Generally Speaking...

Being a male teacher, people always assume I teach high school. I think I have even blogged about this 'misconception'. Well, one of the questions that I am sometimes asked pertains to the subject area. "What do you teach, Math? Science?" I usually answer "Yes."

I was in a meeting with an administrator. That person was speaking to a bunch of us (elementary teachers) and we were told that elementary classroom teachers are generalists. We know and teach everything without specializing. After seeing initiatives at the federal, state, and local level and these panaceas for curing all of the ailments of the education system, I am convinced that we are no longer generalists. We are specialists that specialize in nearly everything. Over my relatively short tenure as a teacher, I have worked my butt off to learn as much as I can about everything I teach. I spend my summers in workshops developing new curricula, discovering new resources, learning new content, and reviewing new standards. It would be nice to be a true generalist. I would stay above the surface of a concept and not dig deep into it. It would be great to be a specialist and really know one content area as deep as possible and truly become an expert in it.

Why do we become special generalists? (Is that a good term?) You never know when that one child is so engaged by a subject and he or she asks some really great questions that you can either answer from your own knowledge or discover the answer together using the resources that you have spent the time to learn. It might be that one child that is really challenged by a concept and he or she needs a new approach to help them understand it and the smile on their face is the reward that blows you away. It could be the intrinsic satisfaction that you as an educator feel when you really know your stuff. If you are wondering.... yes the work is worth it.

So... does that make elementary teachers true know-it-alls?

Discuss...