Teaching

"...you can have the most fantastic credentials ever in your field, but if you don’t know how to manage a classroom of 8th graders you don’t know jack."
       
                                                            Rose, in a comment to PPS Equity

Rose--as usual-- is right.  And her remark calls into question No Child Left Behind's requirement for "highly qualified teachers" in every classroom.  No matter how many academic and ed classes you pile up, you'll never be a good, or "qualified", teacher if you can't relate to kids. 

That trumps everything, especially in elementary school.  But it also matters in secondary schools.

It helps to know a lot, of course.  You better have some grasp of math before you face a room full of algebra students.  But then again, if your students can't stand the sight of you, they're unlikely, especially as adolescents, to learn much anyway.  A good teacher, regardless of specialty, is one who engages students.

Teaching is hard.  That's a judgment confirmed by the poet T.S. Eliot who worked as a school teacher, a banker, and an editor.  Of those, he acknowledged that teaching was the most arduous.

So teaching is hard.  And stressful.  But once you get the hang of it, once you master classroom pedagogy, teaching can also be extremely gratifying.  (Of course, true mastery can only be approximated.  Occasionally a teacher will feel that everything has gone right, but only occasionally.)

But here's the larger point.  Ultimate gratification in the teaching profession comes with the empowerment of teachers, not only to do well with the relatively small number of students they encounter in the classroom, but empowered to contribute to the larger educational community as well --the school, the district, the profession. 

When I write about school reform, I mean reform through teacher leadership.  That's what I mean when I talk about grassroots reform as opposed to top-down prescriptions, prescriptions often coming from people who have spent little time in an actual school classroom. 

When a building educator --a teacher-- is involved in that sort of reform leadership, that's when he or she truly begins to feel like a professional.

That's when teaching becomes ultimately fulfilling, and ultimately gratifying. 

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