Author's note: this essay started as a three-page assignment I was working on with my class almost three years ago (I try to write all the assignments I make my students write). It got a little carried away. I'm not 100% sure I agree with me-from-the-past about everything, but I'm still teaching and loving it, even though the compensation is, well, insulting. Enjoy!
As it turns out, a lot of idiots and
morons get involved in trying to become teachers. In fact, there is a strong
possibility that you had several teachers over the course of your educational
career who barely passed their education or content classes in college. There
is certainly a cavalcade of reasons for this lack of intelligence among
teachers. Iowa, for example, has no G.P.A. requirement for entrance into the
education program for their state. It might also be true that stupid people
just want to become teachers. One source online claims that “today’s K-12
teachers have the lowest average SAT scores of people in any professional
occupation” (Nemko). While I generally consider myself outside the categories
of “idiots” and “morons” (there is a subtle difference between the two terms,
particularly as they were applied in early psychological diagnoses, and most
would agree that knowing this puts me outside of both categories), I actually
received a C+ in Calculus II and a D- in my final history thesis seminar during
my undergraduate experience. There may be perfectly legitimate explanations for
these anomalies in my academic career (how else does one
explain my almost-perfect, straight-A educational background, my 4.0 M.A. grade
point, or my well-above-average GRE percentile scores?), but I certainly
encountered a fair share of, well, dummies while I went through the tortuous
process of becoming an educator, and the scene hasn’t changed much now that I
teach college writing as an adjunct.
