Are Teachers Professionals? by Clinton Cruice

Today a debate is going on over whether or not teaching is a profession. Some believe that teaching is not a profession for several reasons. The first of which is that students are not only educated by teachers, they can gain information from television programs, YouTube, and from any other person they meet. Teaching also does not require as much specialized training as other skilled trades. Teachers also do not have much autonomy because what they are required to teach is not decided by the teachers, but instead is designed by others. In the school structure teachers are also the second from the bottom in terms of amount of power, above only students. Teachers cannot refuse to teach certain students, because they are assigned to them, however other professions like doctors and lawyers can refuse to offer their services to clients they do not want to help. Teaching is also a high security, but low paying job, while other professions are low security, high paying jobs. Those who support teaching as a profession give several reasons to give credibility to their position. They say that because professionals are supposed to provide a service to others, teaching is a profession because teachers make many material sacrifices, so that they can be devoted to their service. They also believe that teachers possess a unique set of skills that are required to teach the young. These skills which are passed on to the students are considered essential to operate in modern society. These people also believe that teachers have a large amount of autonomy because they decide which parts of the curriculum they will focus on, and which parts they will only do an overview of. The ways in which the material is taught is also left up to the teacher. And after the first few years of teaching at a school they gain tenure, and are no longer routinely observed. I don't think that it matters whether or not teaching is considered a profession because all it really is is a title. And being able to call yourself a professional does not change anything, it does not help you do your job more effectively, and it does not give you more money. So in my opinion teachers should stop wasting time arguing over whether or not teaching is a profession, and should instead learn to develop more effective teaching techniques.

CLIMB THE MOUNTAIN by Becky Bowser

The harder the challenges, the more glorious the triumph.

Challenges are what make life interesting, overcoming them is what makes life meaningful.

Everyone has challenges and problems. Success lies in dealing with them promptly and thoroughly.























Mt. Everest rises to approximately 29,035 feet making it the highest mountain on the earth.

A very famous blind mountain climber named Erik Weihenmayer quotes:

“One thing hasn't changed in the twenty years I've been rock climbing and that's the reach. We calculate and predict. We hope and pray. All our measurements lead us to believe we'll find what we are looking for, but we know there are no guarantees. It's that moment when we've committed to the reach, and we know it's almost impossible to turn back."

Another amazing fact about Eric is that he is the first blind person to climb Mt. Everest, and during that climb, he led a group of Tibetan blind teenagers with him to about 21,000 feet, then he continued with a few blind guides up the mountain. To get ready for the climb up Mt. Everest, it took him weeks of preparation such as eating a good diet, getting plenty of rest, performing strength exercises, taking motivational training, writing down goals, and practicing rope training. Many will give up on their first attempt at the climb. Some may get scared or fall and may not want to experience that pain again. There are many who won’t give up, but will look forward to the challenges and the rewarding sensation of completing that goal and reaching the top.



I would like to show you a video of Dan Osman (February 11, 1963 – November 23, 1998), an Asian American extreme sport practitioner, known for his dangerous sports of "free-soloing" (rock climbing without ropes or other safety gear); and "bungee jumping" (falling several hundred feet from a cliff then being caught by a safety rope), for which his record was over 1000 feet. His mountain climbing skills will always be remembered in the hearts of his family and friends. Here’s a quick side note about Dan. The mountain that you will be watching him climb is called Bear Reach in Lover’s Leap, California. This would take the average mountain climber 3 hours to climb with ropes. Dan did it in four minutes without any ropes.



Dan Osman Speed Climbing - The funniest bloopers are right here

No one said teaching is an easy job. Unfortunately most first year teachers overlook the challenges, and then walk into their classrooms unprepared and incapable of handling the challenges of teaching. 1/3 of teachers leave their profession in the first three years of teaching. Just like a mountain climber, a teacher has to prepare themselves for the climb.

So, what are some of the challenges that you may face as a first year teacher? Shortages of money,lack of supplies and planning time, overcrowded classrooms, stacks of administrative paperwork,plain frustration, parents who won’t support you by attending conferences, diversity of student achievement and ability levels, a difficult principal, difficult student body, teacher’s meetings, teacher evaluation, feeling humiliated by making a mistake, being on an emotional yo-yo ride, working in a school with a high drop-out rate, meeting the emotional needs of students as well as their academic needs, piles and piles of papers to grade, dealing with an unruly student, constant interruptions, and being a young teacher whom the children may have a harder time respecting because they consider him/her a peer.

