"Original" and Other Sins

Abstract

We are all familiar with the old chestnut of original sin. Teachers invoke it to avoid the responsibility for their results as reflected in their students' performances. High school teachers say, What could I do? They just weren't prepared at the intermediate level. Intermediate teachers shift the responsibility to elementary teachers who blame the homeparental environment, and the parents are left with only original sin as an excuse for their children's performances in school. Now we are all confronted with an alarming new problem: the change in attitude toward self-improvement by the new and younger biology teachers. We old mossbacks have integrated our professional with our personal lives. Our hobbies, our reading, our part-time jobs, our vacations, even our family lives, have been closely associated with our biology teaching. Many new teachers leave their interest in biology locked in their desks at the end of the school day. They need something different to supplement their lives outside school. Hobbies are more apt to be hanggliding than wildlife photography. Summer vacations and jobs often reflect interests completely divorced from their teaching field. All too frequently these people drop out of biology, and even teaching, to pursue their other interests. To put it bluntly, too many of them lack a genuine love for and interest in the very thing they are trying to sell to their students. When you talk to college instructors, administrators, and other members of our profession about this problem, all too often they invoke original sin. It must be a result of the high school teachers' attitudes, or education on the intermediate level and so on. We need a new approach because there are flaws in our reasoning. Rather than going back to original sin, let's look forward toward the teachers' last points of contact with the educational system, teacher preparation programs. Have we become so involved in the battles between the education departments and the biology departments over who should control what that no one is providing leadership in these programs? Is there more than a slight possibility that the college and university professors may be a major part of this problem? Perhaps their teaching has become too slanted toward the students. Students pursuing or interested in pursuing doctoral degrees have become the prize students. Too often these students find that the only place to do their prized research is at a university where their teaching is aimed at more students. This is an example of educational incest at its worst. A few of these people are natural teachers and like that part of their work, but many others are just the opposite. The new Ph.D. with no teacher training, or even a desire to teach, is usually assigned responsibility for the large introductory course. Thus, the area that needs instructors with the highest level of teaching ability to maintain and nurture student interest in biology receives instructors with the least experience and ability to inspire. Because the instructor doesn't like this part of the job, s/he shifts as much of it as possible to the teaching assistants. These people, also, are overworked and uninterested in teaching. They are mainly interested in earning their doctorates so that they can enter the academic research world where they, in turn, will be assigned large, introductory classes that they can pass on to their assistants. Is it any wonder that the prospective biology teachers start to lose interest in their intended profession? On every side, they hear that research is the ideal; teaching is for those who just can't make it in research. And, they definitely have not seen many outstanding or even good examples of teaching at this supposed highest level of the profession. At this point, the prospective biology teachers turn to the education departments seeking the training they want and need. They experience three years of educational philosophy, history, psychology, measurements, reading problems, bilingual problems, behavioral problems-mostly taught by people who haven't set foot in a public school since they left the 12th grade. Then comes the dawn. No one has mentioned one word about how to teach biology and how to deal with its many current, complex problems. The only example they have to follow is how they were taught in college courses. The circle is closed.