An Angry Rant
One of my friends asked me today my views on curriculum standards in education, and I remembered this rant I wrote a few years ago, and decided to reprint it here. I hope you enjoy it.
and on a completely unrelated note: You know those big foam cowboy hats? Those are freakin’ hilarious.
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It seems that lately I’ve been asked quite often why I am not going to be a teacher. Well, I think I finally came up with a good answer.I place way too much emphasis on content to be accepted into todays teaching standards. Today, it seems like content takes a back-seat to methods, which to me is pointless. In my opinion, flawed as it may be, content is the basis for methods. Think about it logically: without content, why would we have methods? We wouldn’t. And yet, today’s teachers are so focused on how they teach that they forget to actually teach.
For those of you in college, how much have you learned in, say, a history class that directly contradicts something you “learned” in high school. And, as much as I hate to say it, I place a lot more value in what someone with a PhD tells me as opposed to someone with a bachelors in something that they really have almost no background in.
Case in point: I was a Social Studies Secondary Education major. Basically, I would have been certified to teach sociology, economics, political science, and World and American history. But here’s the funny thing. I only needed 9 hours of credit in each of those to become certified (a total of 45 hours), and I also needed 45 hours of education classes to be certified. Tell me, am I the only one who sees the inherent flaw in this system?
Don’t get me wrong, I think some background in education would help, but 45 hours? Spending more time learning how to teach than what you are going to teach? I just think that is plain wrong. And honestly, to all you actual teachers out there, how much did you learn in those education classes actually apply to the real world? Most of the teachers I know have told me that the only thing that really mattered was student teaching.
So, where does this flaw stem from? In my opinion, standards. I think there are too many standards that it doesn’t allow a teacher to tailor their lessons so that the students actually learn something instead of just learning how to do well on a test. Maybe we should stop worrying about whether or not a child in District 150 is getting as good an education as a kid going to New Trier and start worry about whether or not this child is going to be a better person because of the education they are getting.
Maybe instead of making the Revolutionary War exciting to students, we should start talking about the truths that make America, both the good and bad (if you haven’t figured it out, I am a history major). It seems like we discuss the things that the United States has done that makes it “great,” but what about the crappy things? They are still a part of our history, just as much as those stupid things you and I did freshman year are part of our own history. Deny it all you want, its still there, and maybe the only way to truly benefit from mistakes is to admit to them and learn from them, not ignore them.
So, lets focus on the content of our courses… Maybe, just maybe, we can make a few kids better and more aware citizens. And by creating better citizens we can create a better society for our children. Tell me, where is the flaw in that?
