Student Teaching Programs are Too Expensive

[alterin]

I have a student teacher this semester, and this post certainly isn’t about how great she is. She’s great. And that’s my last student teacher was great. I was great as a student teacher, and then every now and then, we get a Karen who is not so great. All of these points are not at all the point.

Out of the classes that a teacher-in-training takes in their three and a half years of traditional classes, the only ones that are actually really useful are the classes that they take for their subject matter. Okay, maybe, I’m exaggerating. The first class you take in the field of education is definitely valuable. Notice, I didn’t specify which class that is? Because it doesn’t matter. The other 6-10 classes are generally rehashes of whichever class you take first. But there is one “class” that does matter, and it’s the bane and the jewel of the program.

I mean once your in a classroom. It actually does kind of make sense because when we have in-service days of training, the key is: can you find one thing of value to keep? And if you can find one thing of value in the six to seven hour training day, it wasn’t a waste. So as long as we apply that rule to the entirety of the teacher training curriculum, it’s all good! Right? Right. Kinda. Not really.

 

Holy hell, that was an introduction and I’m not even at the point, yet? Good god.

For a teacher’s student teaching semester, they are paying the school for 15 credit hours, and then they’re still paying all of the other fees that go into a student’s normal semester cost as if they were attending classes on campus. But, they aren’t spending any time on campus nor in labs nor anywhere else. They have one weekly hour long online meet up with their cohort, and then the rest of it is spent with their cooperating teacher.

I have some issues with when this particular program starts their semester (it’s with their start/end not ours!) But ,for the most part, the experience is as good or as great as the student teacher and the cooperating teacher are allowed to make it. I feel like I’m experienced enough to know how much of a leash I need to leave my ST so they’re meeting all of the requirements of their program and their supervisor, but most importantly, they are getting the very valuable experience that they need from it.

It’s incredibly satisfying for me, and I hope my ST would agree. All of that is great. All of that works.

The problem is compensation are the lack thereof. And I have three different stories about how this works.

I student taught in 2016 (coincidentally, all three of us went through the same program). When I student taught, I was in my early 30s, so I had all of the money issues that someone going to school has at that age: rent, car payment, car insurance, food, etc. I worked my butt off prior to student teaching, so I had as much money in savings as I could. I used student loans to pay for my semester, and I even got a little extra to help with bills. PSLF horror stories soonish

With all of that, I was forced to subsidize the rest of living with credit card debt. You cannot student teach and work a second job. Student teaching is a full time and then some job. With experience as a teacher, you can eventually find extra time for these things, but the demands of this job-- unit planning, lesson planning, grading, communicating with families, collaborating with other teachers, and the constant micro decisions that you have to make when dealing with 100 different teenagers or younger kids-- all take a huge toll. It is a full time and then some job.

My first student teacher had a much better experience. She, like a much smarter more well adjusted person, went to college immediately after high school. She also was an alumni of my very amazing school which gave her a bit of a head start on college. So, she was young which meant she lived with her parents which helps with a lot of the expenses. Someone with power, finally, actually, amazingly, noticed that hey maybe this make a student pay to work full time, internship for a job that is generally underpaid is well, bullshit. (I teach ELA. I should diagram and fix that sentence, but I won’t.) So, she received a stipend for her services.

My current student teacher falls somewhere between us in the age range category. She doesn’t live with her parents, but from what she offered, it sounds like she has a live in partner that is supportive. And unfortunately, the revenue sources to offer student teachers a stipend don’t exist anymore (You can guess why). The person who decided that maybe they should get a stipend is fighting for it, but the last time I checked it wasn’t secured. There’s still a possibility! But as we’re half way in, and I at least haven’t heard anything, it’s probably not happening. I could be wrong about this for this year. I think it’s important that I keep a certain mentor/mentee relationship with my student teacher, and as she hasn’t brought up finances, I will stick to my lane, as I believe I should.

The student teacher experience is incredibly valuable. I think it’s the one teaching class that actually works. You learn not only the ins and outs of a semester, but you also learn a little bit about how the politics of the building work. I can’t stress how little the politics of the building come into conversations about education. And, the idea that it should be much more centered in this conversation is an idea to explore at another time. It puts the things that you learned in your first teaching class, and then revisited multiple times without real context, into context and practice.

There’s also something to be said about alternative ways of going about this. But the system itself is only broken when it comes to: How is the student teacher supposed to survive their unpaid internship? I’m not a fan of unpaid internships in any field, but I can at least understand it when it comes to something with a lot more earning potential.