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[anakin]

D'oh.  Typing error.  Of course the link is http://www.senari.com/ppt/hol.ppt.

I am not affiliated in any way with the people at senari.com, but if I'm going to share my Google results with others, I can at least give the correct address.

I think that my problem with the entire debate boils down to three issues:

1) There seems to be an implicit "faith" in Bloom's taxonomy, a faith that might not be justified

2) People seem to interpret the "levels" as increasing in intellectual merit and academic prestige rather than merely illustrating different but equally necessary types of processes. Synthesis is not necessarily "better" than the acquisition of "rote knowledge". For example, there are some elements of rote knowledge that function as keystone concepts throughout an entire discipline.

3) I do not think that it logically follows that the approaches one takes to lead students through the higher levels of Bloom's taxonomy will work successfully with the "lower" levels. EG the rote knowledge level skills probably require a rote knowledge level approach, and attempting to teach rote knowledge with an eye to "evaluation" might not be the greatest plan.

I think for the first time ever, someone's been able to summarize the nebulous reservations I have about Bloom's. It also strikes me as heavily cognitive-based - how should learning a lab technique, or ballet, or playing the violin, or being able to throw as well as Brett Favre be evaluated?

Chime on polly, too, for "we need critical thinking and problem solving skills." How are we to evaluate these skills? I don't think it's quite as straightforward as it seems. Let's agree our students must be able to solve novel problems. (We do.) What kind of problems? How many steps should they be able to carry through? Solving problems requires that I draw on my prior knowledge. What if I have the skill to solve a problem, but not the prior knowledge of some fact, or some connection? Then I still get it wrong, but my wrong answer is qualitatively different than yours. How do we evaluate - for our own professional development and the development of our students - the progression of wrong answers?

Same kinds of questions for critical thinking. There are layers of critical thinking - how far should our students progress, and how do we decide that? Is critical thinking discipline-specific or generalizable - IOW, can my parsing of the Riemann hypothesis help me understand Chaucer? (Let's ask MTG!)

Perhaps we can have some discussion about that too, because I haven't run across any rigorous academic debate about what, exactly, constitutes "critical thinking."

As far as NCLB, I have to say...having been in an urban elementary school (many different colors, high proportion of ELL's, high proportion free/reduced-price lunches, etc.) I came to be persuaded that some features of NCLB may help. Schools focus a lot more attention on ELLs (English-language learners) and children of color, and there are a handful of peer-reviewed academic studies that show that Hmong, African, and Af-American children have higher relative gains than white kids in the 'burbs - IOW, in some places at least, the achievement gap is closing. It did also force everyone to think about the practice of assessment, even if the execution of that is mostly terribly screwed up.

[mystictechgal]

Same kinds of questions for critical thinking. There are layers of critical thinking - how far should our students progress, and how do we decide that? Is critical thinking discipline-specific or generalizable - IOW, can my parsing of the Riemann hypothesis help me understand Chaucer? (Let's ask MTG!)

You can ask, but I can't answer.  First, I had to look up the Riemann hypothesis (which I'd never heard of), which, near as I can tell has something to do with defining zeroes at half-way points between a given (positive) number (those existing on the negative scale being inconsequential and happening at the -2's instead of on the halves) and an infinite, which, in turn, has something to do with calculating the number of prime numbers that exist between any given numbers on an infinite scale, and maybe how it all ties together on the circular, yet linear, Möbius strip.  Or, something like that.

I learned to enjoy Chaucer the same way I learned to love Shakespeare.  My Aunt read Canterbury Tales and his poetry to me as bedtime stories.  When you grow up hearing and seeing the language as a child you get accustomed to the lilt and rhythm and develop an sense for determining how that word may relate (or have morphed into) this word, which is in common use.  That, and you learn how to use a dictionary and don't think it odd at all that one is on the bedside table as well as others being available in the living room, den, and bathroom.

[polly_mer]

D'oh.  Typing error.  Of course the link is http://www.senari.com/ppt/hol.ppt.

I am not affiliated in any way with the people at senari.com, but if I'm going to share my Google results with others, I can at least give the correct address.

