Teacher's Are Not Professional - My American Life

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/115/first-day

As much as you thought that your teachers knew what was going on in the world, I can tell you, that my first day as a professor, and every first day that I have while being a professor is a giant act. I get paid to lie about the knowledge and experience that I have in he field that I teach.

Let's get this straight, I have a masters degree, and I do have the education.

What I don't have is the knowledge of what in the world is going to be taught next month, what the assignments are going to look like while doing all of that, and most of the time I don't even know what I'm going to be talking about in class in the next class that I'm going to be teaching.

The first semester was/is the worst.

Every single day that I walked into the class I prayed that none of my students would ask me about what was due in two weeks, or the reading assignments that we were working on because I hadn't even read them yet. There's nothing quite like a student coming up to you and telling you that they're going to be absent in a few weeks and that they wanted to know what assignments that they're going to miss out on. The number one answer that I want to give them is, "I don't know! I don't even know what I'm going to be doing by the end of the week." but that isn't exactly what a student wants to hear from their professor.

With talking to other professors about this deal they all say that it's par for the course, that each of them went through something like this. Each one says that they had to go through the trial by fire and that it was the sink or swim type of mentality with teaching, and I didn't understand it.

Let's be clear, this is educators talking about education, and instead of educating each other and helping each other learn about how to be an educator, they drop new members of the group on their head and essentially say, "Good luck! I hope you don't fall on your face!" The worst part about it is that even if I'm screwing up, even if I'm doing everything wrong as an educator, I have no way of knowing if I'm screwing anything up. As long as my students don't go and complain to administration, there's never a single time that my administration will actually sit in my class. Out of all of the time that I've been a professor, there's been one time and only one time, that my adviser has actually sit down in my class. It's a rough go as a first time teacher, and there's no one there trying to give me any support through the process. It's like my first day every single time I walk into the classroom, for an entire semester.