School always came relatively easy to me.
While I have never qualified as a “star student” in high school or college, I did well enough to get by. I excelled at the subjects I enjoyed, and I skirted by in the ones that were not so interesting to me.
All in all, it added up to a pretty average GPA when it was all said and done.
Throughout undergraduate college, I bounced between a History major and a Social Science Education major before finally receiving a Journalism degree.
After a few years working in newspapers, I decided to go back and give teaching a try. I had always wanted to be a history teacher, and I had completed about 33 hours of history credits at Delta State while I was there.
So I took the Praxis II exam in social studies and enrolled in one of Delta State’s alternate route programs, the Masters of Arts in Teaching.
I went through a summer of rigorous classwork before I was finally awarded a temporary Mississippi Teacher’s License.
The program called for a one-year internship of teaching before receiving my Masters the following year.
I got a job in a Delta school, and I started my new career.
The problem is that I was utterly worthless in the classroom.
After all of the undergrad education classes, the countless social science and history courses and even a few years of working in the real world, I was completely unprepared for the 181 days –minus all of the personal days I took – I spent in the classroom.
It was a nightmare year for me, but it did teach me some hard lessons.
One lesson is that knowledge of a subject area does not qualify one to be a teacher.
Teaching requires a skillset that is completely separate from whatever subject area one may have excelled in.
I would even say that teaching is a calling, and if one is not called to the profession, that person should not be in the classroom.
Each day I went to work and was cursed at, yelled at, threatened and totally disrespected.
And the kids were bad too.
There wasn’t a lot of support. The administration and the parents seemed equally disinterested in my plight. They had equally and often times worse situations going on themselves.
When it comes to hiring qualified teachers, it is very difficult for principals to sit across the table and judge whether an individual has “the calling” or not.
Most times, the best they can do is hire the person with the best credentials.
But there are many instances when principals do not have a stack of credentialed applicants in front of them, and they must fill a position quickly.
This is the case for many principals in the Mississippi Delta.
If they end up filling too many positions with non-credentialed applicants, they will get in trouble with the Mississippi Department of Education.
A group of Delta education leaders recently asked the state legislature to consider lifting some of the more stringent regulations when it comes to recruiting teaching talent within the state.
For instance, there are some who may have a strong desire to teach, and they may have a degree in a certain subject area, but they lack the resources to go back to school and obtain a teacher’s license.
If a school district does not hire these individuals, out of fear of penalty from the state, this could mean there is teaching talent right there at home going to waste.
I normally would agree that a profession that is responsible for molding young minds should require the highest of standards, but the state of Mississippi has been so hit-and-miss with its own standards that it would be foolish not to let a college graduate – who has a desire to teach – give it a shot.
When I was in school 15 years ago, they were peddling their Critical Shortage incentives to try and get us to teach in the Delta. Then they offered us a Masters degree for teaching a year in the Delta.
Then came the Teach for America educators, but all of these efforts combined have done little to strengthen education in the Delta.
That is why a recent bill put forth by Rep. Orlando Paden, D-Clarksdale, is not that objectionable.
The so-called higher standards that are in place today have done little to move the needle on education in Mississippi - even in areas that are not faced with as much shortage in teacher labor - so why not give a degreed person with an ACT score of at least 18 the opportunity to see if education is their true calling?
They couldn’t be any worse than I was, and I had a five-year license when I left the classroom.
