It has been said that teaching as a profession is impossible without passion. With all the challenges teachers face today, I wholeheartedly agree. In the teaching community, there are constant debates on a variety of issues ranging from school safety to what's being served in the lunchroom. As a teacher, I will face parents, principals, and politicians who all seem to think their opinion is the right. That being said, I will not be able to please everyone with the decisions that I make, but ultimately I will have to be wise, ensuring that I give my students the best learning experience. .
I want to be a teacher who thinks of the student's needs first. I want the policies I support, the curriculum I teach, and the grades that I give to benefit the student. In the vast sea of political agendas that flood our education system, people often forget about the individual student. They focus too heavily on test scores, which aren't always the best indicator of a child's intelligence. That being said, I want to be a teacher who sees past the test score and finds solutions to problems that are helpful to my students. As I said earlier, the government seems to focus a lot on test scores. When No Child Left Behind was put into place, under the Bush administration, suddenly every school focused heavily on test scores. This is because the way that No Child Left Behind works is by expecting all schools to have students reach a certain standard of proficiency in the core subjects. Schools, and more specifically, teachers with a significant amount of students who don't reach these standards are penalized until they are able to bring up the proficiency rate (What is No Child"). However, the way they determine this is through standardized testing and as research will show testing is not an accurate measurement of a student's intelligence. A famous quote among the teaching community, commonly attributed to Albert Einstein, sums up the problem perfectly: "Everybody is a genius.