In the next video, there is a small clip from the movie titled, "Dangerous Minds," with Michelle Pfieffer. Michelle plays LouAnne Johnson, the true story of an ex-marine who doesn't give up on 34 inner city sophomores students who were called the class from hell. LouAnne Johnson inherited this class from a teacher who'd been pushed over the edge, and had said that these kids had blood on their hands. She was warned that her new assignment would be dangerous, but where the school system saw 34 unreachable kids, Johnson saw young men and women with intelligence and dreams. Johnson broke the rules to give these kids belief in themselves, and the ability to beat the odds when statistics said they'd never graduate. This is a remarkable memoir of a tough, dedicated, inventive teacher, whose inspiring story later spawned a hit movie and television series. LouAnne Johson faced the challenges and didn't give up. To learn about 25 other teachers who changed the world, you can visit, http://www.teachingtips.com/blog/2008/07/02/25-teachers-who-drastically-changed-the-world/





Your first year or your future years as a teacher may feel like total chaos, but there is always hope. Here are some tips for the first year teacher mentioned in Those Who Can, Teach book. (chapter 14, pages 483-487)

• Make a study of your strengths and weaknesses. For example, if shyness is your weakness, start speaking to people right now before you begin managing a classroom.
• Keep a teaching journal where you can write your teaching thoughts and suggestions. A journal serves as a constant reminder that you are preparing to actually be in charge of your own classroom, and can serve as a personal record. Plus, as years go by, you can reflect upon the challenges you faced, and may in return, help a first year teacher.
• Maintain proper frame of mind such as realizing that you are someone who is untested and who has a great deal to learn.
• Find an experienced teacher who can mentor you daily.
• Make your students’ parents your allies. Difficult parents will be a part of your teaching experience, but if you maintain the proper attitude by making the parents your friends, then you have already conquered the difficulty.
• Take Evaluation seriously. When you are being evaluated, be yourself, not someone else. Show the principal or administration the type of person you are when THEY are not in the classroom. Professor Robert Leblanc won a Seymous Schulich Award for Teaching Excellence in this article where he wrote about 10 points on how to be a good teacher all the time, not just on evaluation days, such as good teaching is as much about passion as it is about reason. It's about not only motivating students to learn, but teaching them how to learn, and doing so in a manner that is relevant, meaningful, and memorable. It's about caring for your craft, having a passion for it, and conveying that passion to everyone, most importantly to your students. You may read the other 9 points if you visit this website. http://honolulu.hawaii.edu/intranet/committees/FacDevCom/guidebk/teachtip/topten.htm
• Take care of yourself. Get plenty of rest. A teacher friend of mine goes to bed at 9:00 every school night. Be bacteria or virus aware. You will be around more germs than you want to know about that are creeping around in your classroom. Proper hand sanitation, Vitamin supplements and airborne are just a few ways you can help yourself fight germs. This website lists great tips to keep yourself healthy during your teaching career.
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/2036559/back_to_school_health_tips_for_all.html?cat=5

Will you be part of the 1/3 of teachers that quit their climb in the first three years? Or, will you be the one who faces the challenges and who climbs to the top of your teaching career? What can you expect the first year of teaching? Challenges. Finally I would like to encourage all of us future climbers by remembering, “Life is all about the climb.”

