- It started with a dream...however the dream is not the reality.
- You can't teach what you want.
- For example, sex education is scripted, and you can't veer from it despite sex education being one of the most important and applicable things you can learn in school.
- Kids don't know how to make goals outside of what they've been taught (e.g. career, passing standardized tests, etc.).
- They don't have metacognitive awareness to say what they want to learn because they've never been asked that question before.
- I wanted kids to know that learning is lifelong and not just a thing that exclusively happens in school. I wanted them to know that they can learn to do anything at any age like how I learned to ride a bike and swim as an adult. That was what I saw in my dream. However, when I posed this topic to kids in real life, all I got were blank stares.
- Why I wanted to quit originally (Fall 2017-my first semester of grad school)
- I hated what I saw in the classroom.
- Kids' needs not being met
- Students visibly upset because she couldn't copy what the teacher was writing fast enough
- Fights between students
- An extremely needy student who hung onto me
- Inattentive teachers not trying to help you, a new teacher
- Waiting for you to fail
- Not wanting to develop relationships with you
- Using you to watch her students during recess while she pumped milk
- A teacher going off a student simply for refusing to put on his coat when the weather wasn't even severe
- Worksheet after worksheet
- One student wanted to break the teacher's printer to stop the worksheets.
- Bored students
- Grad school was boring.
- All the "best practices" videos we watched were of well-behaved children
- The elementary curriculum was so easy for me. I didn't understand why my classmates were so confused about everything.
- I spent the majority of my first semester in class doodling.
- Why I changed my mind (Spring 2018-second semester of grad school)
- I finally opened up to my advisor and professors about my struggles and started making peer connections in the program.
- As a result, I was paired with a great teacher with 40+ years experience. In addition, I had another student teacher with me. However, the placement was at a practically all-white school with richer students, meaning there were way less challenges. I wanted to work with more diverse students.
- What I learned in student teaching (Fall 2018)
- You have to scare kids into submission, and I was not respected by students.
- While the students were challenging, I had amazing coworkers. They were super supportive and friendly.
- You can watch the video below for more information.
- What I learned in my first full year of teaching (Fall 2019-Spring 2020)
- Kids still don't respect me.
- I have nothing in common with my coworkers. They were the complete opposite of my coworkers during my student teaching and were more like the teachers I saw during my first semester of grad school.
- Academically, students are so sooooooo behind. No matter how hard I tried, I could not catch them up to unnecessary and ridiculous grade level standards.
- You still can't teach whatever you want.
- It doesn't matter what you do as a teacher if a child's parent suck. Parents are children's first teachers.
- School lunches are destroying the health of our children. Students starve because they have nothing good to eat or they stuff their face with cheese and meat from the salad bar and cartons of milk.
- In conclusion, I'm only a teacher because I thought I had to choose a career. Teaching in the American public school system is not an act of service; it's an act of obedience, of maintaining the status quo. I elaborate on this thought in my videos, which you can find at my YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMtL_OddxxWplF8JFoD741g/ Here is the link for all my videos on the topic of education: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKp8rE4iA6GdllU3paniHeDwF8mEoaJAM Imagine if I had spent all this time, energy, and money the last three years pursuing my dreams instead of this fruitless career.
- Although I allude to what I think public schools should be like in all my videos on the topic, below are additional videos that support my ideas. I'll also link a paper/presentation I did for one of my grad school classes examining the morality of compulsory schooling.
- Going Natural in Education: Lora Smothers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0hQNR5fDKw&list=LL&index=138
- The Decline of Play: Peter Gray https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bg-GEzM7iTk&list=LL&index=94
- Education is Broken https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xm59B3F_G0E&list=LL&index=3&t=7s
- Is Compulsory Schooling Moral? (Presentation) https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1zBvvXkZh88kaqhLFjQFj1TtHaD64XP_XfaDz6i4Dki0/edit?usp=sharing
- Is Compulsory Schooling Moral? (Paper) https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jQXnne0WGbx9VKvdPsfSrQvGWIHkgOirQbdxjjNNgEg/edit?usp=sharing
