Learning and Improving as a Teacher: No Joke

Like most professionals, teachers are expected to grow in skill and knowledge of their craft.

The problem is that for teachers, their skill set is primarily about keeping kids from killing each other, or about kvetching to the right people to get done what you want done, which rarely happens.

Most teaching seminars veer between two extremes:

Keeping your students happily compliant -- classroom management

Creating innovate (read, innocuous) projects, games, and lessons -- also classroom management.

Most of the theory bombarded on teachers has little to do with getting students inspired, getting them engaged, helping them to grow and be great people who do unique things. Rather, teaching credential school is about indoctrinating teachers into the grand ideals of the liberal agenda, experimenting with democratic leadership, although Teacher truly remains in charge. Discussing the plight and pleas of public education -- why

Even my first mentor teacher (and I had more, sadly, that did anything but) whined himself that his first class for the teaching credential did nothing, absolutely nothing to prepare him for teaching.

Of course, no amount of course work could prepare a human being for the Kafkaesque, labyrinthine Hades that dominates the halls of public schools.

Administrators demand perfection, even to micromanaging the set up of classroom, make empty promises to ten teachers, not keeping their word to even one.

Following that, students with quirky personalities to begin with, easily challenge the authority of anyone who would dare tell them what to think, what to write, and above all to consider preconsidered considerations at home for homework.

Great ideas flow in ready numbers from experts who, after thirty-plus years in the classroom, decided that they would have more success hoodwinking adults needing course credit or needing to clear their credentials. Prepare a seminar on racial insensitivity, or combat bullying with non-violent (and non-confrontational techniques). Maybe try dressing up your classroom management with mini-jobs; classroom management is a favorite topic of many extra-curricular seminars.

Improving as a teacher also involves learning new skills for coping with the stressors of the job:

1) Declining revenue. Less money, less money, less money, although school and student performance is unaffected by more or less money. Yet the school boards and the unions repeat the same empty canard time and again ("More money should work"; "More money should work"; "More money should. . .")

2) More students, fewer teachers, declining resolve to tackle all the problems that a society can generate in the troubled life of one kid.

3) Fewer administrators to oversee student and school issues outside of the classroom. (Then again, fewer overseers is perhaps a better thing for the teachers who slave away teaching students who earn D' and F's and wonder why they are failing.

The list can go on ad infinitum.

In the midst of hassles outside the scope of one person to address, let alone an entire community, teachers are still expected to sharpen their skills, catch up on innovative ideas in the teaching profession.

The only problem, though, is that the liberal-statist status quo that squeezes the life and capacity of educators and students to live and learn is still all the rage with the powers that be in the educational realm. And they love to deal in secondhand ideas, beliefs rather, that demand more and more from a increasingly impoverished state.

Some teachers, though, do improve their lot as professionals: they quit altogether.