Reply to Fairfax Co. teachers can’t afford to live near where they work, report finds

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]So what? Neither can I. It  took me an hour and 44 mins to get to work this morning. And I have significantly more education than most teachers. [/quote]

71% of FCPS teachers hold at least a Masters degree. Many have more than one advanced degree.

I’m curious… what’s your education background? [/quote]

Np. They don't need it. I'm all for paying teachers more, but they should be paid more because it's a hard job, not because they have an unnecessary masters degree.[/quote]

That is not true. My undergrad degree was in the subject area that I teach and my masters degree was in education. [b]My masters degree is how I learned how to be a teacher. So it was very necessary. [/b]Many middle and high school teachers I know are similar. We didn’t study education in undergrad eirher because we went to small LAC that didn’t offer a bachelors in education or bc we didn’t know at that time that we wanted to be teachers.

-high school history teacher. [/quote]

Ok. Then we should start requiring a master's in education for all teachers. [/quote]

Many states do! Generally you have 5 years after you start teaching to get the masters.

The issue is that you legally can’t teach public school without education coursework (they’ve made exceptions with provisional licenses for this severe shortage, but even then you have to be done in 3 years).

If you major in education for undergrad, great, maybe (probably) the masters is silly. If you major in math or art or chemistry like my colleagues and I did though, those don’t automatically translate into being a good teacher. The education courses, while certainly not a mental challenge like my math degree, were really necessary to prepare me to teach. How do you structure a 90 minute lesson to capture multiple ability levels, engage kids who hate your subject, check for understanding multiple times, and assess learning? How do you take a list of 65 poorly worded state standards and order them/structure them/pace them out to insure no one gets left behind when you have no curriculum? How do you build an entire 90 minute lesson (or 6) on “the student will transform rational functions” when that’s all you have to go on—there are no resources?  My degree in math didn’t teach me any of that.

I wish the education classes had been all taught by current teachers. They were professors who had been out of the classroom 10 years so that was challenging.[/quote]

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