TEACHER TRAINING PROGRAMS ARE FAILING miserably in america,according to all indications. Not surprisingly, the united states federal government monitors and ranks all public american schools, including education departments at colleges and universities, including their emails and phone calls (just joking). And not surprisingly, the almighty fed gov does not like what it sees.
Classroom management, content knowledge and conveyance; in all areas of endeavor, american teachers are failing, because they are poorly trained. I was poorly tained by a teacher training program twenty five years ago, so it certainly doesn't surprise me that today's trainees are also.
The best, and only way to train anybody to teach is put them in a classroom, and let them teach. Throw them to the wolves, in other words. Like swimming. All these classes on how to teach are mere supplements.
One would assume that there are many teachers, schools, and students in america who do not particularly enjoy or appreciate being so closely supervised and monitored and rated by the highy and mighty federal government in washington D.C.; if you can imagine such a thing as desiring participation in a local, democratic process, rather than a far distant, all powerful tyrannical one.
The fact that the kids are raised in and sent home daily to a violent, angry poverty ridden culture, and the teacher's hands tied with endless testing, no creativity or flexibility, teaching hagiographic propaganda instead of real american history, rote memorization rather than mathematics, word lists rather than reading, writing, and thinking, does little to lessen the breakdown of education and our widespread disenchantment with learning.
We must encourage naturally good teachers to come forth, identify themselves, then jump into the teaching profession, with as few ceremonial hoops through which to jump as can be reasonably arranged. Help guide this new crop of talent into the public schools in as painless and rewarding a manner as possible, efficiently, smoothly, without all the rigamarole.
Successful teaching is not so much a matter of training, as allowing; allowing the inner teacher to emerge, and to produce results, that being, namely, a well educated studentry.
What we need in america is flexibility and creativity, not rigid, standardized top heavy tyranny.
Our schools will work well only when we do what is necessary to make them so do, and that means we must stop hindering each other with senseless systems of control and coercion, and, at long last, promote intellectual freedom.
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