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.