Hello and welcome to my blog!
I was discussing teaching with my dad a few weeks ago. He has known me since before I was born, he encouraged me to follow my dream of becoming a teacher, and he (and my mother) foot the bill for my undergraduate degree and certification exams in order to fulfill that dream.
We were discussing the shortage of teachers, why teachers were leaving the profession around our area and the attitudes of students and parents and how they have changed since I was younger.
I said the following: "[Dad], the problem is this: God gave me the gift of teaching, I am creative, enthusiastic, and love children. I am not a robot, and to me, teaching isn't a job."
This is the issue that I have seen ever since leaving my teacher preparation program in college. The real world of teaching is no longer hands on fun, letting kids create have choices and experience and teach each other. The real world is now assessment, testing, comparing unique individuals based on their level of mastery of skills. Putting children in "ability groups" and teaching the same way to all students in the class and all students in the grade level.
Teaching these days has become so stressful. Your ability to be a good teacher is judged by the way students answer questions on a multiple choice test. Paperwork and graphing testing data and disecting each and every skill and disecting each and every child's strengths and weaknesses. Teaching isn't fun anymore. There is absolutely NO ROOM to be creative when planning lessons, you follow a script, you ask these assigned questions, you do the assigned worksheets. It's the same thing every day. This kind of enviroment isn't condusive to learning, or teaching for that matter. Teaching these days goes against almost EVERYTHING we learn in teacher preparation programs.
And it isn't fun for students, either. How sharply has the amount of responses of "I want to be a teacher when I grow up" plummeted? I'm no professional surveyor but school just isn't fun anymore for kids. This is a direct effect of teachers not getting to have "fun" either. Teachers aren't stupid, they're TEACHERS, we know the guidelines, standards, and skills, we know what the students need to learn this year in order to be ready for next year and we know how to reteach skills that students may have missed before coming to us. We are PROFESSIONALS. Let teachers do what they LOVE and students will begin LOVING SCHOOL again! And when students are happier with school, parents are happier to and when an issue arises and the teacher and parent need to communicate, it will be more positive.
Let's start a teaching revolution! Let's help students LOVE school again!
I want YOU to share your thoughts, stories, testimonies, ideas, comments. Feel free to comment underneath this post or if you want me to "post" it here, you can email me at cristin.coulter@gmail.com and I will post it!
Thank you so much for reading! We can do this!
