Everything We Ever Needed to Know We Did Not Learn in Education Classes

Back in the day, when YNSHC was preparing to be a teacher, we had two choices: We could either complete a master's degree in education or in another subject of our choosing (in our case, English). Since New York City is always in need of teachers, the authorities make things as easy as possible on those pursuing a teaching career. While one does need to complete a master's degree in order to be fully certified, all a prospective teacher needs to do is complete a master's in education--which simply requires a series of education classes and no master's thesis. You can complete the whole thing in about a year with a minimum of stress and strain. The choice is really a no-brainer.

We did the master's in English.

Part of our reasoning was that we had already taken a plethora of undergraduate education classes, so we had no need to take additional ones. Of course, this would have made the master's even easier, as we had already experienced, in one form or another, most of the coursework to which we would have been exposed. But frankly the thought of spending even one supernumerary (look it up) minute in an education class was anathema--no matter how easy our subsequent glide path into a teaching career would have been.

Now, the New York State Board of Regents may take a step that will ensure that prospective teachers can bypass the mind-numbing morass that is the teacher-training school. Instead of requiring specialized certification from programs like Teachers' College, the Regents would allow teachers to meet certification through alternative programs like Teach for America. The advantage would be that teachers would focus on practical techniques, like classroom management and lesson planning, rather than spending time on philosophical debates about the role of education in a free society and the history of pedagogical theory.

Look, we know a lot of education teachers, and we respect the scholarship that goes into becoming an expert in that field. But we also know that, had we entered a high school classroom armed only with what we had learned in our education classes. . . . Well, you wouldn't be reading this blog now, because we would have been eaten alive by the students. It was only through our experiences working in classrooms (college classrooms, luckily), that we developed an understanding of how to teach, how to explain, how to interact. More valuable than any of our classes on pedagogical theory would have been the simple act of sitting in classrooms and watching teachers teach.

Anything that privileges hands-on, experiential learning in a working (or even a non-working) classroom over sterile indoctrination through hidebound theorizing is to be welcomed. Those who can do. So let those who want to teach do it--it's a great way to find out if they can.