I wasn't taught how to be a teacher. I took all of the teaching classes sure, and my diploma says that I have a teaching degree but being a teacher isn't something you can be taught in today's university. All of the educational classes on reading, math, and science provided me with background knowledge and a dabble in what it might be like as a teacher. Lesson plans were written with fictitious students hand-selected by our imagination. I liked to keep things harder so I always had a student with less attention or limited English proficiency, you know just to spice things up. And amazingly every one one of those lesson plans was a hit with my professors. My fictitious students ran home to their parents and heralded me as the best teacher ever. And yet inside, I knew I was not ready to teach.
I walked the stage at graduation already with a long-term sub position I had gotten at my school. I had been inducted into that job through on the job training and yet the entire time I just swam to stay afloat. I was not a teacher then either. I got my own classroom and on that first day I looked at those students and knew that I had not been prepared for this. It wasn't that I didn't feel prepared; my education degree had not equipped me with the tools I needed to be a teacher. So when we discuss education reform today and we throw around harsh lines about the quality of teachers, I think we need to refocus and aim our glances at the universities and colleges preparing the next generation of teachers. How are they reforming to create capable teachers?
No amount of papers, lesson plans, or discussion can truly prepare you to to the amazing and exhausting job of teaching so why is it we hide our future teachers in college classrooms rather than set them free in schools? To be a teacher, we need to be in the classrooms because that is where we learn how to be effective, reflective and creative. This is where we face the true audience, the true measure of whether students have learned or not. So disband teacher educations, or at the very least the last two years and replace it with on the job training with a certified experienced teacher. Imagine the benefit for not just the wannabe teacher but also those students that get the luxury of having two adults in the room. If there are bad teachers out there, or ineffective as the new term goes, then we must look at how those teachers were prepared. Until our teaching education is changed, real reform will not be accomplished.
