Re: Online Applications - sort of related
Posted by mrsd on 6/21/08

You have some good points. When I was in college, we did have
theory classes. Actually, it was one theory class. We also
began our observations in our freshman year. And that's all we
did - 10 hours of sitting in a classroom, watching the teacher.
In our sophomore year, we had more observations, but were also
able to walk around the room helping students. We also learned
how to run the ditto machine (guess how old I am!) and how to
grade papers. Junior year, I actually got to teach lessons and
then a unit. By my senior year, I was more than ready to do my
student teaching. I had been in enough classrooms and had
taught enough practice lessons that I was fairly comfortable
taking over a classroom after only a few days of observation
and a couple more days of co-teaching with my cooperating
teacher. Nowadays, we are seeing teachers who start out with a
major, say English, get their degree, then take a fifth year to
get their education degree. They come to us as seniors in
college with no classroom experiences. They observe in various
classrooms for 10 hours. I've had students take just two days
to complete their 10 hours. Then, they go on to get their
education certification with just a few weeks of student
teaching. We've gone through 2 language arts teachers in the
past two years on my team. One had NO business teaching, and
she is now working retail. The other took the theory classes to
heart and was very rigid in dealing with our 8th graders. She
had many great ideas and lessons. But her ability to adjust her
lessons to fit the needs of the students was lacking. For
example, if we had a grammar lesson all planned for the same
day and another the next day, she'd follow that plan. If the
other l. arts teacher and I taught the lesson and felt that we
needed to do some reteaching and more practice, she wouldn't go
along. In the same vein, if her students did poorly on an
assignment, she'd record that score and move on. We other two
would give a completion score (5 or 10 points), reteach, then
record the next assignment as a full grade. I agree that these
young teachers are great at knowing how to create great
lessons, teach to all modalities of learning, and do all the
other "in" things. But, they lack the experience of knowing if
they even BELONG in a classroom. Sigh..Karen

On 6/19/08, spedhead wrote:
> On 6/19/08, mrsd wrote:
> It's very difficult to
>> hire teachers who speak incorrectly, especially when
>> teaching reading/language arts.
>
> My only comment here is that many people get nervous during
> interviews, especially when they know th chips are so stacked
> against them in the job market. I really, really like getting
> involved with our student teachers in my department and relish
> the chance to work with them. Its basically a semester long
> interview, but we drop the pretense and business suits and get
> down to teaching, learning, and being realistic.
>
> Supposedly there is a glut
>> of English teachers out there, but I really wonder how many
>> are competent teachers.
>
> Hard to say, because most of them haven't had a job teaching
yet.
>
>> I
>> don't know if it's a sad commentary on our teacher
>> preparation programs or on the quality of young people
>> going into teaching.
>
> I think teacher prep programs lack the real-world element.
> Many, many teacher come out of their programs like deer in
> headlights and while most of them get a good dose of the
> real-world in student teaching, they still cling onto the
> philosophical nonsense and theory shoved down their throats.
> I would rather see more teaching strategies taught and
> demonstrated and real-world teaching situations explained and
> demonstrated. There's a lot of pie-in-the-sky stuff taught in
> college ed classes.
>
> I had one person show me, from his portfolio, a unit plan he
> designed for college-bound, gifted seniors with LD. The plan
> and materials were written at 16th grade level or higher.
> They were excellent, for a 2 or 3 hundred level college
> course, maybe even an honors high school course... He was
> applying for a 7th grade Special Ed position.

Posts on this thread, including this one

• Online Applications - sort of related, 6/19/08, by mrsd.
• Re: Online Applications - sort of related, 6/19/08, by spedhead.
• Re: Online Applications - sort of related, 6/21/08, by mrsd.
• Re: Online Applications - sort of related, 6/21/08, by Merrill.
• Re: Merrill, 6/21/08, by mrsd.