What Are Your Job Options in Education? By Idania Duarte

Teaching is a large occupation, representing 4 percent of the entire civilian work force. There are more than twice as many K-12 teachers as registered nurses and five times as many teachers as either lawyers or professors. Factors influencing teacher supply and demand are: Student Enrollment in Schools, Class Sizes, Geographical Location, Subject Matter and Grade Levels Taught, Retiring Teachers, Teacher Turnover, Returning Teachers and Economic Conditions. One of the greatest teacher supply-and-demand problems concerns minority teachers. At a time when the minority school-age population is increasing = rapidly, the number of minority teachers is decreasing. The shortage is severe now and appears likely to become worse. This shortage of minority teacher is problematic for several reasons. First, the growing number of minority children deserve to have positive minority role models who can help guide them in a world still plagued by racism. Second, white children also need to have minority role models to help them overcome the effects of stereotyping and racism. Third, it is important for our country's well-being to have a teaching staff that reflects the diversity of racial and ethnic backgrounds in our country's population. A large employer of teachers is the U.S. government. The Department of Defense operates 224 elementary and secondary schools in seven stats, Puerto Rico, Guam, and fourteen countries around the world, making it the twenty-second largest school district in the United States. These schools enroll approximately 106,000 students and employ about 9,000 educational personnel. Private education is a highly significant part of the American educational system. There are more the 26,000 private schools with an enrollment of more than 6 million preschool, elementary, and secondary school students and a staff of 413,000 teachers. What are teachers paid? We might answer this question by saying, "Not nearly enough." No one ever went into teaching because of the lure of big money. Most of teachers' satisfactions come from being of service to others and helping students learn. The 2001-02 average salary of classroom teachers in the United States is estimated to be about $44,600. Many indicators point to a strong demand for teachers in the coming years. Impending retirements in the current teaching force and increased school enrollments are encouraging signs for prospective teachers. America has become an education-oriented society. This means we are committed to more and better education, to life-long learning in and out schools. More than seventy years ago, President Calving Coolidge said, "The business of America is business." Today and into the future, the business of America is education. Teaching is where the action is and will continue to be!

What Are Your Job Options in Education?

There are many positions in the educational field that you can choose from. When thinking about education as a career, many people think about teaching. Teaching is the more opportunistic position in the educational field. It has a mass variety of areas not only where you will further educate students but as well as yourself in the long run. Some perks about teaching is receiving private scholarships and federal funding for teaching programs only problem the school in itself has a small budget. Another advantage is not having to work on weekends, holidays, and during the summer. The down side to that is you would work about 50 hours a week. Everything advantage has its disadvantage. Teaching is not the only job you can take up in the education. You can be an education administrator where you would provide vision, direction, leadership, and day-to-day management of educational activities in schools, colleges and universities, businesses, correctional institutions, museums, and job training and community service organizations. There is also the educational, vocational, and school counselors who work at the elementary, middle, secondary, and postsecondary school levels and help students evaluate their abilities, talents, and interests so that the students can develop realistic academic and career options. What is important to keep in mind are the students. As an educator, try to keep their interest high as possible. Present day education should not be prehistoric and dull. Everything in this world is evolving, so utilize every opportunity that comes your way. This video shows a great importance with technology whether it be text messaging, myspace, even twitter, these forms of technology are a good way to reach out to the students.

State Educational Reform by Diana Duarte

This call for excellence in schools has had many effects, such as the increase in graduation requirement, an increase in learning time, including other effects. States began requiring more years in core subjects, to obtain a high school diploma science and advanced math courses are required. "Social promotion" was eliminated, that is moving students through the grades so that they could stay with their own age groups independently of their performance. As reported by the US department of education academic credits earned in high school have increased as a result of those changes. Quality instruction time, rather than time spent in class is the key to quality schooling as thought by many teachers. In response, school days were lengthened to six and a half to seven hours, and the school year was lengthened to an average of 180 days of school per year. Unlike Japan and Germany, having about 240 days of school, no states have put into the idea of year-round education, though it has been thought of, lengthening the amount of schooling is extremely costly. Some people insist that the long ten week summer vacation is hardest on children in poor families. This is because camps and recreational activities, including enrichment programs are out of reach for them. A very important reason why people are concerned about year round education is disrupting established family life patterns and summer opportunities for teachers’ professional development, something I consider very important. There are also people proposing standards based education. As a result of the NCLB incentives, 49 states have adopted some sort of standard.
And here another report on it.
This state wide tests have been used as educational report cards that allow policymakers and the public to see how the schools in different districts are performing. And here is another view point of NCLB.

