One post, two trains of thought.

I was just reading Jessie Bindrim’s blog post, teacher unions: to be or not to be, which I found to be very interesting and informative. Teacher unions are something that I have thought about, and had conversations about, quite a few times, and I tend to agree with Jessie that they may not be the best thing for education. However, the issue is really a double-edged sword. I have a friend who is in his first year of teaching in a middle school, and over the summer we, along with two other more experience teachers, had a discussion about unions when he had to make the decision as to whether or not he would join the union at his new school. His reasons for not wanting to join were moral reasons regarding unions having agendas that did not always prioritize what was best for students. However, the legal protection offered by the teacher union ended up being too good to pass up. One of the two experienced teachers, who teachers fifth grade, told us how he was so grateful to be a union member because of an issue of one of his students accessing an inappropriate website during his class. He preempted any backlash by making a call to his union rep, and the union ended up handling the situation before it became a big problem. The other teacher was a middle school teacher, and one year during his career a student wrongly accused him of inappropriate behavior, which led to potentially harmful rumors travelling around the school. His union provided him with legal protection and ended up saving his career and reputation. After hearing these testimonies, Bill ended up choosing to join the union despite his personal disagreements with the institution, because ultimately he needed to protect himself. Personally I think it is unfortunate that teachers should be forced to make these kinds of decisions.

Moving on, I had a completely different idea about the topic of this blog before I checked in with my Google Reader. So, I’ll discuss that now. A few nights ago I was talking about jobs to an engineering friend of mine, and he said “if things don’t work out I might use teaching as my fallback.” He then proceeded to tell me about his high school physics teacher, who had been an aerospace engineer, but made a mistake which resulted in some sort of multi-million dollar accident and got himself blacklisted in the industry. So, he became a teacher. I don’t think this friend of mine realized how those comments would sound to me, as I am dedicating four years of my life and a great amount of (my parent’s) money to learn how to do his back-up plan. But seriously, ouch.  I have an unfortunate tendency to overanalyze just about everything, and these comments certainly got me wondering why I am here at Penn State in the College of Education, working hard so I can enter the career that a person who failed in their area of expertise fell back into? For a while, I was a little disheartened.

Then I realized that it doesn’t matter. I, and all of my classmates, am here because I want to be a teacher. I think that I will be a good teacher, and I work hard here so that hopefully it will pay off in my career and I will be a great teacher. New teachers coming out of the College of Education will likely be more excited and more enthusiastic about teaching than those who are entering teaching because their first plan didn’t work out, so we will already have a leg up. We will have been preparing for our careers for four years, and will be armed with information from courses and field experiences that far exceed the general teacher certification requirements. As long as we are happy in our jobs, and being the best teachers we can be, who cares if someone else is getting the same job without the same training? We will hopefully be satisfied with where we have come to and where we are going, without comparing our own paths there to the paths our colleagues may have taken.