Respect

I was thinking about Wednesday's discussion about how little respect teachers get, and realized that there is a sliding scale.  PreK get the very least, elementary get a little bit more, middle a bit more than that, high school more than that, and then university professors quite a lot.  So what's different about elementary teachers and college professors?

Certainly when I meet a tenured college professor, I feel like they will be better educated than I am.  They will have spent more time in school, they will have focused on a subject and learned it thoroughly.  They will be doing research and staying up-to-date in their field.  They will make a decent salary and job security.  They will have been put through the vetting process by the university and proven themselves worthy of tenure by a combination of good research and proven teaching skill.  Their students will be paying to be taught be them. 

That's my perception, and it may certainly be out-of-date or just plain incorrect, but respect is based on perception.  So can elementary schoolteachers make progress on any of these points?  Yes.  In the current system, I think the two that could be changed are education and research.

When I was at college, the people who were getting their degrees in education got little respect and those studying architecture or pre-med got a lot of respect.  No one failed out of education and lots failed out of the bio and architecture classes.  Someone in class Wednesday mentioned a 100 level economics class which weeded out students.  It flies in the face of what we're learning to think of deliberately failing some, but a reputation as a hard major would surely increase the respect for it.  Perhaps education programs could require that their graduates were true renaissance women and men, by requiring that the they take college level classes in a wide range of subjects in addition to education classes.  A heavy courseload would reflect a hard major.

I have myself thought it would be fun to do research projects in elementary schools, and one of our readings talked about a private pre-schools informally doing research to keep the teachers focused and engaged.  I will be curious to read the mood at the elementary schools that the UW partners with; I would think that the partnership would promote a great deal of respect from the parents there.  Could all schools partner with universities, and have teachers work with them to carry out research?  How cool it would be to have schoolteachers among the co-authors on professional papers, and have school websites include that information in their staff biographies, along with liking cooking and scrapbooking with friends.