Teaching Issue

The teaching issue that I am most interested in is the high teacher drop out rate. This was my concern when we needed to choose a teaching issue for our School of Education interview. The NEA has stated that many of the first year teachers drop out because of various reasons. They feel that there are ill prepared, they feel overwhelmed, they feel overworked and underpaid, and sometimes they don’t feel welcome. I thought this was a horrible issue, I had no idea that many teachers felt this way or went trough this. From what I found it consists of a lot of teachers: “US studies into attrition show that nearly one-third of new US teachers drop out in their first year and that education authorities there have poured millions of dollars into induction programs to deal with the problem hoping to retain more teachers to work in the already under-resourced education sector.” I think part of this issue is that the teachers really are excited and ready to go out there and teach but they just don’t know what it is really like until they are all by themselves. I also feel that some teachers don’t have a good support system to back them up. In anything it is important to have people behind you but especially in teaching because you can’t tell the students and you always have to appear happy. So you need people you can talk to. In pedagogy I had to teach a lesson on how to become an effective veteran teacher and it gave a lot of good tips to battle this issue. The key topic of that lesson is that teaching is not a private practice. We are in the business of helping so in essence we help other people and we have to let other people help us. We have to talk with our colleagues to gain advice and help and maybe just a listening ear. The lesson also said that how the word “location” is important to real estate agents, the word “listen” is very important to teachers. If we just listen to others we will be better off. I also feel that the School of Education program is very helpful with this issue. When we do our O & P and the student teaching we actually get to see what it is like out in the real teaching world. Because I think I would be a little overwhelmed just graduating and then being pushed out into the schools. In short I think it is very sad that so many people drop out of teaching because it should be your passion if you went through all the schooling just to be a teacher. I hope that there will be better ways to combat this issue and that it will be solved. Thanks for reading some of my ideas.