Sam Pernicano English 100 11:10-12:30 Paper 4 Engel S. (2009, November 2). "Teach Your Teachers Well".

The New York Times, p. A17. The Teachers of Tomorrow Raising the teachers of tomorrow, will they be ready? When it comes to raising new teachers, we may not be doing all we need to. Students that are going into teaching as a career need a better education. This would start with the style of teaching received by each student. Most students are given the same type of education if they are going into teaching as a profession. They start out with the basics: making lesson plans, observing teachers, and reviewing students. While these things are useful, they may not be enough. I can say from personal experience as a student who is going into teaching as a profession, these things dont inspire much confidence in learning how to teach. I can say for a fact that from my experience so far, I and the other students could greatly benefit from better teaching methods. To start out as a teacher you basically have a set time to learn about the basics of teaching. After about a month they send you into the field to do a practice teach. In the time period that you are being taught how to teach, they dont tell you very much. They send you off with virtually nothing. They do, however, give you a lesson that is fully made and prepared to be taught. They expect you to be able to Sam Pernicano - 2 teach it with about a weeks worth of practice. Im not sure if other teaching programs work similarly, but that is how you start out in the sky teach program at Western Kentucky University. The students that are going into teaching need to have more time to spend with teachers that are teaching their subjects. They need to be able to go into classrooms and view how the teachers teach. During this time period they can take notes on the students and how the teacher teaches. This way they can see what teaching styles work and which ones dont. By learning which teaching styles work and which ones dont, students can learn how to better teach students when they get put into the field. This will allow the students being taught to get the full blast of the lesson being taught. If this is

done, both the students being taught and the students teaching will learn something from the lesson. When we went to do our first lessons, we were put in a random classroom and had no chance to see the way that the teachers taught the students. We had to teach blind and had no idea how the students would act. What happened was the students paid more attention to saying goofy things to me than participating in the lesson. I had to tell several students off and remind them to watch the lesson. In the second lesson, we were supposed to go out and view a teacher. After doing this we were supposed to have acquired the skills needed to teach the next lesson. The program would allow the students to view teachers as often as needed. Sam Pernnicano - 3 The only problem was that we only had about a week or two to do this. With other classes in our daily schedules, this wasnt possible for most students. One thing that needs to be done is that when a student is finally given a lesson to teach, they need too be given something that pertains to the subject that they are going to teach in the future. Giving a science teacher a math lesson to teach is like telling Shakespeare to fix your television. Its near impossible unless you really know the subject well. When I was being taught, I was lucky enough to be given science lessons to teach. Since my major was science education they were very easy to teach. Some students were given lessons that had absolutely nothing to do with the subject that they were studying. I think that if universities want students to become better teachers, they should give them lesson plans to teach that actually pertain to their subject criteria. According to the article, teaching programs should require a 3.5 GPA and be extremely selective in who they choose to teach. They should be completely free and give a stipend for the first three years of teaching. (Engel, S., 2009, p. A17) This way only the best teachers will be chosen to teach. I think that these conditions are too strict. What about those students with GPAs of 2.0-3.0 that meet all the other requirements of teaching? I am one of those students. My GPA is less than 3.0, and yet I did very well in my teaching sessions. I Sam Pernicano - 4 was very good as a teacher, but if the GPA rule were followed, I would have never been chosen to teach. I do however agree with making the programs cost free. Most teachers that are in the teaching program have no experience with how to interact with the children they are teaching. They just teach the entire class and dont look for hidden signs that a student is struggling or doing better than the

others. Knowing the telltale signs will help students teach every student in the class as best as possible. The farthest I've gotten in the program I'm in is the third teaching session. This is where you go out ton a school and view the students in a class while the teacher is teaching. You are supposed to choose a student that is struggling and take notes on them. After the class is over you are supposed to think of some way to get the students more involved. In summary, the teaching programs we have are drastically in need of improvement. We need to get students out into the field more and teach them the things that they actually need to know. Students need to be teaching on the subject that they are studying so that they dont get confused or mess up. So Ill leave you with this, we need to improve, but are we ready?