Why We Need Young Teachers

In an op ed I recently read, the author warns young people against taking the time to become teachers in a country that is growing increasingly hostile towards its educational system and by proxy it's teachers. And I can't argue the validity of his points. They're accurate. But I do argue his message.

The author of the article, to summarize, directly tells young people not to become teachers. He raises some good points, like how policy is dictated by people who would never send their children to the schools and that their isn't a support system in place which offers clear punishment for problem students. But this isn't necessarily a modern problem. This has always been a problem. For the latter, a quality teacher learns how to deal with problems internally, and modern educational theory encourages this approach anyways because often students are acting out to get themselves kicked out of class!

As for the former, that people dictating policy would never send their children to those schools, when has that not been an issue? This is just the same as saying that people who dictate economic policy don't work within the policies they put in place. People who dictate war policy would never send their children to war. The problem, to summarize, is that there exists a rift between the upper and lower classes.

But what is going to happen if all of the idealistic and hard working future teachers give up and quit?

Well one of two things could happen. The first is that the system recognizes the error in its ways and drastically moves to change to appease all of the potential teachers who decided not to enter the profession. Teacher pay will rise, curriculum will be the responsibility of teachers, and the day will begin with coffee and cupcakes.

Clearly I don't think this is going to happen.

The opposite, and what might be lending itself to an accurate observation in the increase in bad teachers, is that as higher qualified individuals leave the field, schools will settle for less capable educators. If you're not aware, their used to be a shortage of teachers but as of writing this there is a surplus! Removing the future generations of teachers is not going to clear away the bad teachers, it's just going to encourage even more bad teachers to enter the field.

Many of the policies which inhibit teachers are in place because of said surplus of less qualified individuals. Teacher's have to be given a curriculum because some teachers don't know enough to teach theirs. Teacher's have less ability to punish student's because some teachers punish too many. Teacher's can't fail students because no child can be left behind which, as horrific a policy as it is addresses a very real problem that there were problems even before our current ones!

Encouraging people to quit just because something has become difficult is never sound advice. In fact, it's directly contradictory to the very nature of teaching. If every student quit when things got hard no one would ever learn anything. If every worker quit when things got hard, nothing would ever get done. But it raises a more important question.

If no one teaches people that things are wrong how will anything ever change? I'm not encouraging teachers to stand in front of their students and rant about how being a teacher sucks and we should all riot against the man, but when students ask me about teaching I tell them the truth. It's a lot of work. It was before things got rough and even if we see pay increase and better support systems, more curriculum control and better training methods, it will continue to be hard!

Without stepping up onto my own soap box for too long, teaching might be one of the hardest jobs I can think of. Teachers are tasked with instructing a non-receptive audience often in the most tumultuous time of their lives, balancing caring enough about students to help them grow without caring too much or too little, dealing with parents who question your every move, people who question your authority, and a world which changes what it wants of you almost as rapidly as you learn what it wanted before it changed its mind.

But everything I listed there has nothing to do with the issues raised in the article. It's what teaching is all about. And it's why we do it. I knew about many of the issues (excepting that there is a surplus of teacher's) before I set out on my mission of becoming a teacher and I did it anyways. Because the world needs great teachers. If you're going to be discouraged by some hardship than you shouldn't be a teacher anyways, it's not for you. But the only way that things change is with great teachers who can do their jobs no matter how much society tries to stop them.

From my perspective there is no better time to become a teacher, because there's so much to be overcome and incorporated as lessons for students who need to see when the system isn't in your favor you fight even harder to change it from within.