Issues in education and social justice

¶ … Tiffany Brownlee

The field of education is a field in which one is given the opportunity to convey one's love of learning and discovery, and equip students with the tools necessary to make their own discoveries. One must admit that a career in education is a demanding one, as instructors often serve in various capacities at the same time. However, being a part of this profession is ultimately one of the most rewarding experiences that one can attain in one's career. As George Savile cleverly stated, "Education is what remains when we have forgotten all that we have been taught."

A good educator is thus an individual who can teach beyond the ordinary, and whose instructions remain with a student long after he or she has exited the classroom. In other words, a good professor will teach a student life lessons along with a specific subject. Because of this facet, and due to the fact that teachers often fulfill more than one role, one could say that instructors are students' educators, motivators, guides, counselors, coaches, and disciplinarians. The following paragraphs will speak more about education experience, and will include an analysis of the field from various points-of-view.

Although the field of education is wide in its scope, the traditional thought of an educator's line of work is teaching in a public school, a private school, or a college setting; but, as one may surmise, the duties of an educator far surpass such margins. The undergraduate area of expertise in my case was focused in the elementary realm. The elementary instructor is a person who teaches core subjects, usually to one classroom of students, while secondary teachers have an area of expertise and teach the given subject to several, different classes of students. Beyond planning lessons, teaching and grading papers, instructors are also involved in non-teaching activities.

They must thus confer with parents and manage after-school events, as well as undertake planning in their personal lives, and monitor the education of their own children, if this were the case. One can see, from all the above information, that educators are faced with numerous issues both within and outside the classroom; thus, simply relegating the instruction in an hourly time frame is not usually the way that such teachers must think.

There are plenty of stresses on educators, but two specific issues that they may face which, both of which are near and dear to this author, are the implications of the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT), and the debate over classroom sizes, which will be described below.

Many teachers believe, myself among them, that a student's educational level should be assessed. However, in contrast to others, I do not agree with the assessment methods of the FCAT. The FCAT is the statewide educational assessment for the state of Florida and is intended to measure a student's prior and current knowledge of given subject matter.

The student is assessed in the areas of reading, writing, science and mathematics. It is stated that if a student attends school regularly, has in-school and home-based encouragement, eats a well-balanced diet, and completes given class and home learning assignments, he or she will have a better chance at passing this statewide test. Special emphasis must to be placed, in this case, on the importance of diet, because it is an aspect of a child's welfare that is often ignored in discussing education. It is paramount, for any child, to eat properly in order to allow one's brain and body to be attentive and alert during school. This is a statement that, whole true for some children, may not be true for all. The reason I say this is because while diet is important, not all children can afford to have proper nutrition, based on some circumstance, or another, and thus, because each child's circumstance is different, he or she should not be assessed simply based on the FCAT alone.

I think that this test places an extreme amount of pressure on the student, as well as the teacher. Students worry so much about their test results and what that could mean for future prospects, that all of the proper lesson material is not learned or learned quickly and forgotten. This means that more leisure-based classes like physical education, music, and art suffer because their programs are relatively unimportant compared to the subjects tested on the FCAT.