Word: conant
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Dangerous Misunderstanding. Conant calls this "a national scandal," and he has a solution: take the wraps off the 1,150 colleges that train teachers in the U.S., give future teachers a real academic education, and make practice teaching, not fusty education courses, the key to certification. Only by this "radical" reform, says Conant, will U.S. classrooms get qualified teachers...
...that guide state edu cation departments in setting certification rules, which in turn dictate college curriculums. In recent years the establishment has tightened the rules - nobly, it believes - to stress subject matter and a trend toward five years of teacher training. But this is not necessarily an improvement, says Conant. The same education courses remain, while the establishment, with "frightening rigidity," endorses only "approved programs" -most of them academically anemic...
...Pathetic" is Conant's word for most required foundation courses. Tidbit surveys, such as philosophy of education, "leave the future teacher with the most dangerous of misunderstandings: that he knows what he is talking about when, in fact, he does not." Worse, Conant found in college after college that "members of a subject-matter department (English or chemistry, for example) were totally unfamiliar with what was going on in the schools and couldn't care less." The same went for supervision of practice teaching in "even the best institutions...
Opium Smokers. While certification rules distort college curriculums, the ultimate irony is that half-educated teachers are later thrown into fields not their own. This is how most states "solve" the teacher shortage. Conant "contemplates with horror" the fact that 34% of all seventh-and eighth-grade mathematics classes are taught by teachers whose college training covered less than two elementary courses in the subject. Concludes Conant: "The policy of certification based on the completion of state-specified course requirements is bankrupt...
Equally bankrupt is the widespread policy of giving teachers a raise every time they pass a course after hours-any course, including "Mickey Mouse" guts like driver education. "I just love taking courses," one teacher told Conant. "I could keep on taking courses all my life." Says Conant: "I felt as if I were talking to opium smokers...