What Factors Really Set Apart Our Educational Differences?

So yesterday when our class' counselor came in to talk about our futures and plans in life, I heard an interesting statement made by her. It went more or less along the lines of:

"Those who want to be teachers don't go to good colleges because they don't want to spend that much money if they just wanted to be a teacher."

I found that to be true for most cases in American schools (of course with exceptions). Our school has a lot of teachers from lesser state schools like Portland State or Central Washington and schools like that. They are also usually teachers in their late 30s to 40s who teaches (first) just for the sake of getting paid rather than teaching kids. That's why there have been teacher strikes so big to the point that school gets cancelled and teachers from all over the state rally at the state capital. What kind of example does that show? Are they encouraging us to have a strike on eating lunch so that they can increase our lunch time? Because that's the example that teachers here show.

Furthermore, there are teachers (well respected teachers) who retire (even though they still had a good decade or so of teaching in them) just to come back and be a substitute teacher because they get better pay in most cases. This is a smart plan to have a better work-pay ratio, but who does it benefit? This shows how a lot of teachers here basically put their paycheck before their students.

This is where one of the main respects to the teachers in Shanghai (there are again a few exceptions). The teachers in Shanghai have not complained nearly as much about their paycheck than the ones in America have. There are more than plenty of teachers who have had a very good college education coming from top schools including Yale, Cornell, Northwestern, and the UCs. A lot of them come right after undergrad at the age of 22.

Sure they're young and are able to relate to the students more, but they are also much better paragons just as a whole--sometimes due to the fact that they are so young. Of the teachers who have left the school in Shanghai, many have gone off to good graduate schools including Tufts and Georgetown to continue with their education. This is where a lot of the respect comes from. A lot of the teachers are also still students studying to get into graduate school. We study for the SATs as they study for their GREs, LSATs, MCATs etc.

The teachers in Shanghai may not be the most experienced teacher or the best at hammering information into your head, but they are good teachers because they teach us how to be good students and also be able to help teach others at the same time by actually doing it themselves. This allows us to give no excuses that what teachers want from us is impossible and irrational.

All this talk about education reform in America is fine, but one major aspect that they haven't really been picking up is the teachers' characters and the example that they portray not just in the classroom, but ouside of it as well.

And just as a side note, one education reform that I think should be added is corporal punishment. I mean, that would definately motivate people to do well and also it's a good way of shaping people up. This would also then reduce the number of students joining boot camps and possibly even close down some boot camp sites and save a lot of tax dollars that could be either used somewhere else, or returned to the payers by lowering taxes.