Becoming a Teacher

Some say that good teachers are born while others say they have to be trained. I think it is both. Some people are more natural at it than others but they can benefit from some training, too. At least, I did!

I felt pretty confident, coming out of college, that I could do the job. I knew quite a bit about science and had the equivalent of a minor in that area. I was comfortable with math at the elementary school level and didn’t see social studies as a challenge. I wasn’t so sure about how to teach skill-oriented reading or even where to start for that matter. I hadn’t been a good reading student myself so that didn’t help. I loved language but didn’t do well with the traditional language arts classes that were heavy on drill and practice.

Educators tend to break things that need to be taught into parts, teach the part, and then have the student put it all together. The problem was that we got so busy teaching the part that the student never got around to putting it together. The putting together is where the fun and reward of learning is. Needless to say many didn’t find reading and language arts fun and rewarding. Kids rarely read anything more than a very short passage. Research in those days said elementary students spent less than two minutes a day reading. They almost never got to write a story and when they did it was taken apart piece by piece with a red pen.

I sought advice from my colleagues in the building about how best to go about teaching reading and language arts (English). Most just said they went by the teacher’s manual. It was scripted instruction and had exactly what the teacher should say and what the student response would probably be. No creativity there! It seemed sterile and boring. I honestly believe the other teachers were terribly bored with it and, as a result, the students were, too. Oh, a small percentage of kids “got it” and made sense of the drudgery but the majority just dutifully plugged along.

It just seemed to me that it didn’t have to be that way. School didn’t have to be boring and tedious. Kids needed to know that somehow it would all fit together for them. From that came a career long battle of swimming upstream against prevailing practice in the classroom. The surprising thing was that even then, and long before then, research and professional opinion was on my side. As far back as the late 1890s professionals had warned of the pitfalls of the drill and grill instruction that became common practice after Rudolf Flesch’s book Why Johnny Can’t Read became so popular in the 1950s. As I recall he had little background in education but had tutored his child or grandchild using the skill and drill technique and the child could now read. It wasn’t research and it might just have been the extra attention the child got that turned him around. Flesch swore it was the method and if it worked for this kid it would work for all kids.

Publishers grabbed on to the “one size fits all” mentality and produced manuals and workbooks and worksheets by the truck load! Use their materials as they prescribe and your students will prosper. Never mind that they had never met even one of my students.
(Part 1 of many!)