Why I Will Not Become a Teacher

It is in fact nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom; without this it goes to wrack and ruin without fail.

-Albert Einstein

I have wanted to be a teacher for as long as I can remember. I saw something in my teachers that struck me as amazing, starting with my first grade teacher Ms. Kelly and continuing through my high school English teachers. Helping to guide students through the process of learning, which for me was filled with joy and excitement, seemed like the most important job in the world, and it was what I wanted to do. As I grew older I became more aware of the challenges that teachers face. I looked beyond myself and noticed that some students saw school as painful, difficult, and frustrating, while other students saw school as boring and useless. My enthusiasm for teaching wavered slightly, but I still felt confident that my own passion for learning could heb students rekindle the joy and satisfaction of exploring and discovering new knowledge.

As I entered the Northeastern University teacher preparation program, I felt a renewed sense of commitment to teaching. However once I reached the courses that centered on methods and materials for instruction, and curriculum development, I began to wage an internal battle with myself. All the discussions in class around creating relevant and engaging curriculum units and lesson plans seemed to clash with what we were asked to do. Our assignments called on us to create, for fictional students, arbitrary units and lessons that were so highly structured that they left no room for what I view as authentic learning, the kind of spontaneous exploration that no teacher could have anticipated. The more I was reminded that elaborate lesson plans hold a place in today's accountability-driven educational climate, the more I found myself at odds with the idea of teaching.

My philosophy of education stems greatly from the concept of a personcentered classroom, as written about by Carl Rogers and Jerome Freiberg in Freedom to Learn. This philosophy has been around me throughout my life, as my mother trained to be a person-centered therapist under Carl Rogers, and also worked as a teacher of graduate students pursuing their master's degrees in education. It was only in my own college education however, when there was a conspicuous lack of notice given to humanistic philosophies of education, that I realized I had internalized many aspects of the person-centered approach and had molded my own philosophy of education upon it. Increasingly I saw my philosophy of education and the concept of becoming a teacher as mutually exclusive.

A strong philosophy of education and becoming an effective teacher seem as though they should go hand and hand, and yet they have often been contradictory in my own experience. The current educational climate makes this truer than ever. It had been my experience that teachers had certain obligations to the state and the school, beyond which they choose to run their classroom in a way that suits their philosophy and personality, and the personalities and ages of their students. This is how I thought I would function within a school : creating a classroom molded on my beliefs and convictions about what a positive learning environment should be. However, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is increasingly stepping into the classroom and removing control from the teacher and students. This is in the name of standards and accountability, and carries with it the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS), a series of high-stakes tests for public school students. As a teacher, I would now be obligated to interrupt the natural, student-directed flow of learning in order to cover all the material that students need to know in order to pass the MCAS and graduate from high school. As a result, my philosophy is at odds with teaching, and so is my concept of authentic learning.

A test such as MCAS assumes that learning is synonymous with being taught, an assumption that appears to be the primary in most schools in the United States today (Greenberg 6). The construction of schools today is one in which control - over the selection of material, the duration of time spent studying a subject or topic, and the rate of speed at which new information is processed, is removed from the learner. Robert Fried argues that: "if you believe that adults can 'make' children learn well - in the absence or in defiance of the child's inner sense of confident engagement with the power of discovery and of mastery - then... you are placing that child at great risk of failure as a learner" (243). Yet, the focus of today's educational climate of high-stakes testing as a method of determining whether students are learning or not assumes that teachers can make students learn, and that all students can accurately demonstrate what they have learned on a single test.