4 ms·
I was a history major in college before joining Teach For America as a chemistry and physics teacher. That pivot often surprises and confuses people -- and is o
by eastbayjake 10y ago
I was a history major in college before joining Teach For America as a chemistry and physics teacher. That pivot often surprises and confuses people -- and is occasionally a reason they criticize TFA -- but I think it was done deliberately and for good reason: as a history expert I would have relied much more on my abstractions while teaching history than I did teaching chemistry/physics I had to re-learn from my high school notes and my students' textbook.
- e2e8 10y agoBut then the students might as well just read the textbook. I had in high school, physics PhDs for physics and math and it was the best experience of my educational life. The much deeper level of understanding they brought to bear allowed them convey the material more clearly and also draw our attention to deeper connections with more advanced topics.
- eastbayjake 10y agoYou should bear in mind that: (1) At the high school level, for most students, a teacher's value-add is diagnosing and remediating misunderstandings. It's odd that we expect high school teachers to create curricula from scratch when it'd be better for a highly-optimized lecture (e.g. celebrated teacher recording a video lecture) to convey knowledge to lots of students and let teachers focus on the high-touch, one-on-one work of figuring out what individual students are misunderstanding and working with them to correct it. (2) Teach For America works with students who are often far behind national standards. My students in Mississippi had one year of science between 5th and 9th grade, so most of the nuance of a physics PhD would have been wasted on remediating things like basic atomic structure. My anecdote is particular to a very low-performing region.