“What do education majors even do?”
“Well, what do business majors do?”
“We learn how to do business and the aspects of it.”
“Well, we learn how to educate and the aspects of it.”
Let’s be honest for a second, everyone who criticizes education majors and says that it’s a really easy major is 100 percent correct. They never had to go to school and have teachers educate them. It’s such an easy major that people go to school for years and years to learn from education majors.
I think that the most important thing that I have learned as an education major is how to color inside the lines. I make all sorts of crafts for my little in my fraternity and my students have learned so much about literacy and history from the coloring books that we use every day!
Yeah, yeah, yeah, so what we don’t color…all we do is write lesson plans. What a piece of cake. Come up with a lesson and write it down and you’re done. Crap! I almost forgot there needs to be one for each subject…oh and they have to cover six hours each day. Easy enough! Ah, silly me, I forgot each student has different learning needs and I need to consider that, oh and sometimes I need to work with IEP’s for students with exceptional abilities and all of that has to be within the state standards. Easy? Give me a break.
Okay, that’s enough sarcasm. Every occupation gets paid for the importance of their work. Doctors get paid six figures because they save people’s lives, lawyers get paid six figures because they protect the citizens of this country. Teachers on average make $45,000 for nurturing the minds of the future doctors and lawyers. But, money isn’t everything and I can almost guarantee that every single education major out there is not in it for the money. But, since we pay other occupations based on what they are doing let’s break the salary of a teacher down:
Let’s pay all the teachers minimum wage. Since some think teachers are “just babysitters” let's pay them like that. In Chicago, babysitters have to be paid five dollars an hour. So five dollars an hour, per student, since each parent would have to pay for their child would be 125 dollars in a 25 student classroom. Add in a seven-hour day is 875 dollars per day. Since teachers get summers off and breaks there are only 180 school days. So 875 dollars a day times 180 school days…well, it looks like teachers should be make 157,500 dollars a year.
One of the beautiful things about education is that every person in the country has gone through the education system. That one thing, being school, connects us all: whether you went to a private boarding school to a low-income public school, we all went to school for some duration of our lives. We all experienced it, but that in no way means we can all lead it like a lot of people believe. Just because you went through school:
A: doesn’t mean you can do it from the other side as a teacher and
B: you may or may not have learned in the best manner and you can probably only teach the way you were taught.
So I might be a bitter education major who is slightly tired of being told that it is a very easy major with not a lot of work. But, every teacher you’ve had has played a role in who you are today. Even the professors who are still teaching you every weekday are teachers. So next time you think of telling someone that education is a really easy major, think about how influential teachers are and how important it is that future teachers get the right training because the future of America is going to be taught by us.
