I have been many things, and some of them were pretty cool. Any of those careers would make a living, so why, at 51, do I turn to teaching? There are some practical reasons, the pay is pretty good, the hours too, but neither of these are worth the lack of respect teachers face everyday. Every teacher has a graduate degree, often more than one; every teacher is a roll model for the children passing through their classes; every teacher is expected to form relationships to 100 plus students and create personal learning experiences for each child. And yet I’ve known parents to call a teacher a liar rather than admit their child would prevaricate about not doing their homework or threaten too take the teachers job away to improve unearned grades. Teachers are the easy scapegoats for a society that has allowed its educational system to erode. The government blames the states, the states blame the districts, the districts blame the administrators, and everyone blames the teachers. They all think they’re qualified to earn large salaries telling teachers what to do, and then blame the teachers when it doesn’t work. And this despite the fact that the only people in a position to fix our educational crisis, are the teachers.
Perhaps that’s a reason to become a teacher, where else can a science geek have a greater affect on society? But this isn’t the reason I’m becoming a teacher of Science and Mathematics. I love this stuff! I read text books for recreation, scour the internet for new stuff to try; I prefer to talk about science even above politics. Where else can I spend the rest of my life learning and doing science,. Where else can I get a group of people, heretofore known as students, who are interested in my favorite stuff and willing to listen to me daily! And they’re going to pay me to do it! My answer to why chose teaching, is why would I want to do anything else? I don’t even have my first real teaching job and I’m hard at work, not only building interesting curriculum, but developing after school courses to fill out all the fun stuff I can do with kids thats been left out of daily school life.
My goal with this blog is to discover what is required to be a “good” teacher. Everyone has their own opinion about “good” teaching, though the farther the speaker is from the classroom, the more vague the opinions, but are opinions enough?. Scientific literacy is not about facts, it’s about understanding. It’s about imparting a new intuitive paradigm to students and no two students are the same, so generalities are suspect. The best teachers seem to immerse themselves in the process, no learning opportunity is missed and everything is seen as a learning opportunity. They are continually looking for new, more effective, ways to impart their curriculum. It’s a life long process, and arriving at the chosen destination happens only in the memory of the students. This blog will be my attempt to share what I learn in the process.
I’m about to begin my student teaching, the last step in the process of earning certification to teach in New York State Public Schools. It is not the final step in the process of becoming a teacher though. First comes the critical need for experience in the classroom and the building of curriculum, then the obligatory master’s followed by the ongoing need for professional development, not to mention the salary incentives for an additional master’s or two. Learning teaching is an ongoing career long, process. For every child you teach, you learn something,
Weldon MacDonald
Forest Hills, NY
