Elementary Education Student Shocked to Find Out She Has to Work with Children
After perusing the available undergraduate science degrees on offer at our esteemed university, many students end up choosing a B.S. in Elementary Education, where campus administrators are more than happy to put the ‘E’ in “STEM”. However, after pursuing this degree for no less than three years, one future Elementary Education graduate was shocked to find that at the end of the college experience lies the untold horrors of the classroom.
Nicole, whose real name we have anonymized to protect her identity, gave us an eyewitness testimony of the duplicity at the core of the College of Education. “I really feel deceived,” she claims, “I thought I would be an advanced student because I already knew my shapes and colors.” But it seems that department heads had other plans. Within the core coursework are classes such as “Child Psychological Development” and “Naptime 370,” which students are woefully unprepared for and involve time in real classrooms with real children.
According to Nicole, “There is a radical difference between the Theory of Preventative Crayon Eating and Applied Silent Reading Time and I can barely bring it all together.” She told us harrowing stories of having to go into enclosed labs and interact with people under the age of twelve. These so-called “teaching experiences” seem impossible, as students are required to make tiny people understand big subjects such as math and science, all while stopping them from pulling hair and putting stationary up their noses.
This callous disregard for the body of students who actually take the courses, do the work, and attend the lectures – all before monday night Lion – shows how out of touch school faculty is. “It’s very disheartening and I can imagine how the alienation can really kill the dream for a lot of us,” Nicole said; “All I wanted to do was hit on future frat guys as an English teacher, now I’m responsible for shaping the next generation.”
Her impassioned words resonate with those of all majors, and all of us here at the Nightly Illini hope things will get better.