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.
I bring this up not to lambaste the educational system (though it would be easy to devolve into a tirade about the current, lackluster, nigh-unredeemable state of education in the U.S.), but because the simple fact that there are a fair share of surprisingly uneducated teachers among us always makes me wonder what ultimately sets a good teacher apart from a mediocre teacher. One theory I have is that mediocre students end up becoming mediocre teachers, but there’s definitely more to it than that.
Imagine you are a struggling student, and a kind-hearted physics
teacher meets with you after class to help you with your homework. As a result,
you become much better at physics and you get to know your teacher a little bit
better. You might even realize that he is a human being just like you. You are
inspired by this teacher’s life and their commitment to teaching a worthless
slacker like yourself who probably never should have gotten involved in physics
in the first place. So, what do you do? You get a passable score on the ACT,
enroll in the college that gives you the most money, and get started in their
education program to become just such a teacher teaching just such a student as
yourself. You pass, sometimes just barely, all of the required classes; you
pass the laughably simple tests required to get your teaching certificate; and
you somehow manage to land a full-time job (probably because you coach
football).
There
is nothing inherently wrong with this picture unless, of course, you are
looking at it from the point of view of someone who is actually a good teacher.
First, idealism is not a strong enough buffer for the realities of educational
systems, and an overwhelming amount of research illustrates this simple truth.
For example, studies show that teaching has a ridiculously high turnover rate
for new employees; one article in Forbes states that “46% of
new teachers leave the profession within five years” (Kain). A few major
reasons for this, as far as I can tell from my experience, are (1) the major disconnect
between the idealism of many people who go into teaching and the reality of
lazy, underperforming students who feel a false but remarkably undiminishable
sense of entitlement, (2) absurd volumes of bureaucracy that make an
individual, regardless of how exemplary they are, feel like a tine-less cog in
a run-down machine operated by people who skipped their employee training, and
(3) the ever-decreasing compensation for work that never stays in the office,
e.g., based on the number of hours I work as an adjunct professor, I am making,
at the very absolute most, $7.51 per hour of actual work with no
benefits, and, depending on what I am working on in my classes, at least a
third of that work comes home with me at night and over the weekends despite the
fact that, at the time I’m writing this, I’m in my office from 9:00 a.m. to
12:10 p.m. four days a week and only teach two classes from 12:20 p.m. to 2:30
p.m. on those days (The work to pay ratio only got worse when I taught four
classes at separate institutions, and it’s even worse now that I teach five
classes). The teacher who gets into teaching because they want to help students
like themselves may have a perfectly legitimate and commendable motivation for
teaching, but, as far as I’ve seen, no amount of idealism can withstand the
constant, grinding ravages of the actual job of teaching.
Second,
someone who decides early on to pursue the profession of teaching has no
experience whatsoever with other possibilities, which, essentially, gives them
no real choice in the matter of a career. This lack of experience in other
areas is further complicated by the fact that the requirements to complete just
the education program consume roughly 1.5 times the amount of time and credits
as a high-credit major such as English or history, and educators have to
fulfill the additional burden of requirements for both a major and a minor in
order to become certified in my state. When the difference between a major and
minor is only about eight credits, this means that people who want to become
teachers basically need to triple major in college to get certified, and even
though I finished in four years by taking double the recommended course load
for several semesters in college, most teachers take at least five full-time
years to finish their undergraduate work. Furthermore, teachers need to take
more classes related only to education, their major, or their minor after they
graduate in order to remain certified. The result of this preponderance of
requirements is that almost all the students going through education programs
to become teachers get short-suited. They have no chance to branch out, get
experience with other subject areas, explore other career options, or,
depending on their dedication, enjoy a social life of any kind. A bit of
modification to a clever illustration provides some insight into why most
teachers are, well, dummies:
I, of course, chose only the right option because I wanted to finish my
education and certification before my financial aid was cut off at the end of
my fourth year of college, and that perhaps explains my cynicism, a term some
apply to my grounded, realistic outlook. Despite the humor (read: tragedy) of
this, the important, underlying issue still remains: if you know nothing else,
how can you say that what you are doing is actually a choice? Those who pursue
education without pondering or experiencing other options because they once had
a teacher that inspired them may end up teaching for a lifetime because they
don’t want to waste all the work (and debt) that went into becoming a certified
educator, a perfectly understandable but nonetheless terrible eventuality since
we’ve all had at least one teacher who was only there for the paycheck.
