Friday, January 26, 2007

I wrote a paper too...make me a teacher!!

So tell me, why is it that to teach Kindergarten to Grade 12 you have to go through years of teachers college and be specially approved before you're allowed to start teaching, but to teach in a University where everyone is paying $400+ to take your class you don't need any teaching experience at all? What is that about? Honestly, as far as I'm concerned, just because you've earned the title of doctor doesn't mean you can teach a class! I say this because of the number of highly underqualified professors that I've encountered this semester. One who clearly can't distinguish a University student from a Kindergarten kid, another who doesn't seem to understand that regurgitating the textbook IS NOT TEACHING and another who never has notes and can't keep her train of thought for more than five minutes!! Honestly, if you actually feel the need to let your class out more than an hour early and utter the sentence (more than once I might add) "maybe two classes on Anne of Green Gables was too ambitious", get the hell out of the classroom honey!!

It was just announced that compared to several other Canadian Universities, the number of applicants to Ryerson is greatly increasing. But the sad thing is that all those kids don't have a clue what they're getting into. A classmate of mine told me that I should make a point of checking ratemyprofessor.com before I apply to classes. Perhaps she's right, but maybe Ryerson's Master Plan should also incude revamping its teaching staff in addition to its signage!

1 comment:

Horvendile said...

I found my college professors to be much better teachers than the teachers that took education courses. Of course I think that I'm a better teacher than my students' high school teachers.

My friend was in a doctoral program in math education and I used to help her do the research. I read dozens of studies and what all of them found was the the studied teaching method didn't work. That didn't stop them from being taught in ed classes. College professors know there material and that is far more important.

Now of course I had some bad professors. They helped me become a good one. I studied the difference between them and the good ones.