Teacher and author Frank McCourt
WHAT AN EDUCATION AND AN EDUCATOR SHOULD BE, ACCORDING TO ME...
An important facet - perhaps the most important! - of apprenticing to become a classroom teacher is to develop, revise, and seek to put into practice your own philosophy of education. What should students learn? Why? Towards what ultimate end? How can you best serve in this process? Not simple or easy questions, obviously. A teacher will wrestle with these questions on almost a daily basis over the years and decades of a career. It never ends.
Still, to the extent that you have clearly thought through the process of education and the role of the teacher in it, the further down the road will you find yourself in the process of learning the craft of teaching. Let us begin now then!
In this blogsite posting, please identify and explain your preliminary ideas about what is your philosophy of education. What should an education be, for your students and in your classroom? What should the job of teacher be? How should you go about performing your duties? Why? EXPLAIN! Feel completely free to integrate any/all of the larger philosophical frameworks we have identified in class up to this point.
At almost the end of a thirty year career teaching in the New York City public high schools, author Frank McCourt related the following conversation he had with a beginning teacher:
"A young substitute teacher sat beside me in the teachers' cafeteria. She was to start her regular teaching career in September and could I offer any advice?
Find what you love and do it. That's what it boils down to. I admit I didn't always love teaching. I was out of my depth. You're on your own in the classroom, one man or woman facing five classes every day, five classes of teenagers. One unit of energy against one hundred and seventy-five units of energy, one hundred and seventy-five ticking bombs, and you have to find ways of saving your own life. They may like you, they may even love you, but they are young and it is the business of the young to push the old off the planet. I know I'm exaggerating but it's like a boxer going into the ring or a bullfighter into the arena. You can be knocked out or gored and that's the end of your teaching career. But if you hang on you learn the tricks. It's hard but you have to make yourself comfortable in the classroom. You have to be selfish. The airlines tell you if oxygen fails you are to put on your mask first, even if your instinct is to save the child.
The classroom is a place of high drama. You'll never know what you've done to, or for, the hundreds coming and going. You see them leaving the classroom: dreamy, flat, sneering, admiring, smiling, puzzled. After a few years you develop antennae. You can tel when you've reached them or alienated them. It's chemistry. It's psychology. It's animal instinct. You are with the kids and, as long as you want to be a teacher, there's no escape. Don't expect help from the people who've escaped the classroom, the higher-ups. They're busy going to lunch and thinking higher thoughts. It's you and the kids. So, there's the bell. See you later. Find what you love and do it."
So what do you love? Where do you as a teacher fit into the school system and the lives of your future students? What do you hope to accomplish?Why? What kind of student would you seek to foster? What kind of society would you hope to help build in the United States as a teacher? EXPLAIN!
What is your personal philosophy of education?
To help get things rolling along, here is a short video clip encapuslating your teacher's teaching philosophy; and here is John Dewey's "Pedagogic Creed."
