Teacher Training

    There has been a lot of criticism of American Schools, K thru 12 and college.  Some things we ought to keep in mind.  The Catholics run very good parochial schools at very reasonable costs.  We sent our three children to parochial schools and the experience was good.  The public schools should take notes.

   I did Framingham public school up thru 9^th grade and then Westtown Friends School and then college and finally the Air Force.  I had pretty good teachers all the way.  There were a couple of duds, Miss Waters and Miss Coyne, but the rest were all fair to very good.  But the best teachers I had in all that time were in the Air Force.  USAF ran Field Training Detachments (FTD) to teach aircraft maintenance, airborne radar, jet engines, fire control, guided missiles, instruments, electrical systems, lots of good stuff.  The teachers of this stuff were really good.  They were just flight line mechanics, pulled right off the flight line and run thru a three week “How to teach FTD” course.  None of them had ever been to college.  But they were good.  They knew their stuff, backward and forward. Their classes were all teenage boys, who could be troublesome.  The FTD instructors never had any trouble with student discipline.  The students all knew they had to pass the FTD courses in order to get promoted from apprentices to journeymen, so an instructor’s invitation to a troublesome student to leave the class was effective.  

   My take away from the Air Force was two things.  The students had to know the material was essential, and the teacher had to know the material cold. 

   Which to my mind means prospective teachers ought to major in stuff they need to teach, like English, history, mathematics, foreign language, physics, chemistry, biology?  Not “education”.  My college roommate wanted to teach after graduation so he majored in “education”.  He told me it was the most worthless, boring major imaginable, and he only put up with it to get a job teaching in the public schools.  After watching the FTD instructors do a super job with just a three week “How to be an FTD instructor” course I can believe that. 

  American education would be better if we scrapped the “education” major entirely.