Teachers teaching teachers-to-be

After my rant about auctioneering chants a couple of days ago I started thinking again about one of my ‘pet peeves’ in Education – students, loving a subject and the way it is taught, growing up to teach that subject in the same way they learned it. It spells doom for anyone not naturally inclined!

For example, in my experience people who ‘get’ math easily – and grow up to teach it – are already attuned to it in a way that the rest of us are not. It never bothers them that the ‘language’ of math is incomprehensible to those of us who love Language.

All the “therefore it clearly follows that…” statements in math texts left me frustrated that I didn’t follow ANY of it, clearly or otherwise. (Saying it is "clear" doesn't make it so.) “Let x be…” is never a statement I’d read willingly.

Math teachers (MY math teachers at least) never understand the challenges those things pose to their non-math-inclined students. They just keep right on teaching – and eventually authoring textbooks – according to time-honored tradition. I guess they just assume that the rest of us are idiots if we don't understand.

PE teachers are even worse! Surely they became PE teachers because they loved, and did well in, PE. (Why else would anyone do such a thing?) They are zealots about sports and exercise. And they just don’t understand why they can’t promote Lifetime Fitness by making their uncoordinated, fat and out of shape students run 3 miles in the heat on the first day of school. They make kids sick instead – and there never will be a Fitness Devotee who exercises because it makes him or her feel sick.

(And it would have saved my sisters and I a lot of getting-hit-in-the-face-with-the-ball if some PE teacher had just taken the time to explain about eye-hand coordination instead of just yelling "keep your eye on the ball" at us. We honestly couldn't imagine how that would help!)

Aspiring teachers should be encouraged to teach the subject they DIDN'T do well in. That’s what I think.