New Teachers Must Be Brave Professionals
Larry Cuban, Estelle Woodbury, Jennifer Dick, Greg Peters, in discussion at Stanford University, June 22, 2011.
A few days ago at Stanford, I had the opportunity to address, oh so briefly, a crowd that included perhaps a couple hundred teachers and future teachers. We had just listened to a panel discussion that included current and former teachers, along with Larry Cuban, Stanford professor emeritus and one of the foremost scholars of American public education. The topic was the nature and status of the teaching profession in America – in particular, the pay and working conditions that drive so many teachers to leave, or consider leaving.
The portion of the audience most on my mind during all of this was the incoming class at the Stanford Teacher Education Program (STEP). They had just begun graduate school two days earlier, and I can still recall the heady feeling of being in their exact situation when I entered STEP in June of 1994. I had just moved to Palo Alto from Los Angeles, had just settled into a small apartment next to a gas station, and I was on a constant high – not from any gasoline fumes – but from the incredible rush of meeting so many smart and wonderful