-- The interesting thing about this professor's advice to new graduate teaching assistants is that it seems pretty much to presume that none of these assistants have had much if any training in classroom management or pedagogy. It always struck me as a little ironic that public school systems require degrees that take four or five years to earn in order to be able to teach their students, but universities may not look for much beyond a degree in the field. I've been involved with schools of different sizes and backgrounds, and while smaller colleges and liberal arts schools often feature excellent teachers, there's no guarantee that the person handling 700 18-year-olds at Ginormous U's "Introduction to Basic Whatever" course ever did more than be the smart kid the teacher left in charge when he or she had to step out for a moment.
-- Donald Trump says he trademarked the phrase "make America great again" because other people running for the Republican nomination for president are copying him and using it. "There you go again," the guy who used it first might have said to the Trumpster if he were still living and could be bothered to have an opinion about a candidate as unserious as AquaNet's favorite son.
-- Kanye West has got a little trip ahead of him in order to get back to reality. It's pretty sad, considering that the 2015 MTV Video Music Awards show brought the top level of class we've come to expect from it.
-- Hannibal's over. I've got no clear concrete suggestions, but I'd like a couple of TV shows that don't lionize sick sociopaths who eat people, maybe? And it will be nice to be able to read a pop culture site without having to worry about tripping on the polysyllabic purple prose it seemed to inspire in everyone who talked about it.
When I was a TA, we had some training. Not a lot, though there were additional optional workshops and things available to us. (I did the ones I could; I knew I was aiming for a teaching career).
ReplyDeleteIdeally, the kind of "keep the monkeys from running the circus" classroom management should not be required at college level because (a) presumably, all the students want to be there (unlike K-12), (b) the people involved are supposedly adults, and (c) the prof DOES have more of a right to throw truly disruptive people out than your average school teacher. (I've never had to use c).
That said, my biggest classroom issue these days is people deciding to "check out" on their cell phones. I make a deal about it on the first day saying I know who is doing it (I can see, these classrooms are not large, and I can also tell when discussion happens in class who doesn't know what's going on) and that while I'm not going to call people out for it (because I'd be doing that daily to some people), I will also have little sympathy for anyone coming to me complaining about earning a D or an F if they were someone who was physically but not mentally present.
However, I have long opined would-be professors need some basic training in human psychology, just to be able to cope with some of the different personalities we encounter.
No doubt! I expect the training varies from school to school, and I had several professors at graduate and undergraduate levels that were good teachers.
ReplyDeleteThe thing that interested me was how all of the pushback given to both homeschooling families and the idea of alternative certification for K-12 teachers seems to contain the notion that someone without a full education degree can't possibly do the job that someone with such a degree can, even if the credential is the only major difference. And yet, with either no training in some horrible cases or decent training that still falls way short, hour-wise, of all the classwork in a degree program, folks are turned loose on college classes.
It's almost as though there are people who have the skills or gifts necessary to be good teachers without spending five or six years drinking from the pricey well of modern pedagogic theory.
Without going into a possibly career-compromising discussion, I can say the "alt cert" thing has been a BIG fight we've been involved in. The idea of "more science classes for science teachers" vs. "the ed classes all teachers are expected to take."
ReplyDeleteI think also a lot of "learning how to teach" just comes with experience. I KNOW I am a much better teacher than I was when I first started this gig (and my evaluations bear that out).
I also had more than my share of good examples and "terrible warnings" among my profs, both in undergrad and grad school and I've shown myself to be better than average at learning from others' mistakes.