even though my mother was one for over 30 years, and without her paycheck things would have been a lot duller and hungrier around the Brindle manse. These days, organized teachers generally strike me as whiners and slackers who are more interested in pushing ideology than in educating. But I digress.
As my reader (yes, singular) may know, I have a faux niece who just graduated from Indiana University with a degree in elementary education. I am very proud of said faux niece, because she got good grades, made the Dean's List, spent four months in a hellhole Indian reservation in Arizona doing her student teaching, and on top of all that is dyslexic. She is now subbing in the Fort Wayne schools because she couldn't find a full-time teaching position.
So in this morning's fishwarp (I like "fishwarp" better than "fishwrap" -- it describes the Gannett Star better), to what do my wondering eyes appear, but a story about people teaching in Indianapolis schools who apparently decided on a whim at the end of their college careers to take a 5-week crash course and become teachers.
Apparently there is at least one program (called Teach for America) and a few others that are to blame for this.
Apparently also,
What is clear is that political support for these programs has never been stronger. Both Gov. Mitch Daniels, a Republican, and President Barack Obama, a Democrat, are pushing for more opportunities for those without education degrees to become educators.
Now, like I said above, I yield to no one in my strongly-held opinion that a) teachers today are generally ideological slackers, and (after P.J. O'Rourke), that b) anyone who doesn't know what's wrong with our schools today never screwed an el-ed major. (Sorry, Heather. I know you are an exception. Please forgive me, and don't sic Aaron on me with that 9mm.)
But I don't get why our governor and our president -- both of whom have really good reasons not to take the positions they are taking -- are taking their respective positions, and thereby screwing people like my faux niece -- who, after all, spent four years in college actively studying education -- out of jobs just so a bunch of liberal arts geeks who suddenly realized there was no market for their skillz in this economy could scramble through a crash course and steal the soup out of their bowls.
And yes, I know, I was a liberal arts geek 15 years ago and lucked big time into a tech job that today pays me big bucks. And yes, I know, I used to rail about the fact that a history bachelors plus 24 hours of grad work in American History still didn't qualify me to teach history in the public schools (not that I wanted to, it was the principle of the thing).
But in a down economy with 9+% of the workforce out on their ass, it is simply ridiculous to encourage a system where people who entered the ed pipeline four years ago in all good faith get screwed out of jobs by people who didn't even decide to become certified until they had damn near graduated.
Our president and our governor and anyone else who supports these crash training programs should be ashamed of themselves.
I notice that the story doesn't quote any newly-graduated ed majors on their opinion of Teach for America. That's probably because their responses weren't printable in a family newspaper.
Can't speak for the O., but I'd bet that Mitch sees this as a way to get people with math and hard science degrees (most of whom wouldn't be caught dead within a mile of an ed course) into the K-12 classroom. I'd also bet that there's probably some provision in this program that gives preference to "fully degreed" teachers; certainly the accrediting agencies (full of EdDs, all) wouldn't look favorably at a district with too many non-majored staff.
But yeah, it sucks if you punched all the tickets only to have the rules changed after you're done. The Govt. probably views the ed majors who get screwed as just collateral damage.
That's all well and good, but my niece is an el-ed, and she's been taught how to teach. You need a major in elemetary pedagogy and a general knowledge focus to teach children that age, not a narrow focus on a particular arts and sciences major. A five-week course is not going to give you that.
Plus, what about student teaching? I'm guessing none of these instant teachers did any.
One of the complaints we used to have in college was what lousy pedagogues some of our professors were. Good men and women in their fields, but couldn't keep a classroom lecture interesting to save their lives. (I had one who actually lectured from the manuscript of his unpublished book. He rarely looked up while lecturing...but he did know his sh*t about European Intellectual History.) The point being that anyone other than an ed major rarely has (or is required to have) any training in pedagogy at all. That may not be as critical in higher ed as it is in K-12, but in K-12 you have to be more than a nose-stuck-in-notes lecturer...and you have to have a broader knowledge base because (at least in K-5 or 6) you are the math, science, reading, and history teacher rolled up into one single individual.