Why I Will Not Become a Teacher

My teacher preparation program culminated with ten weeks of student teaching in an urban public high school. As a student teacher, I felt I did things to contradict my philosophy of education by selecting material and dictating activities and outcomes for my students. These tasks were required of me as essential components to the successful completion of the program. Therefore I chose to create a curriculum unit and lesson plans that I felt were viable for a traditional classroom as it existed in the school in which I was teaching, but also retained some of the underlying elements of my vision of myself as a facilitator as opposed to a teacher. The idea of teacher as facilitator or "coach" stems from the book Freedom to Learn, in which the authors, Rogers and Freiberg, assert that "teaching is...a relatively unimportant and vastly overrated activity," and that the process of "imparting knowledge makes sense [only] in an unchanging environment" which the present United States is certainly not (151,152). In the society in which we now live, change is continuous, and Rogers and Freiberg argue that in this environment, "the only person who is educated is the person who has learned how to learn; the person who has learned how to adapt and change; the person who has realized that no knowledge is secure, that only the process of seeking knowledge gives a basis for security" (152). Thus, the teacher, school, or state-mandated curriculum becomes irrelevant, in that the content of subject based classes is static and therefore not useful to the students who today live in a dynamic, global society. The role of the teacher becomes not to pass on information or knowledge, but to facilitate the students' attempts at learning how to seek knowledge independently.

This is the framework which I utilized in developing a curriculum unit for the eleventh grade students with whom I did my student teaching practicum. Though I had chosen the materials and activities, the main thrust of the curriculum unit required students to seek knowledge independently through research, interactions with peers and myself, and through the process of writing about their experiences as learners. In this way, the students who participated in this curriculum unit should have been learning about learning, with the subject matter as a changeable conduit. I was teaching concrete skills about how to access information in the world they live in, as they explored the library, internet resources, and personal interactions. These skills are more valuable to students than knowledge of any given content area, in that once students have the skills to find and access materials, the potential for learning is boundless.

However, in my student teaching experience I did not find I could integrate my philosophical stance effectively into the already established classroom culture. When I attempted to teach in a traditional way, such as lecturing, I felt the students learned some, though more frequently I felt the concept of investment in the outcome of a piece of work was choked by a lack of choice for the learner, and the work was consequently mechanical, forced, and minimal. Yet when I attempted to let students learn independently or from working with their peers, I was met with apathy, resistance, and was accused by my students of putting the work on them so that I had to do less work myself.