Third,
and finally, individuals who are inspired and who make it through the
curriculum may still end up being terrible teachers. As illustrated above and
from my own personal experience, there are a lot of lackluster individuals,
academically speaking, who end up becoming educators. Part of the blame
certainly rests on the heavy course load of education classes since they teach
you shockingly little about the subject-specific content you are eventually
responsible for teaching to your students. They also incinerate the time you
have to actually learn because of their workload and attached obligations to
spend vast amounts of time in classrooms observing and teaching every semester.
Additionally, the several batteries of tests you are required to
take in order to become certified eat up weekend time and are woefully
simplistic. The “Basic Skills Test” assesses an individual’s prowess in the
areas of reading, math, and writing. I took it at the very beginning of my
second semester as a sophomore in college and scored a 292 in reading, a 289 in
math, and a 300 in writing. The maximum score you can get is 300, and the
minimum score needed to pass is 220. After passing the Basic Skills Test, you
have to take your subject area tests. I took mine after my junior year of
college and scored a 272 in English even though I had not even fulfilled the
requirements for an English minor at that point. Again, you only need a 220 to
pass. Putting things a different way, you only need to get 73% (a C-) on the
test in order to pass. The most insane thing about all the tests required to
become certified is that you can retake them as many times as you need to in
order to pass. Think of the sort of people you know who got a C- in classes you
took. Is that the sort of person you want to have teaching thirty-two students
(or more if higher-ups have their way eliminating classroom size limitations
despite research that says smaller class sizes dramatically increase student
performance)?
Most education programs require higher grades in all education
classes, but that is mostly due to grade inflation and the relative simplicity
of education classes. For example, I was still making posters with magic
markers during class in an advanced education
course in my junior year of college to summarize and present information to the
rest of the class even though the reading was on the syllabus and everyone was
required to read it. Furthermore, I vividly remember my educational advisor
telling our class that basically everyone would get an A in their student
teaching “course” because if you don’t get an A, you can’t get a job. While
some teachers may excel academically, the fact that it is so easy to pass the
certification tests and meet the education course requirements allows for the
very real possibility that a complete nitwit can become a fully certified,
hired, tenured teacher, especially if they coach football.
This, added on to the increasing demands to prove your prowess in
front of the snotty brats in your classroom can lead to some devastating
consequences. I recall asking my third grade teacher why old people were
smaller than normal people. She laughed condescendingly and promptly responded
by telling me that your bones disintegrate as you get older. I held this view
of physiology as a fundamental truth until College Preparatory Biology in tenth
grade. A famous study revealed that this sort of thing is not unique to me and
the thirty-one other students in that third grade class when it discovered that
the majority of Harvard graduates couldn’t explain why the seasons exist (hint:
the earth is actually farthest away from the sun when it is summer in the
Northern Hemisphere).
In a world where there are so many possibilities for individuals
to become bad teachers, how, then, does one become a good teacher? The first
step is to repeatedly deny that teaching is the best option for you. In high
school, have your father bring you out on a golf outing with his teacher
friends and have each one of them berate you for even considering getting
involved in the teaching profession. Make sure every teacher you come in
contact with tells you that it is a terrible idea; that it will not make you a
successful, rich adult; and that it will ruin your life in almost every way
imaginable.
In college, be sure to constantly second guess your decision to
take simplistic education classes that, as it turns out, only help you cope
with and understand roughly 5% of the reality of teaching (there are no
requirements for and, shockingly, no elective options for a classroom
management class). Frequently consider dropping everything and starting your
pre-med degree from square one, which would take you less than four years to
complete. Up until the day you start student teaching in your fifth or sixth
year of undergraduate work, be sure to think that enrolling in the education
program was a terrible idea and that, if you weren’t already tens of thousands
of dollars in debt from student loans, starting college over from the
beginning, getting that twenty-credit business major, and graduating with the
absolute minimum number of credits possible for your institution would have
been a much, much easier, socially beneficial, and lucrative option because, in
fact, it would have been.
