Jobs?

I luckily, have been offered a job at my former high school. I will be teaching 9th and 10th grade English coming this fall. I have been so fortunate to be offered a position, especially the first position I interviewed for. Unfortunately, MANY of my peers are in the opposite situation. I find young teachers sitting on either side of me, who are just brimming over with new ideas and methods they are simply DYING to implement in their classrooms. Simply because of union regulations, and the unwillingness of older, dinosaur teachers to step down from positions they no longer pursue with zeal, my peers and friends may find themselves jobless in the Fall.

The stark reality that all of these brilliant young minds, who are eager to influence and improve other young minds, may be forced to find different positions in different fields. There is an emerging problem in our education industry. In the 1960's there was an influx of young teachers into the education field. Many of them were eager and full of ideas from the programs they had just exited. HOWEVER, the problem is that now, some of these teacher are still teaching, and they are still practicing in the way that they did when it was 1965. There has been an influx of new education research and new methods of instruction in the past 20 years. Unfortunately, these old dinosaur teachers oftentimes (not always), do not adhere to any modern education pedagogy. Instead, they stick with what they know and what is most  comfortable to them, and their students sometimes suffer.

I am not suggesting that we instate agism and toss all teachers over the age of 50 out of schools. But I do see an enormous disparity between the eager enthusiasm of my peers and the tired, dogged persistence of some of the dinosaurs I know. If anything, teachers should be FORCED to attend pedagogy update seminars and technology training in order to help them update. Teachers who have been teaching for longer periods of time should be subjected to as many, if not more, reviews and observations as other teachers. I sincerely hope that all of my peers will be offered positions in the very near future.