"For a first year teacher, all you have to remember is that - according to your employers - a quiet classroom is a good classroom. Just keep them quiet and you won't get performance-reviewed. Some of the kids may not like you, and they will complain about you to their parents, but when the parents complain to the Principal/Executive, the Principal will diffuse it because your classes are quiet."


The above is a paraphrase of a caller to a radio talkback show about why there is a shortage of teachers in every country in the world.

I think it speaks to the heart of the problem.

To keep a classroom quiet you basically have two options:

1. Coersion

2. Engagement


For a first year teacher, especially in the first weeks of the first year, you basically have one option:

1. Coersion

When you first begin teaching, you are a stranger with a modicum of hand-me-down authority, seeking to accomplish educational goals in a complex, partially dysfunctional, social environment. The students will test you. The other staff will test you. The parents - judging you from their own, often unhappy, school experience from the 50's through to the 90's - will test you.

If you're going to keep teaching, you've got to pass.

Your task is to bring order to chaos. You can't simply coerce. If too much time is taken up with coersion then all the other educational objectives fall by the wayside, and you are not only back at square one, you are seen to be back at square one.

Teacher shortage? The reality is that teacher education is turning out idealistic education theorists/young experts who find that their idealism must take a back seat to being a cop, sometimes never to return.





[edit on 11-7-2008 by undermind]

Agreed 100%

Basically, I find it in-humane to force 27 kids in a classroom and expect them to learn.

When 27 young people are in a room, you MUST play police man and make rules, management routines, policy, etc........you're a sheriff on the I-15...you catch the one or two speeders, and the rest seem to fall into place.

But, WHY do we stick 30 kids in a classroom. In reality, the "hidden curriculum" teaches kids to sit still, behave, be quiet, .......or else!!!