I think the world would be a much better place if teaching was not allowed to be a first career. I think personal experiences contribute to self-improvement and that someone fresh out of college just doesn’t have a deep enough well of wisdom to be giving out meaningful advice or teaching memorable lessons. All of the teachers I’ve ever encountered that were very young were not spectacular.
I think it is crucial for a teacher to know and understand personality typing. If one doesn’t know how people differ in their learning styles, they will only ever appeal to the single style of learning that they know. I am a hands-on learner, and the education system was a drag for me because it largely relies on conceptual learning that is not hands-on.
I have four immediate positive memories from my 17 or so years of public education that truly stand out. In sixth grade, my teacher took us out to a grassy field behind the school and let me bisect angles in chalk and draw lines out there to make a volleyball court. It was the first time within the public school system that theory was practically applied to a real world, tangible problem. In high school, I had two great biology teachers – one fed a pet bass live mice which was pretty darn cool, and the other took us down to a nearby stream to take water samples and test water quality. In college, I asked a calculus professor to let us do a hands on project to apply the stuff we were learning – he told us to calculate the angle at which light must enter a water droplet to form a rainbow. It wasn’t the kind of hands-on project I had in mind (I wanted to build something) but considering how theoretical mathematicians are and how little professors regard good teaching skills, I think that was pretty generous of him.
I had one extraordinarily bad experience in those 17 years. That was being thrown out of a lab for no reason and with no warning while trying to do a project. One faculty member even suggested that the reason I had been treated so poorly and unjustly was because I was not technically a student within that department (and yet we were all within the same college), that faculty politics was the reason I was being denied an educational opportunity. All I needed to finish my project was a few square feet of space in their lab to store things for another week or so – they confiscated this space without warning one day and refused to budge. I terminated the project and have never been so disgusted in my entire life. I will not be donating any funds to that college, ever. They have lost all of my respect.