Dinero

Melissa Wolter-Gustafson
Teacher Education Quarterly, Fall 2004

Why I Will Not
Become a Teacher
By Melissa Wolter-Gustafson

It is in fact nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have
not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant,
aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom; without this it goes to
wrackand ruin without fail.
—Albert Einstein

I have wanted to be a teacher for as long as I can remember. I saw something
in my teachers that struck me as amazing, starting with my first grade teacher Ms.
Kelly and continuing through my high school English teachers. Helping to guide
students through the process of learning, which for me was filled with joy and
excitement, seemed like the mostimportant job in the world, and it was what I
wanted to do. As I grew older I became more aware of the challenges that teachers
face. I looked beyond myself and noticed that some students saw school as painful,
difficult, and frustrating, while other students saw school as boring and useless. My
enthusiasm for teaching wavered slightly, but I still felt confident that my own
passion forlearning could help students rekindle the joy and satisfaction of
exploring and discovering new knowledge.
As I entered the Northeastern University teacher
Melissa Wolter-Gustafson preparation program, I felt a renewed sense of comis a graduate of
mitment to teaching. However once I reached the
Northeastern University,
courses that centered on methods and materials for
Boston, Massachusetts.instruction, and curriculum development, I began to
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Why I Will Not Become a Teacher
wage an internal battle with myself. All the discussions in class around creating
relevant and engaging curriculum units and lesson plans seemed to clash with what
we were asked to do. Our assignments called on us to create, for fictional students,
arbitrary units and lessons that were so highlystructured that they left no room for
what I view as authentic learning, the kind of spontaneous exploration that no
teacher could have anticipated. The more I was reminded that elaborate lesson plans
hold a place in today’s accountability-driven educational climate, the more I found
myself at odds with the idea of teaching.
My philosophy of education stems greatly from the concept of apersoncentered classroom, as written about by Carl Rogers and Jerome Freiberg in
Freedom to Learn. This philosophy has been around me throughout my life, as my
mother trained to be a person-centered therapist under Carl Rogers, and also worked
as a teacher of graduate students pursuing their master’s degrees in education. It was
only in my own college education however, when there was a conspicuouslack of
notice given to humanistic philosophies of education, that I realized I had internalized many aspects of the person-centered approach and had molded my own
philosophy of education upon it. Increasingly I saw my philosophy of education and
the concept of becoming a teacher as mutually exclusive.
A strong philosophy of education and becoming an effective teacher seem as
though theyshould go hand and hand, and yet they have often been contradictory
in my own experience. The current educational climate makes this truer than ever.
It had been my experience that teachers had certain obligations to the state and the
school, beyond which they choose to run their classroom in a way that suits their
philosophy and personality, and the personalities and ages of their students. Thisis
how I thought I would function within a school: creating a classroom molded on my
beliefs and convictions about what a positive learning environment should be.
However, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is increasingly stepping into the
classroom and removing control from the teacher and students. This is in the name
of standards and accountability, and carries with it the Massachusetts...