Challenging The Teachers

"Can the United States raise the status of teachers and teaching in general so that more talented young people are attracted to the profession?" This question has been asked numerous times and Kati Haycock has given an answer to solve this problem. In her article responding to the question in the New York Times, she proposes that the U.S. improves teacher training. I absolutely agree that to raise the status of teaching and to attract more intelligent young people to the profession, that the U.S. needs to improve teacher training. In her article, she says we must “enrich the programs” and “ratchet up their admissions requirements.” Meaning that we should increase the level of the preparation programs so that the interns will be challenged and then we are able to “weed out weak” and less intelligent candidates and keep the strongest ones for teaching. Keeping the strongest ones for teaching will also help the country’s future because they will actually understand and grasp the meaning of the material they are teaching, which then allows them to pass the information to the students’ brains in a more effective way. Also being able to know the material well, will earn the teacher some respect from the students because no student wants to learn from an air head that doesn’t even know the material themselves. In my experiences, many of the teachers I have go straight from the book and worksheet for worksheet. When my teachers do this, I find it harder to follow along and understand the meaning, but when other teachers explain in depth and expand on the curriculum, I find myself understanding the material better and then scoring higher on my tests. I tend to respect these teachers more and take them seriously because they know what is going on in the class. Students respect teachers when they are putting the effort in to help them understand the material. What if the new interns don’t want to work as hard, so raising the requirements to become a teacher actually drives them away? Well, in Haycock’s article she says that research shows the new interns that come into the preparation programs find them to be “so mindless that they can’t transfer out of them fast enough.” Even if there were some that couldn't’pass the new requirements, that would just open up the doors for the numerous amount of bright and driven young people to teach the students of America.