Are all Education majors lazy idiots?

genetics was a breeze. it's physics that kills.

Since we're overgeneralizing, let's include their "professors," who, generally speaking, seem to have no idea about anything that actually goes on in a real classroom.

I'm getting ESL certification and confirm the OP; the only smart ones there are the linguists.

oh god. i'm an undergrad math tutor... i'm paid to help people with their math. grad students often work alongside me. either math grad students or (apparently) education students.

an education grad student who plans to teach high school math was working alongside me. she couldn't do any calculus whatsoever, couldn't even help kids in basic calculus.

i mentioned to her as we were leaving that relearning the basic calculus she forgot would help her do the (non-calculus) stuff she was helping people with. wouldn't even consider it. she "didn't need to know it" and so she'd leave it to us.

i'm still not sure if she knew how lazy that made her look.

for those who are interested: the problem she was helping with was finding the maximum/minimum of quadratic functions, ax^2 + bx + c. she had a formula memorized: the max/min occurs when x = -b/2a. i hadn't bothered to memorize it, but when the first student asked me for help it took about half a second to see that formula via calculus.

Generation Stupid wrote:

Every Education major I know is either retarded, does the bare minimum just to scrape by, or both. I have some in my Genetics class and they bitch all the time about how it's the hardest class they've ever taken, and it's probably the easiest upper division class I've ever taken. They think it's unfair that they have to read the textbook in order to do well on the tests. I've found this to be pretty standard among Education majors. Obviously they're not all like this, but I'm wondering if anyone else has noticed the trend.

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The laziest and least intellectually capable students are economic majors. Hands down.

no way. sociology, anthropology, and psychology majors. worthless hippies, mentally retarded jocks, and vapid airhead girls, respectively.

As a teacher, I am often embarresed for my profession.

My evidence is only anecdotal, but the only education major I knew in college was a very smart guy, but he turned out to be a pedophile (lost his teaching certification and I'm assuming had some jail time), so be glad the ones you know are only stupid.

Agree.

I can tell you from experience that most education classes are a joke. In college, I had some where there wasn't any outside reading whatsoever. In others, the only reading would be about 10-15 pages per class. I can't remember any term papers or major projects, besides being in the classroom. There would be a bunch of little stuff that took no more than a few hours to do. A lot of people weren't even willing to do this little amount of work. PE majors were the worst.

I had a couple physics majors in my English classes before I switched majors. They were almost always whining about how much reading there was, how difficult it was to do basic tasks like scansion analysis, and how much they hated writing papers (papers, by the way, that often read like high school level work). I thought, "wow, are all physics majors lazy idiots?"

Then I thought about it for two seconds, and thought "Wait, if they loved English and were good at it, they probably wouldn't be Physics majors. It's just like how you hate math, and do not major in math."

Then, months later, I came to letsrun and found this thread. I'll spell it out for you: people have different academic strengths. People tend to enjoy doing what they are good at doing. This is why not everyone is a hard science major.

That being said, of course there are some lazy idiots who are Education majors. I'd be a fool to doubt that. There are probably even more lazy idiots in the liberal arts than the hard sciences. However, even the laziest, smuggest, least practically skilled Philosophy major could tell you where your logic has broken down in the original post, and that anecdotal sample size rarely provides meaningful insight.

I teach high school currently, and I have to agree with the OP. Education classes are a joke, and many education majors are not the brightest.

I earned an English degree prior to my secondary ed. certification, and while it was not all that challenging, it seemed downright difficult compared to education.

I'm getting ready to start my masters. One part of me wants to do something challenging and eventually go on for my PhD, but the lazy part of me just wants to continue with education for the bump in pay.

we were having a discussion in a class about why we wanted to be teachers when one guy actually said, "i don't feel working everyday and i want a job where i won't be fired for it." so yeah...

justintherunner wrote:

I teach high school currently, and I have to agree with the OP. Education classes are a joke, and many education majors are not the brightest.

I earned an English degree prior to my secondary ed. certification, and while it was not all that challenging, it seemed downright difficult compared to education.

