Blog Post #14

In the article Teaching Can Be a Profession by Joel Klein, he first states that teaching needs to be professionalized like law and medicine. How would we do this? We would start by beginning with better academic training for prospective teachers, have a new approach to recruiting teachers, and change how we reward teachers. Second he states seniority should not exist. Have teachers take a "National Teacher examination" and also have them work under supervision to evaluate their performance.

I agree with professionalizing teaching. How do you think doctors and lawyers get their degrees? They had to be taught by someone and that someone is a teacher. Teachers are the reason we have so many great doctors and lawyers in this country, but we are not rewarded for it. Also, I too feel as if anyone with a degree can become a teacher. I have seen certain teachers and wonder how it is that they are teaching children. Also, to be honest, in my classes this semester at South Alabama, I wonder how some of my classmates are going to be the future teachers of America. Several of them have the worst grammar I have ever seen, but yet they are going to be teaching children one day? It's sad. We need to advance our teaching programs. We need to select the best candidates to be teachers. Not just anyone should get in a classroom and teach kids just because they winged it through school and got a degree. Teaching should be much more than that.

Also, teachers get lazy. They create their lesson plans and just ramble on to students with a power point that goes over the material, while their students are playing on their phones the whole time. Teachers need a more professionalized training. They need to meet certain and more strict requirements. So instead of just anyone becoming a teacher, you need to have a high GPA (not a 2.0 like now), be able to pass certain examinations and be under supervision to ensure you have the qualifications and a high level of performance required to become a teacher. You see teachers every day on the news having relationships with their students and it's sickening and this probably has something to do with the fact that literally anyone can become a teacher. With these suggested more strict rules, we can reduce these kinds of teaches and get more qualified ones who will change how people perceive teachers.