JMTeach

Unlike most of you, I dislike this essay. I think it is cynical, hard, jaded, and in many cases, ironically full of untruths. As a public school teacher, the part that outraged me was the following quote: "The sad fact is, US public school teachers don't generally understand the stuff they're teaching very well. There are some sterling exceptions, but as a rule people planning to go into teaching rank academically near the bottom of the college population." At my school, most of our teachers were at the very top of our college populations, ranking in the top 5% of our graduating classes. The exceptions (the ones who went into teaching because they had no other options and thought it was "easy") are few and far between. Most of us have master's degrees, and several have doctorate's. To say that most teachers do not know their subjects well is simply untrue; sure, there are exceptions, but there are engineers, journalists, doctors, and authors who are only subpar. In an essay arguing for the truth, this author has lost credibility as a speaker of the truth.