I'm getting ready to start my masters. One part of me wants to do something challenging and eventually go on for my PhD, but the lazy part of me just wants to continue with education for the bump in pay.

My situation is similar (degree in English literature...earned my teaching certification after I began teaching). Trust me, buddy, you are going to fly through your masters program. I finished mine two years ago, and the courses were easier than some of my freshman English classes. It is also quite apparent that the professors have not spent much (if any) time in a modern, diverse classroom. Their theories are both completely impractical and laughably inefficient.

One thing that always amazed me is how little my coworkers in the English department (who were all education majors) know about English, grammar, literature, etc. During my first week of teaching, I noticed that my grade level cohort was teaching the students that main idea and theme are the same thing. Yikes.

National Zionism = National Socialism

I'm an education major.

I'm lazy.

But I don't fancy myself an idiot.

I'd much rather give out assignments, than do them.

I plan on teaching the social sciences. I enjoy scouring the internet for interesting articles and videos, which I will share with my students and get them engaged in lively, critical discussions.

I think that my students will get their minds and horizons opened and will start to see that the world is complex and interesting. I hope to plant the seeds of intellectual curiosity.

I want them to work on presentations and projects that are challenging, but in a fun way.

I don't like being a student, because most of my teachers are not that good and give out drab assignments. I've had a handful of good teachers in the past, and I really learned a lot from them. That is what I hope to emulate.

You can be a lazy student and still make an excellent teacher. I would argue that a good student might have a more difficult time as a teacher, because they won't relate to the students as well. They'll give out assignments that they think are interesting, but the majority of students will have no interest in.

Because I am lazy, I know what to do to get everybody interested. I know how to movitate lazy people because I am one myself. I know how they tick.

CoachB wrote:

As a teacher, I am often embarresed for my profession.

Hopefully that was supposed to be ironic. Otherwise, I'm embarrassed for you too.

To the OP, YES it is not just you, or just your university. My roommate's girlfriend was an education major and all she did was bitch and whine about her major was the hardest offered at the university and her workload was just so overwhelming. Her best friend was a mechanical engineer and they would have arguments all the time about how much harder her major was than his. Her curriculum consisted of gluing on post-it notes onto a triboard, writing incomprehensible papers that were completely reworked by her boyfriend, basic math and science classes that were barely passed, and being a bitch.

I also had a friend who was an early childhood education major drop out AFTER her 4th year because she was too dumb.

In my experience tho, it wasn't JUST the education major claiming theirs was the hardest. It was everyone. Everyone had a huge ego and wanted to be considered the smartest. The education majors in particular frustrated me because it was clearly a much easier major than any hard science/math major. I would never claim my major is the hardest (ex phys) tho, even tho our advisors would always tell us it was one of the tougher majors and had a high drop out rate because I have a different mind and don't have experience with other majors so I'm not going to be ignorant enough to downgrade anyone else's, except for education tho. There's no way to really rate toughness of a major. It's different from person to person. I know I wouldn't have been able to handle something like english, history, or political science, but I guarantee I could do any math/science major.

i'm just a guy wrote:

You can be a lazy student and still make an excellent teacher.

Not true! Good teaching requires you to do lots of work outside the classroom. Most English and Socials teachers don't mark enough and do a poor job of it when they do. They don't given enough feedback to explain their marking and they don't help the student improve.

Yeah, maybe you'll find an interesting clip which will spur a discussion but most likely the kids will just spout whatever cliche or advertising slogan that will come to their mind. You need to do the work beforehand and during class to help students think and respond critically and intelligently. Anyone can start a "discussion"--look at this message board--that's not the measure of good teaching.

If you were never a good student, you don't know how to help others become better students.

Everything is worth less.

Microchips are easier to make. Trade routes get shorter and more efficient. Labor gets cheaper. Food gets cheaper in money terms. Money is inflated and loses its value. The majority of stocks in purchasing terms lose value. Even Gold and Silver have trouble keeping up with inflation, because their supplies grow every year from mining.

That is the nature of humankind, to reach zero everything. That includes US as people. Eventually everything becomes worthless.

Except hot chicks of course.