Dayton Daily News education reporter Scott Elliott writes about schools, kids, teaching and learning.
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Wednesday, May 3, 2006
It’s easy to be a teacher
There was bit of a debate in the comments under my post last week about corporate recruiters who look to steal teachers away for other jobs.
The argument centered around whether teachers are really overworked and underpaid. After all, teachers’ workdays end in mid-afternoon, they get the summer off, even the lowest paid make at least a livable wage and in many cases they have generous retirement and health benefits.
That sounds pretty good to someone in a normal job who gets two or three weeks off a year, routinely stays past quitting time and can’t afford to even think about retiring.
New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof stirred up some blog debate this week by arguing against certification of teachers, essentially saying anyone can be a teacher. (For a rebuttal, check out blogger Jenny D’s response.)
So is it true that teaching is an easy job? Perhaps it is easy — to be a bad teacher.
If you really didn’t care whether students learned or not, I suppose teaching could be easy. You could just follow the textbook, hand out a few worksheets, give a multiple choice test and burn rubber in the parking lot at 2:40 p.m. And to be sure, most of us probably met one of these teachers along the way.
But most teachers just aren’t like that.
Conscientious teachers get to work early and leave late. They create challenging assignments, which makes for long hours of grading. They meet students outside of class. They read the latest news and research in their subject areas and work toward more advanced degrees. They constantly refine their teaching strategies and classroom management techniques.
They also coach athletic teams, moderate clubs, run the prom, head academic departments, chair important committees, coordinate standardized testing and plan pep rallies. If the most dedicated teachers calculated a true hourly wage, we might find they were shockingly low paid.
Can anyone be a teacher? Let me leave you with this story.
Several years back I followed around a Dayton middle school student for a day. The young man was very bright, an A student, but also quiet and a little shy. The teacher I remember most that day was his math teacher. He was a good man, a former professional — accountant, I think — who just felt he should do more with his life than sit in a cubicle. This was a quiet, thoughtful guy who just thought his life would have more meaning as a teacher.
And he really cared for the student I was tailing that day. They got together twice during free periods to work one-on-one. And during math class, the teacher gravitated toward my student, giving him extra attention. That was for good reason — the rest of the class was out of control.
As the bell rang, several kids were out of their seats, clowning around, mostly picking on a boisterous heavy-set boy. The teacher repeatedly asked them to take their seats, and they promptly ignored him. It took a painful 15 minutes before most of the kids were finally seated — enough so he could start the lesson now that a quarter of the class period had been wasted.
Throughout the period, kids interrupted, disrupted and and distracted the class. But the teacher was just powerless to stop them. He seemed to have neither the personality for, nor any good ideas how to go about, leading this group.
This poor guy’s heart was in the right place and he certainly had the content knowledge research says is the key ingredient in good teaching. I got the feeling that with a training and experience, he could do fine.
So is it easy to be a teacher? And is teacher training and certification necessary if you already have content knowlege? Tell me what you think.
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The carinval’s advice for bad meetings
This week’s Carnival of Education is up over at The Education Wonks blog. The carnival is a weekly round up of the best education blogging posts.
The roundup includes my post citing evidence that having a part-time job can really hurt a teen’s schoolwork.
Also check out a new education blog that the Wonks have discovered. Change Agency is written by a teacher in Houston, Texas, named Stephanie Sandifer. Her entry in this week’s carnival is about wasteful meetings and how to get out of them. Take a look and see if you’d follow her advice.
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