Essay #3 Draft

           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.