frustration. busywork. sadness.

I'm feeling quite irritable, so I don't want to post much, because I don't want to rant. But I mine as well post now, because I don't see myself having any more free time in the foreseeable future.

I am ticked off because I just spent my whole weekend doing homework. And it's going to be the same for the rest of the summer, and I don't think the homework is particularly useful. It makes me furious, frankly, feeling like my time and energy is being wasted.

I have great admiration for the teachers I've had, in my masters in education, and the main trainer for the Montessori certification I'm getting. But each time I've done a teacher training program, I've become deeply frustrated at how poorly they are structured for training teachers. I guess it just reflects the state of education in general: so much of our theories and schools of thought are baseless, not backed by science. And nowhere is that more true than the teaching of teachers. I don't think any scientific research has been consulted most of the time. I don't think much scientific research has even been conducted on the subject. Which is deeply frustrating. There is excellent info on how to train a world-class athlete, or a surgeon, or musician, or a pilot. The methods have been tested, revised, honed until they are super effective. But there is nothing like that, which I have heard of, for teachers. Nobody seems to care how they do, once they've been sent off into the wild. Nobody cares if their methods are particularly effective, and so they're not. You're basically on your own, and it's a roll of the dice, or a matter of what you were already coming in with.

I guess I was hoping this would be different, because an expert teacher said it would help, but perhaps I was running into the problem that often experts in a field are not necessarily experts at creating other experts in that field. It wouldn't be quite so bad, if it wasn't also deeply unpleasant, sitting in front of a computer, typing all day long, every day. typing up things that are quite possibly garbage, pointless. Maybe it's to try and help me memorize, but it seems like an extremely inefficient method of memorization. Maybe it's just to prove you can work really hard, but I already did that during my masters program, I don't need to prove that again. I'm too old for this $%^# and life is to short for it.

Anyways, I'm quite unhappy right now. It has become a drudge, and is likely to stay that way for the rest of the summer, and I'm having angry thoughts of just quitting and being done with it.