You know, I've always felt like I was an underdog. It might have something to do with me being the youngest or maybe I'm just hugely self-centered, but the bulk of this feeling is about my educational history. My counselor in college never told me about drop/add, so when I got a D in a class not related to my major, my entire GPA was in the sink. No one advised me about what you could do with a major in English, so I was left working (an albeit awesome job) at Starbucks with a lot of other English majors.
So, when I looked back at my Masters--a time in my life when I had finally decided this is what I want to do with my life--I'm more than furious that that education did not prepare me for the job. Any time someone says, "You can do this, you have a Masters!!" I scoff.
I looked around at the speech path people and the content teachers and reading specialists and thought, why do they have strategies? Starting out, I had a fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants strategy. For this I give credit to my Masters. I was never taught specific, ESL teaching strategies.
So in this episode, I suggested a course of action for 'Merica: either we have all content teachers adding on an ESL course to learn some strategies & we have one ESL "specialist" in the district (can you tell I'm sick of a buch of .2 or .5 traveling ESL teachers in a district??) OR we continue having ESL teachers, but the certification requirements need more alignment across states & the programs need major revision.
Let's talk revision: I first looked at the listings of one ESL program's course requirements. Next, I compared it the specificity of a Speech Pathology Program's Courses (must be capitalized because they were all to specific & professional). Finally, I made my own ESL program.
Do check out the show notes at the bottom of the podcast page, where I have listed them all & provided links to things mentioned in the episode. Thanks for listening to this rant on certification! And if ANYONE has an idea about who I can contact about my ideas for certification, I would love to be pointed in a helpful direction.
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