I think that my problem with the entire debate boils down to three issues:

1) There seems to be an implicit "faith" in Bloom's taxonomy, a faith that might not be justified

2) People seem to interpret the "levels" as increasing in intellectual merit and academic prestige rather than merely illustrating different but equally necessary types of processes. Synthesis is not necessarily "better" than the acquisition of "rote knowledge". For example, there are some elements of rote knowledge that function as keystone concepts throughout an entire discipline.

3) I do not think that it logically follows that the approaches one takes to lead students through the higher levels of Bloom's taxonomy will work successfully with the "lower" levels. EG the rote knowledge level skills probably require a rote knowledge level approach, and attempting to teach rote knowledge with an eye to "evaluation" might not be the greatest plan.

I think for the first time ever, someone's been able to summarize the nebulous reservations I have about Bloom's. It also strikes me as heavily cognitive-based - how should learning a lab technique, or ballet, or playing the violin, or being able to throw as well as Brett Favre be evaluated?

I'm not wedded to Bloom's Taxonomy, but in the interests of meeting my students where they are using the terms with which they are likely familiar, going with Bloom's Taxonomy to explain why my students were frustrated and I knew that they would be with a class where I was pushing for connections, analysis, and synthesis of those newly acquired facts with existing knowledge when they wished merely to demonstrate minimal acquisition of the facts seemed reasonable.

However, I've checked out the sites that Gennimom listed and one of the links I followed from there was quite useful on getting teachers and prospective teachers to think about how to teach and assess the various levels (only 4 interrelated ones for DOK).  Thus, for Wednesday's class, I'm chucking a lot of the Bloom's stuff I had prepared in favor of a nice chart that I found on those sites.

Chime on polly, too, for "we need critical thinking and problem solving skills." How are we to evaluate these skills? I don't think it's quite as straightforward as it seems. Let's agree our students must be able to solve novel problems. (We do.) What kind of problems? How many steps should they be able to carry through? Solving problems requires that I draw on my prior knowledge. What if I have the skill to solve a problem, but not the prior knowledge of some fact, or some connection? Then I still get it wrong, but my wrong answer is qualitatively different than yours. How do we evaluate - for our own professional development and the development of our students - the progression of wrong answers?

I don't have answers to these questions, but I have created an assignment that I hope will help my students think more about those issues.  I will be returning homeworks on Wednesday and I know there will be a lot of complaints because "I have the same  final answer that she does, but she got 3 points and I only got half a point".  The difference lies in the method.  One student used a reliable method to obtain the answer with good logical thoughts and one student picked some random garbage out of the air to justify picking c from the list of possibilities.  C is the answer that I was expecting, but getting the "right" answer by the wrong method is definitely wrong.  The assignment hinges on evaluating given answers to the obvious question: how do you make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich?  I hope that my students will realize that doing a brain dump and getting lucky is not the same as giving a coherent set of instructions that someone can follow.

Same kinds of questions for critical thinking. There are layers of critical thinking - how far should our students progress, and how do we decide that? Is critical thinking discipline-specific or generalizable - IOW, can my parsing of the Riemann hypothesis help me understand Chaucer? (Let's ask MTG!)

Previous discussions have seemed to indicate that while we can teach critical thinking, the particular lessons and methods are primarily discipline specific.  However, being proficient in multiple kinds of critical thinking methods tends to lead to easier acquisition of more kinds of critical thinking methods.

As far as NCLB, I have to say...having been in an urban elementary school (many different colors, high proportion of ELL's, high proportion free/reduced-price lunches, etc.) I came to be persuaded that some features of NCLB may help. Schools focus a lot more attention on ELLs (English-language learners) and children of color, and there are a handful of peer-reviewed academic studies that show that Hmong, African, and Af-American children have higher relative gains than white kids in the 'burbs - IOW, in some places at least, the achievement gap is closing. It did also force everyone to think about the practice of assessment, even if the execution of that is mostly terribly screwed up.

Interestingly, some of my best science for teachers students come from the inner city.  They have abysmal math and language skills, but they can think.

