Indiana

Back To School

By Abdul Hakim-Shabazz

In my younger days, I wanted to be a teacher when I grew up.    I had excellent teachers in elementary and high school who were challenging and fun at the same time.  When I got to college with the idea of teaching high school math and science.   I had an aptitude for both and was a pretty good communicator who could connect with people so I figured it couldn’t be that difficult.  What the heck was I thinking?

You can imagine how surprised I was to find that in order to become a teacher, I had to take more teaching classes than math and science.  That made no sense to a bright 20-year old.  I asked the advisor why did I have to take so many teaching classes than and not so many math and science?   And to be honest, she couldn’t come up with a straight answer either.

So I laugh at the opposition to Dr. Tony Bennett’s efforts to put more emphasis on teachers learning their subject than the methods of teaching.  Looking at the reaction of the education establishment you would think Dr. Bennett was promoting pay for performance and eliminating tenure in public schools.

I am not saying everyone who is proficient in a subject knows how to teach it.  There are methods courses everyone needs and teachers should be instructed on how deal with difficult students, special education, learning disabilities, etc.  But do you really need to spend a semester on how to put together a lesson plan, much less two years? Under Teach for America, a program that recruits professionals to become teachers, applicants are taught how to teach in five weeks.

My father was an accountant for 35 years and trained other accountants, he had degrees in math, accounting and economics, and he also raised 12 children, but was told he couldn’t teach in any of those areas because he didn’t have a teaching degree.  Come on.

By the way,  I’ve been teaching college and grad school for more than six years now.  Never had a teaching class in my entire life and my students learn the material and have quite a bit of fun in the process.

We need to take good teachers where we can find them.  And to paraphrase a good friend, “if all you know is content and not method, you can be a bad teacher, but if all you know method, you can never be a good teacher.”

Full post as published by Indiana Barrister on August 02, 2009 (boomark / email).