What many people may not know is that I have a degree in Elementary Education. Despite having acquired the degree, I never followed through with the whole Teacher career because I didn’t like the education system. I feel as though the children are not getting the best deal out there but are expected to one day run the world. If the education system stays this way, we are all in trouble. If the people in the high places ever decide to listen to the people actually on ground zero, there might actually be a glimpse of hope. The current approach is unrealistic and clearly not working but from my experience I do have ideas for improvement.
First area of improvement in the education system would have to be testing! My time in the teaching field went something like this: prepare for testing, testing, testing, prepare for more testing, test the testing. The entire curriculum was based on assessments after assessments. Every second there seemed to be a test we had to get the students for. If there is to be any improvement in the school system, they would have to do a dramatic downsize on testing. The amount of pressure on both the teachers and the students to score high on the tests are taking away from them actually having time to learn anything and actually preserve the knowledge. Kids are no longer being taught for their own benefit but rather for numbers and percentiles on a scale.
On the subject of a scale, the pay scale on which teachers’ salaries fall is embarrassing! Teachers would perform better and go the extra mile to educate students if they were not dealing with the emotional strain of not having two pennies to rub together after spending 8 hours in the classroom and another 8 hours after school preparing to do it all over again. Teaching is definitely one of those careers that doesn’t stop when you clock out. Teaching goes home with you and you are never done working. You are given such a demanding task and yet rewarded close to nothing monetarily. I believe raising teacher salaries would improve the education system drastically. The eagerness to fight for the students would be higher and they may actually have a winning chance.
There are a lot of ways the education system could be improved, and I hope one day it is taken seriously and something is done about it. In the meantime, they should focus on the testing and how it hinders teachers from having an effective curriculum, and their wages.