[cgfunmathguy]

I think for the first time ever, someone's been able to summarize the nebulous reservations I have about Bloom's. It also strikes me as heavily cognitive-based - how should learning a lab technique, or ballet, or playing the violin, or being able to throw as well as Brett Favre be evaluated?

I think part of the problem (and I didn't quote Amnirov's post that mentioned it) is that those in higher education who are just now discovering Bloom's taxonomy see it as linear when it's not, and at least where I went for my teacher training, it was not taught as linear. However, various stakeholders (mostly accrediting agencies, but others as well) said "we need more higher-level thinking skills to be developed." Unfortunately, administrators and faculty who knew nothing about Bloom's taxonomy interpreted this as "Do not include any lower-level thinking questions." This was not what was meant, and Polly's post (I think) illustrates that. There needs to be a mix, and we need to do a lot of different things to get students to the higher-level skills. We need to test all levels, not just the lower and not just the higher.

As far as being "heavily cognitive," Bloom's taxonomy fits very nicely in the "cognitive psychology" part of the discipline. Because this is the part that affects how teachers should be teaching, it makes sense. However, teaching someone something physical can also be fit into Bloom's taxonomy; most don't try, though.

Chime on polly, too, for "we need critical thinking and problem solving skills." How are we to evaluate these skills? I don't think it's quite as straightforward as it seems. Let's agree our students must be able to solve novel problems. (We do.) What kind of problems? How many steps should they be able to carry through? Solving problems requires that I draw on my prior knowledge. What if I have the skill to solve a problem, but not the prior knowledge of some fact, or some connection? Then I still get it wrong, but my wrong answer is qualitatively different than yours. How do we evaluate - for our own professional development and the development of our students - the progression of wrong answers?

This is something with which mathematics educators struggle all the time. Solving problems doesn't always involve prior knowledge; sometimes, problems require knowledge we don't have. We must then find that knowledge so we can solve the problem. Let's say I give you the following problem:

You must plan a trip from New York City to Nashville.  You must save enough for the trip so  that you can pay for it as you go. You, your spouse, and two children will be staying in Nashville for four nights (Thursday through Sunday). Plan the trip.

What are the right answers? What are the wrong answers? How do you apply everything you know? What if you don't know it all (with regard to the task of planning the trip)? This is meant to be open-ended without a single correct answer. However, if I were to give this problem to my Math for Elementary Teachers students, I'd have howls of protest because they would want to know how to find the right answer when they've been to NYC nor Nashville. This is what we must overcome, and it is why I believe NCLB--which has/had good intentions--is a piece of junk. Is it working in some places? Sure, for what it measures. Is it working everywhere (or even close to it)? No. Why the federal government needed to be involved is beyond me, but that must be my bias against the "doggone gubmint" (as one forumite put it).

[outlier]

As the basis for standardization, Bloom's has problems. As a taxonomy for individual instructors or even departments to think about curriculum and instruction, if it works for the people involved, that's what's important. It is good to move beyond the idea of a hierarchy, though, and recognize that each part can have depth and breadth.

Anakin, the questions you're asking are, I think, the kinds of questions that led to a move toward competency-based education back in the 70s. The problem with that was that there were long lists of discrete skills that never formed a big picture. An individual could master every little skill and still not be good at what they were trying to do.

I like to think of the overarching goal of teaching and learning in terms of "proficiency," which, as I'm using it, has a very specific meaning. Proficiency is the ability to apply knowledge to solve meaningful problems (and within meaningful, you can include novel, and you can include simulations when the teacher can explain the relevance, but not b.s. simulations that don't matter to anyone, including the instructor!). Proficiency includes domain-specific or discipline-specific knowledge, which is what both k-12 and undergraduate instructors generally try to impart to students. But proficiency also includes tacit or procedural knowledge (know how) and metacognitive skills (the ability to regulate learning, motivation, self-efficacy, performance, all that stuff), and it is situated within a mental model of the field/discipline/career. Just as an example--and I'm deliberately picking an example from outside the controversial area of teaching-- the mental model of a small-scale organic farmer is going to differ radically from the mental model of a manager of a large-scale conventional farming operation, and that will affect what knowledge and skills each needs to be proficient.

