Tonight, I presented my final assignment in my final class in my Masters of Education (Curriculum and Instruction) program. WHEW! But before we start breaking out the champagne, in order to receive my masters degree, I still have to study for and pass a comprehensive exam that I will take in late March.
Also, my GI Bill doesn't run out until June, so I will take a couple more undergrad courses this winter and spring in order to pad my unit count so I can move over on my district salary schedule; that, and the undergrad courses are history/social science and not the dreadfully dull education classes that I had to endure. There is nothing so empty and meaningless than college courses in education - they have no substance to them. It is as if the professors and authors just pull stuff out of their keesters as they go along. I was reminded of this last fall when I filled an empty term in my masters schedule with an undergrad class on the Constitution. After five classes in a row of education theory and philosophy - much of it written by people who barely worked in a classroom - here I was sitting in this Constitution class, learning something of actual substance. It felt good. Then it was back to the fluff of education classes. But now, my last class is over, and I am excited to start my undergrad class in a few weeks; this one is on medieval European history! Now we're talkin'!
I swear, once my GI Bill runs out and I finish those undergrad classes in June, my plan is to never darken the door of a college classroom again. I am burned out on being a student; I want to go back to just being a teacher.
Good Day to You, Sir
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free... it expects what never was, and never will be." --Thomas Jefferson
4 comments:
I know exactly what you mean about being burned out on being a student. I've been working at the credentialing process (two credentials) for the past five years. Like you, once it's over, I don't intend to go back to college ever again. I am not against learning. I am against so-called learning that one has to do simply to satisfy credentialing requirements. A wise colleague, a teacher of some three decades, told me along the way: "All this stuff you're having to do is BS. You won't learn how to be a teacher until you have a classroom of your own." How right she was!
What is this test of which you speak?
Rather than a thesis paper, my program requires a comprehensive exam that addresses anything we have studied in the program. From what I hear, the exam takes about 4 hours.
I actually find the whole idea about this exam to be rather amusing. We teachers are constantly told that we must not teach with the "drill and kill" style, that we must have our students "learn how to learn" and not memorize any set information, that it is more important to be able to look something up than to recall it from memory. All of this was definitely addressed in my Masters program.
So why is it that I must answer these exam questions from rote memory of the material, and I may not have any reference notes with me during the exam? I guess these constructivist teaching techniques are good for other schools, but not Chapman University.
You want to talk about dull? Try CLAD. I am an old person within 4 1/2 years of retirement, and I must take 12 units of this drivel to continue teaching for that period of time. Waste, waste, waste!
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