Once
you get certified and graduate, make sure to keep denying that becoming a
teacher was a good choice in any way. If you can, supersaturate your semesters
of college by taking eighteen, twenty, or even twenty-two credits in order to
finish the education program in four years; scholarships don’t carry over into
your fifth year of school, after all. Then, choose to minor in a subject even
though you’re only one or two classes away from the major so you can graduate
on time and get your teaching certificate because, even in this bleak economic
situation, there are pretty good prospects for a full-time job at the high
school where you went, where you know and took classes with the people
interviewing you for the job, and where your father has worked for over twenty
years.
Despite your doubts, keep applying to as many jobs as possible in
your economically depressed geographical region. Run yourself ragged trying to
fill out the ridiculously time-consuming applications for teaching positions
that include unbelievably redundant information entry, essay questions, and
extensive personality tests.
Take the last few classes to turn that minor with which you
graduated into a major even though those credits won’t count for anything
because you already completed your degree, and not one of the seven people from
different departments you talked to about it told you they wouldn’t actually
transfer.
Keep working for your family’s small business because it is your
only source of income and you have become overqualified for almost all of the
available jobs in your area. Interview for potential teaching jobs with people
who know you such as your principal from high school whose deck you have
power-washed at least twice and your A.P. European History teacher who gave you
an A, knew you aced the A.P. test, and is fully aware of your overdeveloped
work ethic and interest in and knowledge of history. Make sure you lose those
jobs to people who went to college with you, who did much worse than you in
both education and academic courses, and who coach football. Repeat this
process of applying, interviewing, and not getting a job for several years in a
row.
After
this, it is important to become frustrated with the system. Get angry at anyone
who tries to discuss any topic related to education with you. Blow up in
people’s faces when they try to console you after you find out you’re not
getting yet another job that you’re “highly qualified” for. Realize that you
could do other things to make a living, but substitute teach for less than what
you could make working as a barista at a Starbucks because, deep down in your
subconscious, you know that teaching is probably the only thing you can do that
will actually make your days worth living.
Once
you start to realize things are not going your way in the profession of
education, start making deals and promises with yourself. “If I apply to some
PhD programs, I’ll teach at a higher level,” you might think. “If I don’t get
accepted, I’ll apply to some M.A. programs,” you’ll agree with yourself. “I’ll
just substitute for another year, and then I’ll start applying other places,”
you might decide when the schools you wanted to go to reject you because you
only minored in the subject you want to pursue for your PhD.
Once
you have completed all of these steps, allow yourself to devolve. Develop an
unhealthy addiction to video games. Start ignoring your friends’ phone calls
and, if you can, sever as many ties with people as possible. Spend lots of time
reading, writing, and possibly drinking, alone. This shouldn’t be a problem
because the only friends you still have at this point know that you only want
Jack Daniels for your birthday.
During
all of this nonsense, remember that you have, probably inadvertently, kept some
options open despite the fact that your life, as a teacher, has not quite
turned out the way you planned on that day you reluctantly decided to enroll in
the education program at the ridiculously overpriced institution of higher
learning you attended. Come to grips with the fact that if you decided to be a
secretary, salesperson, or barista, you wouldn’t quite feel the same when you
get home after a day of teaching. Despite all the empirical, rational, logical
evidence, decide and accept that teaching is, in fact, what you would like to
do (read: need to do) for the rest of your life.
As
you work your way from teaching job to teaching job, sometimes substitute
teaching, perhaps adjuncting, know that it is the only thing that satisfies
your obsessive, academic, perfectionist personality. In your spare time,
carefully sort out your thoughts on the education system, pedagogy, classroom
management, and many other ideas related to teaching. Become the embodiment of
those ideas in every classroom you find yourself. Know, rather than believe,
that educating people is one of the most important things anyone in any society
can do. Cultivate an overdeveloped commitment to doing anything and everything
you can to help every single student that sits in your classroom in any way
possible. Care.
The
last step to becoming a good teacher is to make sure your
students have no idea about any of this. Make sure everything on your syllabus
and assignments says you are available to help at nearly all times of the day,
but try to remain seemingly distant and unapproachable. Your students will
probably desire to impress you because your aloofness unconsciously reminds
them of their fathers, but, despite your frostiness, they will certainly ask
you for help. Help them, offer advice, and frequently remind them of your open
office hours in subtle ways, even if you don’t actually have an office because,
to the people you work for, you are perceived as the scum of the educational
landscape. Try your best to act offended if students pester you with silly
questions, but still answer them thoroughly; try to give a response that is
long, detailed, and sarcastic enough that everyone remembers it’s not helpful
to ask illogical questions but forgets who exactly asked that particular
question to elicit your somewhat acerbic response. Feel free to honestly berate
them, as a class, for their languidness whenever possible, all the while
teaching them that not being invested in their own education is the epitome of
laziness and apathy.
