This post is mostly just a venue for me to vent about problems I find and experience with our educational system.
I'm currently in graduate school at the U. Many of my classes are undergraduate courses with a graduate label, meaning it has both undergraduates and graduates taking the same class. I would be totally fine with this if there was some accommodation where the graduate students were given extra or additional instruction. However, it nerves me that the professor is giving the exact same lecture, and assigning me four times the work as the undergraduates (all spur-of-the moment, too). I would be okay with a separate syllabus presented to me at the beginning of class, outlining extra expectations, but instead, the professor spontaneously decides (in the middle of the class, in front of the whole class) that I should write four times the amount of everyone else (a writing assignment, by the way, which is complete busy work), and also that I should read two extra books, just for my information. Infuriating. Am I okay with doing extra work? Sure. Am I okay with being presented with higher expectations than peers? Yes. As long as those expectations are purposeful, clear, and organized. None of which these have been.
Which brings me to my next point. One of my biggest concerns with higher education is the fact that the professors that teach the highest level of courses (university courses) have LITTLE to NO training in teaching methodology. They are professors because they are "book smart" and know how to research. Your ability to research, in my opinion, has very LITTLE correlation to your ability to teach. They are entirely two separate and different skills. I can not even count the number of times I have sat in a lecture, clearly driven by the professor's desire to aggrandize him/herself and their research and fame, instead of a lecture that is driven by the motive to help the
students by sound teaching practices that unfold unclear principles and make them clear. Why aren't our professors more trained (and more interested) in learning how to become better
teachers instead of better
researchers? The difference between a professor who understands how to teach and a professor who is only there to talk about what he knows is
monumental.
On the same token, I believe because of the restrictions on professors about research, many exceptional and highly-qualified educators are being kept out of higher education because they don't produce enough research. Some of my most stimulating and interesting courses (and
applicable courses) were taught at community colleges, from teachers that had been teaching in lower education for years, or PhD candidates that have real-world teaching experience. Your ability to teach is the
tool by which you communicate your passion for the content. Passion without the ability to teach clearly and convey it to someone else is useless!
Another problem I have with the education field is that the hoops required to "jump through" do not have enough purpose, meaning, or explanation. Speaking of research, what is the research behind the standardized tests used to evaluate teacher knowledge and ability? For example, I spent years, and hundreds of dollars trying to pass the "Chinese Praxis," a standardized four-hour test meant to assess my proficiency as an educator. Instead of finding predictable indicators of proficiency on the test, I was faced with unrealistically fast time limits on questions, obscure and geographically isolated topics that only someone from that town would have known. None of these topics have
ever come up in my teaching, in any of the courses I have taken in Chinese (clue: I've taken ALL the courses about Chinese available), and none of which have any bearing on my ability to convey knowledge about the Chinese language or passion for the culture to young learners. This test was a huge obstacle to my own confidence as a teacher, to my ability to become certified, and an unjustified smack to all the hard work I had invested into the lives of these children and into studying and becoming proficient in the content myself. After two failures of this test, I witnessed other educators, native in the language but terrible educators that left students feeling discouraged, quitting the program, and giving up on themselves and the language, continue teaching.
Although I spent months rallying to change the test, resulting in a lowering of the passing score of the Praxis for candidates for certification, the issue still remains. The
test is the same. It will leave anyone who takes the test feeling discouraged, saddened, confused at the questions and the content. And I would still give more than anything to see the research behind the test, and to understand
why they chose the questions they did, with the time limits they did.
Fast forward to this past summer. I walk in to meet with the Superintendent of the school district in McCall where I am now living. I meet with him to tell him that I am qualified and willing to pioneer his Chinese program. He responds with, "Between Spanish and Chinese, I just don't know which language will mesh better with the children's brains."
What? You're telling me that learning is a matter of brain development? How about learning will help your brain development.
