Assault on the teaching profession

Teaching, to me, represents the joy of learning. I have found no better way to express this joy than to have pursued a license in secondary education during my undergraduate experience.

By taking classes centered on education policy, teaching pedagogy, learning psychology and youth identity development, I have established an academic framework to process the more than 800 hours of classroom teaching that I have performed this past year.

My student-teaching experience at Jordan High School in Durham has been, without a doubt, the most rewarding academic and professional experience I have ever had.

It has also been one that has inspired many uncomfortable moments, best exemplified by my interactions with two types of people.

First are those that burden me with sympathy. “Wow, that is just SO great,” they respond when I tell them I am teaching. “We really need great teachers in our schools,” they say with a grave look of concern. They conclude their remarks with, “That’s what will improve education in this country: great teachers like you.”

Teaching, for this type of person, has become a job characterized not by the joy of learning that motivated me into the profession but rather by the perils of confronting poor students and saying, “Yes, you can learn no matter what!”

Teaching is much more complex than this cliche, and the climate this attitude promotes leads to the emergence of the second group of people I have interacted with: the irresponsible reformers.

These people love to post Facebook statuses and tweet about what needs to be done to reform public education in the United States, but know very little about existing policy or what it really means to be an educator teaching many types of learners at various readiness levels.

These people love the “no excuses” mentality — regardless of a child’s socioeconomic status, he or she can achieve with a great teacher.

“Test more!” these people say. “While we are at it, let’s abolish tenure and establish merit pay!” they add.

The ideology of harmful reform perpetuated by these people is maintained and fostered by programs such as Teach for America. TFA espouses the idea that college graduates can teach (and teach well) in the hardest classrooms without strong, structured mentorship and minimal academic exploration and practice of pedagogy.

My interactions with irresponsible reformers are awkward, because I loathe their assault on teaching as a profession. What these people fail to understand is that students do not shed their poverty and what comes with it when they enter the classroom.

Admittedly, I have generalized with these groupings. But through these interactions in the context of student teaching, I have learned that teaching is not seen by many as a joyful and enriching profession, but rather it is perceived as a sympathy-driven, challenging two-year commitment in poverty-stricken America.