Teacher Training and Education and the Need for Individualized Education

Argument for the reform of teachers and their role in the schools and their training.

A typical Finnish teacher teaches just under 600 hours a year, whereas the average American teacher teaches students over 1,600 hours annually. According to a recent Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation-sponsored study of the teaching profession, U.S. teachers habitually work an average of about 10 hours and 40 minutes a day, with a great deal of time spent teaching and supervising students.

Finnish teacher, “Our teachers who teach languages for which many essays have to be graded often have fewer lessons,” Marianna said. “And they can decide on their own where they get that work done. They may teach two lessons one day and then go home or to the gym around noon — and then correct papers or work online with students later in the evening.”

With so many ideas and reforms and tests and strategies, it is my belief that teaching is getting more and more away from why many teachers went into teaching in the first place. I wanted to be a teacher for the love of sharing ideas, connecting with students, looking at what motivates my students what ignites their fires. As the great educational leader Sir. Ken Robinson so eloquently and simply stated, “teaching is an art form not a delivery system.” The obstacles that teachers face today the negative images that are attached to education and teachers in the USA is toxic to the educational system. According to Kelly Mc Gonigal in The Willpower Challenge, even the mention of negative stereotypes and images can weaken a persons self confidence in put them into a negative state of mind along with depleting their willpower.

I have been out of the classroom for almost three years now. I have spent my time studying and volunteering in my kids’s classroom in international schools. I have seen various nationalities and their perceptions and expectations revolving around education, teachers and children and I have come back to my original thesis, which is we need to educate the individual not the masses.