When I am packing my mind tends to wonder and today while I was packing my clothes I started to think about all of the bad teachers I have had through out the years. While thinking about them I focused in on why they were bad teachers and noticed that a lot of bad teachers have similar personality traits or teaching styles. I decided to compile a list of these traits/teaching styles and point out why these are bad for teachers to have. Each week I will write a blog about a specific trait that I think teachers from Pre-K through university professors shouldn't have. After I finish this list I will to a contrasting list talking about traits I think teachers should have.
1. Lack of enthusiasm about teaching/the subject
This is an issue that I have seen with quite of few teachers I have had and even with some education students I know. An example of a teacher that has no enthusiasm for teaching is one who considers teaching a chore, seems bored while teaching, seems uninterested in teaching in general or teaching a specific subject. Unenthusiastic teachers are easily identified since they often seemed annoyed with students and even other teachers for no easily placed reason. These are often people who considered teaching an easy profession so instead of following their actual dream they decided to pursue a seemingly easy career. Their annoyance comes from their inability to accept that teaching is a full-time job that is a lot more difficult than they expected. Even though teachers get a two month vacation during the summer, several teachers are required to go to teaching conferences during the summer, teach summer school, or find a part-time job for the summer if they don't do the first two.
There are also teachers that have no interest in teaching a subject, but they decided to get certified to teach it because they perceived it to be an easy subject. I see this the most in elementary school teachers who prefer teaching one subject (such as math) to teaching another subject (such as history). That teacher may be really enthusiastic about teaching mathematics, but once that teacher starts talking about history that enthusiasm goes away and they begin to seem bored and uninterested.
I know an education major (whom I shall refer to as A) who shall face the problem of lack of enthusiasm. When I asked A why she wanted to be a teacher she basically said that she only wanted to be a teacher because her mom is a teacher. It wasn't because A personally wanted to become a teacher, she just wanted to do the same thing that her mom does. A's major problem is that she wants to be an early education major meaning she would have to teach all subjects to students in K-4th grade. The problem with this is that A does not care about subjects aside from math. She shows little to no interests in subjects such as history, science, and etc. I even recommended to A that she should change her degree plan to the math secondary certification degree (Angelo State University actually offers a teacher certification degree for nearly every subject) and she said that she didn't want to do that because that isn't what her mother does.
A person shouldn't want a career just because that is the career that one of their parents has. A person can want the same career as their parent, but the fact that their parent has that job should never be the only reason a person wants that job. A person should want the career that they themselves want. I don't want to be a college professor like my dad or a bookstore manager like my mom. I want to be a secondary social studies teacher and I will fight tooth and nail for that job. In all honesty I pity A's future students because teachers that are unenthusiastic tend to teach purely by the textbook the second trait which I shall talk about next week.
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