Chadrick Hastings

The education system in Alabama, and in the United States, is broken. I'm not talking about the way teachers are educating our students, but rather how universities are educating our teachers. Full disclosure, I have a degree in secondary education and was a classroom teacher for two years. I graduated college at 23 years old and was in the classroom before my 24th birthday. In no way, shape, form or fashion was I prepared for what awaited me.

My college education consisted of two years general education class and two years of subject specific and teaching specific classes. I was required to take multiple education "theory" classes and a few general subject classes. By general subject classes I'm referring to classes with the theme of how to teach math, or how to teach history. I was also required to do a few weeks of observation with limited interaction with the students. The grand finale was a 10 week internship where maybe three weeks were dedicated to letting me teach. After what amounted to maybe one full year of learning how to teach I was sent out into the world to earn my fortune (or rather educate Alabama's youth, so hopefully they could earn their fortunes).

The model described is the absolute wrong way of preparing our future educators. They start in class of students just a few years younger than they are, whose hormones are raging and attitudes emerging. Think for a moment of any other profession where there is basically no on-the-job training. You begin on day one with all the responsibilities as someone who has been there for 20 years. In the most extreme case, a medical doctor, they go through years of on-the-job training before they are allowed to take of full responsibilities. After I left teaching I began working at a software development company. They start me off slowly with very small task that were regularly review and critiqued.  I was also not allowed any customer interaction. Why was that? Pretty much because I didn't know what I was doing. I had been taught in college (I had gone back a gotten a Computer Science degree) how to write software, but I had not been taught how to write real-world software, nor how this company interacted with their customers. They needed to train me how to do these things. As time went on and I learned the ropes I was given more responsibility and larger task.

Why can we not give young teachers the same opportunities and advantages other young professionals are given? Our teachers deserve better and our students deserve better. Any teacher will tell you those first two or three years are hard, especially for high school teachers. Teenagers can be brutal on a young teacher. Most young teachers have the odds stacked against them. They are still immature themselves, they don't know how to talk to parents, and they are intimidated by the parents. Below I propose a model that would better train our teachers.

The first is an internship / residency. After graduating college they should apply to a school for an internship or residency. These internships will last two years. During which the teacher will be paid at a salary that is close too what a regular teacher makes. The teacher will be assigned to a mentor teacher during each of these two years. The mentor will allow the young teacher to slowly move into a role of greater responsibility during the course of the year. Each year would be with a different teacher, to expose the young teacher to different types and methods of teaching. Not only would this be great on-the-job training for the teacher, but it would also give the students another educator in the classroom. The students that need more one-on-one time will have it, and there will be another set of eyes to watch for discipline issues. After each semester the young teacher would under go a review process to evaluate their strengths and weaknesses. At the end of the internship a principle would have two good opinions on whether or not this would be a good hire.

Here is a pretty good article by Laurence Vance about a Christian's view of the Republican war machine

http://lewrockwell.com/vance/vance254.html