Most are not air-headed ditzes as you say. To teach all of the required standards and do so in a way to keep children interested (who have a 5 minute attention span) and have your class score high on the state assessments is not easy air-head work. If it was easy, you would not have a shortage of teachers in most places.
I was an honor student in high school and graduated with a 3.93 and graduated from a private college with a 3.91. I worked my butt off to get this job. I am challenged every day. I try to find new ways for every child in my classroom to succeed. I stay after school to work with kids whose parents are too “busy” or would rather do something else. I am there every day to help students who come in early who are having problems.
Go try teaching for a year and you tell me if its an easy job. Try 3rd grade. Have a classroom full of 20 nine year olds who come from poor families, parents who dont have time to work with them (or just don’t work with them at home), and can barely read. And you take them from that and getting them to pass state standards and bring them up to a 4th grade level at the end of the year. Then after you do that, tell me if it was easy or if you had to put a whole hell of a lot of work into it! Then at the end of the year take home a not so generous pay check.
I do this job because I love the kids and I love the challenge. I did not go into education because I thought it would be easy. It is quite the opposite. You are faced with many difficulties in just one day! During the day you never have time to just sit and relax. Finally when you get home your brain never shuts off. You want to be better and you want the children in your class to be better. So you constantly think of new ways to present lessons in order to have the best students possible. You are continuously working and trying to do everything you can to make sure your students feel safe and that they are learning!! You would be amazed at what each day throws you and what new challenges you face.
I saw this in practice.
In my state there are very few small towns that actually do teach, but many that are not far from what this writer describes, and it is really sad. All schools could use a whole lot more teachers like you.
“Have a classroom full of 20 nine year olds who come from poor families, parents who dont have time to work with them (or just don’t work with them at home), and can barely read. And you take them from that and getting them to pass state standards and bring them up to a 4th grade level at the end of the year. Then after you do that, tell me if it was easy or if you had to put a whole hell of a lot of work into it!”
Why did the students come to your third grade barely able to read? They’ve already had two years of school, and maybe Head Start or kindergarten before that.
I’m not criticizing the teaching profession. Many teachers in my family, but I do believe many unsound approaches are being used in some states or school systems, and a fair amount of time wasted teaching feel good PC nonsense that does little to actually educate children and teach them to think and solve problems.
I have an education degree, and I found it be nearly worthless. I taught high school French, among other classes. Education courses are necessary, to an extent, and the classes that are included in an education major are NOT that easy, as you state. However, most education classes provided me little assistance in actually teaching. To a great extent either one can teach or one cannot. Everyone is not able to teach. Mere knowledge of the subject matter, while a prerequisite to being a good teacher, is not enough. One must be able to communicate effectively in a way understood by one’s students. One must have a certain amount of patience. One must be able to “connect” with the students. These things come easier to some than to others. I enjoyed teaching, but could not afford to continue doing it and raise a family. I practice law, representing banks and small towns, among others. My teaching experience often comes in handy when trying to convey how the law works in different situations.
Your college must have been very different than the university where I teach. My dim view comes from my experience teaching the air-headed ditzes in the one mathematics course they are required to take, and from my wife’s observations of the state of colleges of ed (she took a Ph.D. in School Psychology, and has seen close up the contentlessness of the Elem. Ed major and, to a lesser extent Secondary Ed majors of various flavors.)