Teacher vs Experience

Being in college you are introduced and taught by so many different teachers and professors. At my college specifically they have an interesting way of hiring some of their teachers. A lot of their teachers never actually went to school to become a teacher. They just got hired to teach the skill that they have been doing in their career their whole lives up to this point. For example someone who has been a computer programmer their whole life could be hired to by this college to teach computer programming. Now that can have good things come from it and it can also have a lot of backlash.

I’ve seen both in my experience. I’ve had teachers who may not have a whole ton of real world experience in the field their teaching mostly because they loved teaching it more than doing it for work. Teaching was just their passion and they were so good at it. They were wonderful teachers who knew what they were talking about and were able to teach it in a very understandable way.

Then I’ve had other teachers who have had a whole lifetime of work experience in their field, and just decided to take the job at the college either cause they were bored or just wanted a change of pace. This has been catastrophic at times. They may know what they’re talking about but that doesn’t mean that they know how to teach it in a way where we’re going to understand. Having the knowledge is one thing but being able to teach that knowledge for understanding is a whole other ballpark that takes a lot of time and skill to develop that unfortunately a lot of these teachers don’t have. I hope they’ll see the problem and be more careful in their search for new teachers who will be able to make more of a difference in their ability to take their skills and knowledge and get them across to those students who are on their journey to develop these skills themselves.