Teachers are an integral part of the K through 12 education
system, without them there would not be one. As such, you would expect there to
be some pretty extensive requirements to become a teacher. After all they are
influencing future generations and therefore the future of this country.
However, surprisingly the requirements to become a K through 12 teacher are
just a bachelor’s degree and a teaching certificate. Now that’s better than no
requirements at all, but again they affect apart of our future. Wouldn’t you
want someone with that kind of power to be highly qualified? Therefore what
needs to be added to our K through 12 education system is higher requirements
and better training for teachers. The addition of these to our education system
would end up solving numerous other problems.
The higher
requirements to become a teacher could be that you need at least a master’s
degree and a teaching certificate. This would at least make it so that teachers
would be more educated in their subject and therefore they would be able to
teach the subject better. The better training for teachers could be training
that is required before you start teaching. It could include learning creative
and effective ways to teach classes to how to be prepared and organized for
each class.
Unfortunately
in our education system we do have teachers that don’t know much about their
subject, which ends up hurting the students. One of the problems that John
Gatto presented in “Against School: How Public Education Cripples Our Kids, and
Why” was that in our current education system kids are bored. In his article he
explains that the reason the students were bored was because of the teachers.
He writes, “[Students] said teachers didn’t seem to know much about their
subjects and clearly weren’t interested in learning more.” So since the
students were not learning anything they were bored. If the higher requirements
and better training for teachers was implemented, then this problem would be
fixed. Through the extra requirements the teachers would have to know more
about their subject and therefore would always be able to teach the students.
Another problem with our education
system is that students don’t truly learn. This problem was brought up in Paolo
Freire’s chapter “The Banking Concept of Education”. He writes “The student
records, memorizes, and repeats these phrases without perceiving…” Anyone who
has gone through the public K through 12 education system has experienced this
at least once. Often times as students we will cram and memorize as much
information as we can for a specific test, but then shortly after the test we forget
the majority of it. This is not true learning. As Freire wrote, by doing this
we do not actually perceive the information and as a result we forget it
easily. In order to fix this problem we need better and more creative ways of
teaching that don’t have students just memorizing information. The
implementation of the higher requirements and better training for teachers
would do just that. The extra training would provide teachers with ways of
teaching that would help students perceive and fully understand the material.
Another problem with our education
system is that it is not engaging or challenging enough. Mike Rose discusses
this problem in his article “Mike Rose’s Resolution on Education”. In this Rose
writes a list of improvements that need to be made to our education system. His
number one improvement is “To have more young people get an engaging and
challenging education.” This is very true and very important. An engaging
education is critical because we are in the day and age where there are
numerous distractions, from technology to other people. So an education that is
not engaging will do very little because it will not have the students’ attention.
A challenging education is very similar. It is critical as well, because if the
material is not challenging then the students will not be engaged and will
become bored. As a result they would most likely not learn much. The way to
solve this problem is to use creative methods of teaching that keep the
students engaged and at the same time challenge them. If the higher
requirements and better training for teachers was added to the educational
system, then we could fix this problem. They would provide the teachers with more
knowledge, which would allow them to make the material challenging, and arm the
teachers with engaging teaching methods.
Implementing the higher
requirements and better training for teachers would also solve the issue of
having unqualified or unprepared people working as teachers. We saw an unqualified
teacher in the video Back in Black –
Education Crisis, in which Tony Danza became an English teacher. He was
very unorganized and one of his students even said, “I am actually very
concerned he is not qualified to be an English teacher”. Another time that we
saw unprepared teachers was in the movie Chalk.
In this movie Mr. Lowrey was a first year history teacher, so he had no previous
teaching experience. His nervousness and lack of experience showed as he was
unprepared. The better training for teachers would help teachers like Mr.
Lowrey because it would provide them with useful teaching methods.