Some
may say that it’s important to be a caring, nurturing, self-esteem boosting
educator of the youth of this great nation, but they are almost certainly
chugging the Kool-Aid of feel goodery and probably letting their students slip
through the system without actually learning anything. The essential problem is
that kids, and people in general, quickly learn how to take advantage of any
situation; when teachers allow or support students’ incorrect answers or lazy
behavior, students learn to do as little work as possible to get the points
they need to get the grades they want. The moment students realize that you
care about them, that you have an overdeveloped sense of empathy and
understanding like no one else they have ever come in contact with, and that
you desperately want them to succeed in everything they do, they will start to
try to take advantage of you in every conceivable way possible. Arguably, acting distant
may actually be the best way to care for your students because the real world
is, in fact, relentlessly cold, uncaring, and pernicious. What allows people to
navigate that ocean of uncertainty around them is an understanding of the rules
that govern the world and the skills they develop as they learn and live by
those rules.
In life, a boss fires you and people think less of you when you
don’t do what is expected, when you turn things in late, when you underperform,
when you slack off, and when you produce a wrong answer when there is, in fact,
a right answer. When students don’t do an assignment or turn something in late,
they need to understand that actions have real consequences, even if those
negative actions are condoned by their peers, parents, and other teachers from
the past and present. Not once in my life after high school have I heard the
phrase “it’s okay, at least you tried,” and the only lesson that phrase teaches
is its actual translation: “you don’t need to try any harder.”
What, then, does it take to be a good teacher? It first requires a
realistic mindset and a dedication to instilling that same mindset in students.
Allowing students to set unrealistic goals or develop unrealistic expectations
only hurts them in the long run. Second, and most importantly, it requires intellectualism.
Higher education levels are a major contributing factor in a country’s
well-being, economic development, and quality of life. It’s a widely known and
well-documented fact that America’s education system is consistently falling
lower and lower in its rank among industrialized nations, and some studies have
shown the United States to have the lowest average I.Q. of all developed
nations. One study even found that one in five Americans believes the sun
revolves around the earth (Dean). In a time where debates and discussions of
all varieties both in the public and private sphere are dominated by character
bashing, factual errors, and rampant logical fallacies, it’s barely surprising
that a recent survey proved that watching the news can actually make you less
intelligent (Martel). There seems to be a culture of anti-intellectualism that
penetrates even to the one place it should be least prevalent and infects the
people that should abhor it the most: schools and teachers.
While an important reconsideration of the true purpose of
schools and the educational system certainly needs to be accomplished, the
people that ultimately end up being responsible for the education of students
need to take that duty seriously because, despite what the push-‘em-through,
feel-good, try-less system is implicitly telling all of us, an educator still
needs to educate, and that is what separates a good educator from a mediocre
teacher. A good educator prioritizes the education of their students over
politics, over celebrity, over any “program,” and (dare I say it?) over their
retirement benefits. Ultimately, good teachers do the most good they can for
their students in the little time they have with them despite crowded
classrooms, despite budget cuts, despite constantly shifting standards, despite
the stupefyingly low pay, and despite the, well, dummies that frequently end up
working next to them.
Works Cited
Dean, Cornelia. “Scientific
Savvy? In U.S., Not Much.” The New York Times. The New York Times
Company, 30 August 2005. Web. 5 December 2011.
Kain, E.D. “High Teacher
Turnover Rates are a Big Problem for America’s Public Schools.” Forbes.
8 March 2011. Web. 27 October 2011.
Martel, Frances. “Left
Rejoices as Poll of 612 New Jerseyans Declares Fox News Makes People Stupid.” Mediaite.com.
Midiaite, LLC, 21 November 2011. Web. 5 December 2011.
Nemko, Marty. “America the
Dumb and how to Smarten it (and You).” Marty Nemko’s Website. Marty
Nemko, 2004-2011. Web. 5 December 2011.
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