Education REFORMED?!?!?!? by ~BIGMATT~

Have you ever had a teacher that was so incompetent that you felt that you were wasting your time by sitting in class? On the other hand, Do you remember that great teacher you had that made you feel special, made you feel like you could do anything? What one teacher do you remember the most? Was it the one that made you feel like you could achieve greatness, or was it the one that made you feel like you were wasting your time? For most of us, the teacher that made a positive influence was from grammar school. And unfortunately, the later teacher we can remember from our collegiate or high school years. Whatever happened to “you get what you pay for"? Now I do not mean to sound so harsh. Yes, we are giving the college thousands of dollars to learn the skills we need for either continuing education or a career. But what about our kids? We pay thousands of dollars in taxes every year to fund the public schools. And since we are funding those schools, shouldn’t we have some say as to what goes on in them? My daughter’s fourth grade teacher, Paul Plumb, is a great teacher. He is one that I would gladly pay to have to teach my kids. If it were up to me, every teacher would be like him. Yet too many times, we end up sending our kids to school to be taught by someone who has a bunch of initials after their name, and no real life experiences. They can talk a good talk, but most of them are still trying to learn how to walk. If we are paying these so called teachers, shouldn’t we be the ones giving them the interview for the job? I mean come on, we are entrusting them with our children’s well being, right? And since we pay their salaries, shouldn’t we be the ones able to fire the bad ones? Yet, this is not the case. And in most schools, the average salary for a teacher is the same across the board for the bad teachers as with the good teachers. Who’s to say which ones deserve the job? We need a system that would allow new teachers to have to earn their stripes, if you will, before they make the money that teachers like Mr. Plumb deserve. This way, we could give to those teachers who deserve the money, the money they well earned. This would help to weed out the teachers with poor teaching skills. And make the teachers who really want to teach, strive for their salaries and tenures. A good teacher costs as much as an average one, whereas halving class size would require that you build twice as many classrooms and hire twice as many teachers. Your child is actually better off in a "bad" school with an excellent teacher than in an excellent school with a bad teacher. The students of a very bad teacher will learn, on average, half a year's worth of material in one school year. The students in the class of a very good teacher will learn a year and a half's worth of material in the same amount of time. Teaching should be open to anyone with a pulse and a college degree—and teachers should be judged after they have started their jobs, not before. It needs an apprenticeship system that allows candidates to be rigorously evaluated. Given the enormous differences between the top and the bottom of the profession, you'd probably have to try out four candidates to find one good teacher. That means tenure can't be routinely awarded, the way it is now. An apprentice should get apprentice wages. But if we find eighty-fifth-percentile teachers who can teach a year and a half's material in one year, we're going to have to pay them a lot—because we want them to stay. The notion that smaller classes would make better classes is a deeply held article of faith in American political and policy circles. Politically popular, class-size reductions are especially welcomed by teachers.

Smaller classes mean higher demand for teachers, resulting in more jobs and higher pay.

Smaller classes mean smaller workloads. It is more effective to have a good teacher in a large class than a poor teacher in a small one. Better students tend to be found in larger classes because schools adjust class size to student behavior. A few researchers, most notably Eric Hanushek of the University of Rochester, have found that teacher quality is the most important variable in determining educational outcomes for the typical school. Blanket policies of class-size reduction are inefficient and wasteful. A targeted approach would be best. The primary theme of education reform should not be class-size reduction. Instead, the focus should be on improving teacher quality. Stricter hiring and promotion standards for teachers should be coupled with higher teacher salaries. It is wasteful to spend money on all students when the greater benefits of class-size reduction only accrue to disadvantaged or special-needs children. How can we improve education in the United States so that the new century will not end as the last did, with the United States falling consistently behind other countries in student performance? The answer, in a nutshell, centers on teachers. Without improving the average quality of our teachers, there is little hope of improving the system. The evidence suggests that child behavior is very sensitive to teacher quality. Data from the Texas Department of Education provide authoritative evidence that good teachers improve the quality of the classroom experience and raise performance scores. The biggest obstacle here is that teacher quality is not closely related to any characteristic on which salaries are based. The solution is to have a large pool of applicants, a flexible turnover policy based on teacher performance, and higher teacher salaries to attract the pool and compensate for a reduction in job security. More competition is needed in the educational arena.

Allowing a choice, so that students could move from failing schools to more successful ones, would be helpful. The money could follow the students, allowing failing schools to be replaced by more successful administrators and teachers, who would take over the same physical classrooms.

To conclude, we need to improve our education system. And in order to improve our schools in the twenty-first century, it is first necessary to attract more high-quality teachers. This can only be done by improving their compensation and by introducing a type of marketplace accountability into the system. Competition should be allowed to prevail so that the weak aspects of the educational establishment can be eliminated. Enabling the best part—talented, well-prepared teachers—to flourish. We need to implore the governor and our senators to re-instate those funds that have been cut from our education system. Those funds are needed to acquire the good teachers, like Mr. Plumb of Pueblo Del Sol Elementary School which I have spoken about.

“Teach a child HOW to think, not WHAT to think.” - Sidney Sugarman