Apologies for the wall of text, as a programmer, turned high school teacher, turned programmer once more. Throwaway account.

I was about to graduate with a CS degree from a top 20 program in 2006 when it occurred to me that I really, really loved my time as an undergrad TA running the labs for the intro to computer science course. From a kid up till then, I'd always received the complement that I had a way of explaining things and I figured if I could do this every day for my career I'd never work a day in my life. So I went on to enroll at Illinois State University, the program that produces the most teachers in the state, to get a second bachelor's degree in secondary education and get certified in teaching Math and Computer Science.

My time there involved taking a few additional math courses, a course about unions, a handful of pre-student teaching type courses where you go and sit in on real high school classes and observe, and a couple classes where I learned everything there is to know about social justice, which I and my peers were all about and ate up whole-heartedly (and I still believe in).

Fast forward to our last semester when we're about to graduate and someone finally asks our well liked professor, "Is now the time when you'll teach us about classroom management?" Which, over the course of three years had been drilled into our heads as the #1 reason that teachers quit early on in their career. Our professors, people that spoke at the conferences we attended, and the teachers we shadowed all told us the same thing over, and over, and over. The answer we got from our professor was "Ahhhh, well, you know, that's something everybody needs to work out on their own." And that was it. We graduated and were left to fend for ourselves.

I should also say, there were no courses on lesson plan writing either, at all. Which is strange because it is something a new teacher spends a huuuuuge amount of time on, since tomorrow is going to come, and there’s nothing to present until you make one. And this is on top of grading papers. Also strange is that there is no central repository for celebrated lesson plans. The assumption is that every teacher should come up with their own unique take on things and design their own version of a given lesson from first principles. It came from a place of "Boy, It'd sure stink if we were forced to teach a prescribed lesson plan when I've come up with a better way, one that fits my delivery style better and would truly be better for my students". Which are real concerns. But to not give brand new teachers at least a starting point of 'best practices', which they could then iterate on as they go, and perhaps even contribute their improvements upstream, is absolutely criminal in my book. You graduate and you start with nothing.

So that was me, a Computer Science grad at heart with the best of intentions, plunged into teaching nothing but low level math (because I would have to work at least five years before I’d have enough seniority to teach anything else) at an inner city high school where students would get up and start dancing in the middle of class to music played on their phones, throw skittles at me when I’m at the board, and if you send them to the dean then you can’t manage your classroom. And I certainly couldn’t!

When it came time for parent teacher conferences, it was a total of 4 student's parents that came. And those were the 4 parents that I didn't need to talk to because their sons and daughters were doing just fine. It was the other 116 parents that I really needed to talk to :-(

The people I saw succeed were the children of parents who were also teachers. I assume they grew up with their parents telling them the little nuggets of wisdom that are so crucial, but left out of the formal education process. Such basics as, “It’s easier to relax rules later than to institute more strict rules down the road”. And many others. I really, really hope other schools are better. And that Illinois State University has improved. But based on the experience I had by enrolling in 2006, it’s really seems like it's just a sham, and you had better have some way of gaining actual knowledge of how things work in the classroom from elsewhere if you want to succeed.