But I'm a tenured teacher, and this much I can tell you: you are not likely to ever have more power to actually change things in education than you will between the four walls of your own public school classroom.
Yeah, that's pretty much what I figure (since a lot of education "reform" that goes on is fads getting rehashed, or people searching for Band-aid solutions). It's why I plan to be one of the teachers (I'm thinking at the middle school / high school level). I also plan to be very selective in the interview process. Things will never be perfect, but since I can't effect a large change by myself, I'd at least like to improve the opportunities for others. There are a lot of questions I still have about how to go about this, and I expect that even after years of contemplating it, I'll still get it wrong. But maybe I'll get it a little less wrong. That's kind of my approach to why I want to learn to be an independent researcher in science: it's for the search and the possibility of contributing something worthwhile, not because I want to secure a Nobel Prize.
Yeah, you never know what they'll think - but I figure it's worth it to give it a shot, kind of like I applied to MIT in my junior year even though realistically I had almost no chance of getting in. But I knew I would regret it if I'd never tried.
That's one reason I'm interested in attending - I look forward more to doing research and having discussions with professors than I do to the possibility of skipping some intro courses. I just have to think long-term, which is what I have to do at community college anyway. I'm not a terribly social person (I generally take a "strictly-for-business" kind of attitude for college classes, but would love to find people who want to discuss interesting things from politics to poetry to physics), but if I develop friendships anything like I did in high school, that would be a very positive bonus.
