How could education effect the next generation?

Earlier this week one of my professors I have made a comment like, "Why would you go through four years of college to teach elementary aged kids? Why wouldn't you want to teach something that could make a difference and mean something?" Now, being an elementary education major myself, I found this appalling for many reasons. How could you demean the work of educators like yourself? Just because I don't strive to teach secondary education does not mean that what I teach little kids won't make a difference.

Let's look into this a minute. There's a boy named John per-say and he's five years old. John is getting ready to start kindergarten. By the end of the year, John will be able to tell you all of his ABC's, he can count up to 100 and multiples after that, he can do basic math, he started to grasp subtraction, he learned how to read simple sentences, and he learned to respect his teacher and follow directions. Without the help of his kindergarten teacher, John wouldn't be able to go on to first grade.

The moral of the story is, without elementary education there would be no secondary education. It has taken me 13 years to be able to attend college and be able to handle all of the college work and grasp much more challenging concepts. Without knowing basic math I wouldn't be able to do algebra and without algebra I couldn't do trigonometry. Elementary education only seems so effortless because we have built on the education we gathered from earlier on in our lives to be able to comprehend the education we're faced with now.

To give a personal experience, I went to Fairmont State last semester and while I was there I was able to complete twenty hours in a classroom with a class of first graders. I was expecting it to be a little harder than kindergarten but still pretty simple. These students were already able to tell you what a compound sentence is. They could read beginner books, they were starting simple science experiments, and they could even use technology. The classroom was equipped with two iPads and four computers. As part of the stations the students rotated into, some of them got to use the iPads and play learning games, and the other students would use the computers and learn how to spell and pronounce words using a computer software that would review what the teacher would be teaching them that week and then they would be tested at the end of the lesson. By the time I got done my teaching there, the kids could turn their own computers on, find the internet, they knew how to "get the internet back on" if the computer couldn't connect back to the wifi, they could fix minor problems with the laptops like if it got frozen. So, I would say the kids were benefiting from using the technology to better be able to adapt to the changing world around them using modern technology.

Without the teacher those students had they wouldn't be able to use basic technology and preform basic actions on the computer and iPads to better enhance their learning. I think it's good that the teacher is trying to implement technology into her lessons to help equip the students for the future. The same rule applies here though, if the kids couldn't preform basic actions on the computers now, how would they have done it later on in second grade? Elementary educators are the foundation to education. Without them there would be no higher education. It's like a puzzle and you can't have the full picture with missing pieces.