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<p>Search engines are your friend. What does the U in UTEP stand for?</p>
<p>I sincerely doubt that a Harvard education or any degree from a specific school is going to create a good teacher (based on the many teachers that I know).</p>
<p>^ Bottom line is that Harvard and all its competitors dump thousands of unskilled liberal-arts grads on the job market each year, and having a teacher certification path is one of the few options the universities can offer to sweeten the pill. The alternative is for the older, postgraduate, wage slave versions of the same students to (literally) pay dues in expensive, zero financial aid, night school on top of full time job, Teacher Ed master’s programs. Lots of those unskilled Latin-festooned degree holders recognize the wisdom of attaining licensure at no extra cost before they graduate, which is why nearly every major university has a certification-atop-bachelor’s program.</p>
<p>^^teacher training and credentials are a post graduate program. you don’t get teacher training or certification in undergraduate school, state or Harvard.</p>
<p>buddy of mine got his undergraduate degree from Harvard and his elementary teacher training/credential from Chapman. now he’s headmaster at a new elementary school. And his Harvard education and Harvard pedigree has helped him enormously in setting the educational curriculum and attracting families to the school.</p>
<p>^^This is a bit different than a goal of being an elementary school teacher.</p>
<p>DocT: so you see no difference between, say a Stanford educated elementary school teacher and say a Arkansas State educated elementary school teach. total flip of a coin for you as to which classroom you’d drop your kid off to?</p>
<p>^^i thought I’d give Harvard a break and switch to Stanford:)</p>
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<p>That is completely incorrect. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and on down the list, have teacher training and certification programs for undergraduates. To repeat: search engines are your friend.</p>
<p>"DocT: so you see no difference between, say a Stanford educated elementary school teacher and say a Arkansas State educated elementary school teach. total flip of a coin for you as to which classroom you’d drop your kid off to? "</p>
<p>Absolutely not!!! The most important aspect of being an elementary school teacher is dedication and the ability to deal with children. I wouldn’t even look at the degree. Teachers have reputations that are very easy to determine. This is not rocket science.</p>
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<p>In olden times when the village schoolteachers were the local intellectuals, or in the days when teacher was the most mentally demanding profession available to women, you might have had a point. In the long interval from then to now, the “dedicated babysitters suffice” philosophy has caused (and continues to cause) extraordinary damage when applied in the US public school system.</p>
<p>^^woops you’re right, you can get credentialed as an ug.</p>
<p>docT: the question of Arkansas vs Stanford teacher is only valid with no other inputs. with out knowing anything else other than the teachers ug education which classroom do you drop johnny off at? Stanford or Arkansas???</p>
<p>In the absence of knowing anything else, who would you prefer to coach the Lakers: Phil Jackson or Kobe Bryant?</p>
<p>Phil Jackson as an NBA player (and his career was about as long as Kobe’s) was known mainly for his intelligence. Do you think that had something to do with his later success as a teacher of basketball? Of successful teachers in sports who didn’t play professionally, Bill Belichick comes to mind, and there again the critical variable appears to be intelligence. Stanford or Arkansas, indeed.</p>
<p>i’m at sea…Phil went to UND, Bill to Wesleyan, and Kobe didn’t go to college.</p>
<p>who’s Stanford and who’s Arkansas?</p>
<p>Greetings CC community</p>
<p>My first post on CC gets back to the original question; I choose to start with this thread because my response is applicable to many other threads/concerns posted on these boards. </p>
<p>Your friend is the best person to answer her own question, and this may take years. Others can post their opinions based on, for the most part, personal values applied to an intellectual exercise. In the meantime, your friend has chosen based on her own values and specific life circumstances. </p>
<p>Here is a life philosphy which has served me well since I came to this country many years ago as a child: Move steadily ahead with your decisions and learn to trust yourself. Fortunately, your friend’s choice is between two tenable options which each present pros and cons, not between two starkly disparate opportunities. Both choices are moving in the positive direction of enriching her with a valuable education. Choice-making (and making the most out of the decision) is a good life experience as she will face it again and again: grad school, life partner, career choice. Doggedly wondering “What if…” takes energy and enthusiasm away from present experiences.</p>
<p>Keep moving forward, work VERY hard, pursue good mentors and intellectual challenges. Keep chasing down opportunities which will enrich your life and do so with positivity and openness. These are the ways to meet with success, whatever your college choice or career path. We are fortunate to live in a country where opportunities in personal and professional life abound. A UVM education will not cut you off from them. Pursue opportunities which lie ahead, spend your energies towards making your self and your life extraordinary.</p>
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<p>DocT implied that practitioner (“Kobe”) and instructor (“Phil”) are different skill sets. </p>
<p>The fallacy in his question is that there isn’t much difference between teaching and practice as long as you don’t go to extreme-outlier levels of performance (NBA, NFL), and as long as you also impose some basic threshold for both sets of skills (keep genius PhD out of the classroom if he can’t teach his way out of a paper bag). </p>
<p>At the elementary and high school level, study after study has reinforced an idea that was considered obvious for most of human history: that the main determinants of instructional efficacy (how much are student outcomes elevated by having teacher A rather than teacher B) are the teachers’ intelligence and subject-matter proficiency. At the very top levels — see Phil and Bill examples above — everyone has expert knowledge of the subject matter, so intelligence becomes a clearer distinguishing factor (at least in areas like sports, that don’t directly select for mental ability as you go up the food chain, thus keeping a wider range of IQ’s in play). </p>
<p>Either way, Arkansas elementary ed major versus Stanford subject-matter degree holder is not a difficult choice, all else being equal or equally unknown. It is also clear how the high-performing public and private schools make that choice. The low-performing schools don’t have the choice, because of what you might call Stanford brain drain into the more elite placements.</p>
<p>Yes subject matter material knowledge is very useful particularly at the elementary school level which is the topic. Whats the implication here - that an Arkansas graduate doesn’t know arithmetic, spelling or the alphabet?? We are not talking about difficult subject matter material but the ability to teach. Unfortunately there are a lot of highly intelligent people who do not have that ability - just ask a lot of students at Stanford or Harvard. Why are we talking about Stanford on the Harvard site by the way??</p>
<p>By the way intelligence in this case is a moot point. The discussion revolves around an individual who was intelligent enough to get into Harvard.</p>
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<p>An Arkansas elementary-education graduate almost certainly doesn’t know what is needed, no. In theory, the state school teacher prep courses could teach what’s needed. In reality, none of them do, and they work with a pool of students that has among the lowest SAT scores (including in math) of those they enroll. </p>
<p>For extensive documentation of this point and its effects on instruction, see the Li Ma book on math teacher preparation in the US and China. The far better math teaching in China is done by people who don’t generally have college degrees at all, but they do have much more subject matter competence than is found in the US. Elementary school math is not as simple as you think. I suspect that the same is true for language and reading.</p>
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<p>I believe the average salary last year of harvard grads was upwards of $60K and that aside from those going on to grad school, there was virtually 100 percent employment. I suppose you know something the rest of us don’t and that those going to grad school are desperately trying to get accredited as teachers. I have no official documentation on this, but my sense is that the majority are doing professional programs in medicine, law and business at the top programs in the land.</p>
<p>The sheer selectivity of Harvard and its peers gives their graduates a leg up in virtually every employement or post-grad academic setting throughout their lives. Even the “unskilled liberal-arts” grads who will usually be found setting educational policy rather than teaching in the elementary classroom.</p>