Daniel Buck
If medical professionals spoke about early career doctors the way school administrators talk about early career teachers, no one would enter a hospital again. “Oh, everyone kills a few patients early on,” a caring mentor assures an internist who prescribed the wrong medication. “The only way to learn is to dive in and poke around,” says a veteran surgeon to a young resident about to perform his first tracheotomy.
Unfortunately, these are common sentiments among educators in America. No novice teacher is armed with the knowledge or skills to run a classroom; it’s simply assumed that they’ll fail early on. In fact, making it through the blistering first year — the classroom chaos, the unforgiving workloads, the confusing curricula, the daily student insolence — is something of a rite of passage. Veterans clap rookies on the back and assure them they’ll make it through, knowing that the first few years will be rough — for both the teacher and his students.
The reason for this reality is simple: Our nation’s teacher-preparation system is broken. Our educators enter the profession woefully unprepared for their jobs. The large majority attend programs at university schools of education, where they read and discuss esoteric academic literature that contains no references to classroom-management techniques, lesson pacing, learning assessments, or other practical knowledge. These schools are boxing academies that don’t teach their students how to duck and weave.
I experienced the consequences during my first year of teaching. Lectures on tort law and transgender literacies didn’t equip me to handle a student who slugged another in the face during class. Nor did a few mock lessons equip me to fill 50 minutes of class time for several different classes five days a week.