EDITORIAL
Teaching is a calling, but it's also a career
"They teach for the love of it," Anna Kaneshiro says of her parents, who are both teachers. "And that's what I want to do."
Tell us what you think. What single thing, aside from salary, would enhance the quality of your work and in turn help students. Limit your replies to 100 words or fewer and send them to us at The Advertiser at letters@honoluluadvertiser.com or by fax at 535-2415 or mail your reply to: Letters to the Editor, The Honolulu Advertiser, P.O. Box 3110, Honolulu, HI 96802.
Kaneshiro, a 17-year-old senior at Kapolei High School, is precisely the sort of person we want standing at the front of a classroom some day. Indeed, she's already doing that, in a limited way, as part of the Hawai'i Alliance for Future Teachers "Explorations in Education" program.
Calling on teachers:
Kaneshiro's mentor, math instructor Rebecca Lowe, says there is an advantage in learning what teaching is really like before committing to majoring in education in college. "I was in my last year of college when I student-taught," says Lowe, "and you don't really know if teaching is right for you until then."
Kaneshiro has had another vital preview — this one from her parents, Mark, an art teacher, and Kathryn, a first-grade teacher. They've advised her to expect long hours and low pay.
The explorations program, which involves about 110 high school junior and seniors on O'ahu, is highly desirable. It not only gives prospective teachers a head start, but it also helps attract the right students to teaching — particularly valuable considering the state's serious teacher shortage.
But it will take much more than recruitment to get a qualified teacher in every classroom. And increasing the number of entry-level teachers is part of the equation.
But dealing with the serious retention problem is also key.
What makes so many teachers abandon the classroom after a few years? Lowe makes an important point in suggesting that teacher training at the college level may not provide a realistic classroom experience for students to gauge whether they are preparing for the right line of work.
But even for those who, like Kaneshiro, seem born to teach, there's still a serious burnout rate. Consider that Hawai'i teachers are, by some measures at least, among the lowest paid in the nation, they are often working in classrooms in dire need of repair, and must cope with spartan budgets. Add serious classroom discipline problems, often disinterested parents, stifling bureaucratic red tape and lack of clarity or accountability in education governance, and it's not hard to see why well-qualified and caring teachers are throwing in the towel.
Anna Kaneshiro wants to be a teacher, even though it's not a path to comfort or wealth. But the strength of her calling does not let us off the hook.
Our schools are consistently near the bottom, nationally, in a broad variety of measures. While there's plenty of blame to go around, the bottom line is that the quality of our schools is proportional to how much we as a community put into them. Schools, including finding and retaining qualified teachers, deserve to be among our top priorities.
