Cut Some Slack for Our New Teachers

Some of my teaching colleagues and I have been looking with amusement at the Chicken Little “the sky is falling!” reaction to the sudden hiring of hundreds of uncredentialed teachers by school districts throughout the state. This upsurge has been caused by the governor’s promise to give extra funds to schools agreeing to limit their K-3 classes to 20 or fewer students, creating a sellers’ market for job-seekers.

The public perception seems to be that districts are scraping the bottom of the barrel, yanking in any relatively sober passerby who is breathing without artificial aid, and that most of these folks are “untrained” and so will be utter failures as teachers.

These negative assumptions need to be examined more closely.

Even with the temporary waiving of the dreaded California Basic Education Skills Test, one must be at least a college graduate even to apply for a teaching job. Moreover, these new hires have held previous jobs in business and industry, in the military and in management as innovators and leaders. These are people who spent years busy at becoming experts at other trades and fields, going back to school or at home raising their own kids. They are walking bodies of experience. College graduates all, risk-takers all, some motivated by the best of all encouragement: hard times and a desire to return to or try outone of the most difficult, stressful, thankless--and rewarding--jobs around. What a rich basis of variety and life-experience there must be, hidden in this mob of applicants.

When I graduated in Indiana decades ago with a double major in English literature and American history, it was during another teacher shortage and I was hired green, without even a moment of student teaching. Over my 36 years in the classroom, I’ve taught every grade level from kindergarten to adult and accumulated more than 70 hours of graduate work in education and related subjects. And I intend to keep on doing it, because I enjoy it. I’m only one of many experienced, knowledgeable teachers who started out “untrained.”

We Californians need to remember our collective past: California has historically been through a continuous string of boom and bust cycles, with waves of job-seekers coming here looking for better times and fresh starts. It is part of our culture.

So, be patient. Keep your eyes and ears open. Give these newcomers a chance to settle down and settle in, carve out their own unique niches in their new endeavor. These much-maligned fresh hires just might have some wonderful surprises in store for us and our children.