advanced courses as he could while in high school; but a desk job wasn’t for him.
I disagree: the stimulations doesn’t come from the material, it comes from finding ways to get that material into the heads of the students. And that stays challenging, in the same way that fighting the same diseases year after year stays challenging: there is always the certainty that you could be better at this, if only you can find a way.
I think that a lot of people have a fundamental misconception about teaching: they think it’s about the material: that if you can’t write, you teach writing. If you love science, you teach science. I didn’t go into teaching (and I am plenty intelligent!) because of a love of the matierial. If it were that, I’d have gone on to grad school, and I could have done well there–I was certainly among the inner circle being “groomed” for grad school in my liberal arts undergraduate days, and was widely seen as “selling out” for going into education.
But I teach because I like to teach for about a million reasons, some of which are selfless but most of which have to do with my quirks (and don’t we all find careers where are quirks become assets?). It seemed silly to go to grad school so that I could get a job teaching when I could start teaching sooner if I taught 9-12. I teach English so that I can change the subject matter around (I get bored), but if I had gone into grad school, it never would have been in literature: it would have been in history or rhetoric.
The way I always understood it, the idea behind “those who can’t do, teach” wasn’t that teachers are intelectually inferior. It’s that they couldn’t make it in whatever field they’d chosen, and as a result they’d fallen back on teaching that field. After all, the thinking goes, if they were actually able to go out there and make money as psychologists, they wouldn’t be teaching psychology.
I think the ‘real world engineering’ comment is similar - it’s not about stupidity. It’s a comment on the idea that education is insular and that educators tend to get cut off from changes in their field.
I know there are overworked teachers out there, but I believe that most career teachers eventually get to a point where they have a reasonable amount of free time during the school year, and lots of free time (or large chunks of time off) outside of the school year. Once you’ve prepared the lesson plans, and you’re teaching the same thing every year… Once you’ve got tenure, and you can start actually crafting the lessons to reduce your work load… My father is a special case, but there have been years where he worked 4-5 hours a week including classes, office hours, and grading, and then had the entire summer off, and made a full-time professor’s salary. Contrast that with my profession, software engineering, where it is difficult to find a job that is 40 hours a week, and you are lucky to get 3 weeks of vacation all year. In the last two jobs I’ve been at, they combine sick leave with vacation, so if you’re sick, you get less time off. I have simpathy for new and assistant teachers that take the brunt of the work, but I really don’t think that typical teachers’ workloads are comparable to typical corporate workloads. You also have to think about the strenuousness of the work. In my opinion, the corporate norm is to work people absolutely as much as they possibly can without them snapping. And if they snap, that’s not really a big problem.
Forefront of research and development. Obviously, many researchers teach, but I’m not talking about them. I’m talking about career teachers. Pretty much by definition, if you’re spending a lot of time preparing lesson plans and teaching the ignorant masses, you’re not going to have as much time to contemplate the fringe of human understanding.
I was answering a blanket question. I apologize if I upset you. I only have time to make some blanket statements that I think address the OP. I’m sure other people will chime in with their well-informed opinions, and in the end, we’ll have come to a deeper understanding of the lot of teachers in general. For what it’s worth, the idea that many teachers have “social issues that keep them from being able to relate well to people their own age,” came as a lamentation from my girlfriend who is a teacher.
I was also considering teaching as a career a short time ago. I have degrees in Chemistry, Soil Science and Entomology. I knew I loved to teach when I served as a TA in grad school for insect taxonomy. Loved interacting with the students (admittedly only a year or two behind me), loved the course material - just a great feeling overall.
So - I was thinking after being out in the “real world” for several years…“Hey! Why not try and get certified to teach chemistry/biology in high school! I love to teach, I love the subjects - how could I go wrong?”
And I hooked up with an old high school friend of mine who currently teaches biology in high school and he set me up with an entire day to shadow his classes and other teachers in his high school (physics, chemistry, freshman biology). Can I just say that at 10:00 in the morning (classes started at 7:30) - I was EXHAUSTED!! OH MY GOD teachers are some of the most patient, persevering people on the face of this planet. The ONLY class I saw that day that I would have any hope of getting through was the Honors senior chemistry class. The others were composed of a bunch of uncontrolled - or hoplessly bored - frenetic crazy people. Teaching is more about getting teenage hormones under a brief period of control than about imparting knowledge or wisdom.
I must say that I do not have the strength to fight the in-class socializing/boredom/attention getting behavior all day everyday. You have to be someone who is able to connect with kids of that age and deal with their traits. I am glad I figured out that I am not that person BEFORE I quit my present job for the dream that was teaching…
I am unworthy. And I salute anyone who teaches our children. It ain’t necessarily about book-learnin’ - there are much more important ways to be smart than having a high IQ and being in industry. Knowing how to teach teens, now that’s smart.