Proficiency does not develop exclusively rote learning; yes, there's some basic knowledge and memorization involved, but there's a lot more, too. Think about something you love to do and are very good at, preferably a hobby rather than a job, just to keep that love of learning pure (for the sake of this discussion, just bear with me).

First, does my description of proficiency make sense in your experience? Next, how did you learn and get good at it? How did you develop proficiency?

I'd bet that you developed proficiency through some formal learning, but in much larger part, through trial-and-error, practice in settings where it didn't matter much if you screwed up as you learned, seeking out information to answer specific questions or solve problems as they come up (as opposed to trying to have the broad knowledge base to solve every possible problem before trying to solve any problem at all), getting ongoing feedback that you could put to immediate use, and doing all this in environments that feel supportive, for example, where it is okay to make mistakes on the way to developing proficiency.

If that description of proficiency and how it develops makes sense, then maybe you can see that there's no single "right" answer to the questions you posed, and actually, that your questions are similar to those of the students who want detailed "right" answers. How can the faculty decide what's important for students to learn, what it looks like, what progress looks like and how to evaluate it? I think the answer is to keep responsibility and authority for that local--with the instructor or department, and provide resources in the form of people who know about learning and assessment.

And I think this is where faculty development, professional development, and just about every outside force acting with the supposed intention of improving education gets it wrong: all those see it as their role to tell teachers what to do and how "best" to do it, instead of assisting teachers in defining their goals and improving the implementation, assessment and evaluation to the satisfaction of the teachers. I think if teachers had more autonomy, both in k-12 and higher education, there would be more investment in being creative, innovative, and effective. As it is, teachers feel powerless, so the ones who are happy to be told what to do survive, and the ones who like to learn and who trust what they have learned decide not to become teachers after all, or they leave teaching.

Sorry for this very long post. It's not as clear as I'd like, but I don't have time to revise again now.

[ptarmigan]

I'm not wedded to Bloom's Taxonomy, but in the interests of meeting my students where they are using the terms with which they are likely familiar, going with Bloom's Taxonomy to explain why my students were frustrated and I knew that they would be with a class where I was pushing for connections, analysis, and synthesis of those newly acquired facts with existing knowledge when they wished merely to demonstrate minimal acquisition of the facts seemed reasonable.

Something I've had to learn as I've finally gotten to the hard classes in my discipline is that feeling frustrated, angry, confused, afraid, etc., is normal and not a sign that something has gone horribly wrong or even that I'm not going to master the material and do well in the class.  That's something I encountered very rarely up until the past year or so, which may also be true for your students.  People who are smart and/or good students coast through school up to a point - they might have to work, but they know the outcome and where they are headed as they do it.  Working towards an uncertain outcome - for instance, working on a problem you haven't been shown an algorithm for by thinking and trying various things that don't pan out - is much different.

[glowdart]

I find the whole discussion of which people self-select to go into education rather interesting.  One of the things that I have seen posted here on a fairly regular basis is the idea that those individuals that enter K-12 education programs are the "worst" students.  They seem to be seen as less intelligent, less motivated, less skilled, and more whiny than students in other disciplines, just to name a few pejoratives I've seen used.  And then people wonder why the field doesn't attract better candidates.

My current campus provides an interesting alternate to these usual observations (which were definitely at work on my last campus).  We tend to draw a heavily middle & upper-middle class student body which is often the first generation in the family to have the wealth to afford a school like ours.  The students also largely reflect this region's peculiar blend of social conservatism on some issues and liberalism on others.  

We have men and women who seem to choose education as a major because they have a sense that they should work to improve society, and a number of them have a deep fear of being unemployed ( = unsuccessful) upon graduation.  They blend a career-based mindset with a desire to study the liberal arts and a campus focus on service for the public good, and thus a lot of them end up choosing education as a way to make all of that work together.  And, some of them are really loving life in the classroom.  

We also have a few who think teaching will be easy, but by and large, our education majors here are bright and hard-working.  There are some stringent GPA requirements for the ed school and the program here is the equivalent of a second major, and I think that helps to keep the true slackers out of the ed program.  

We've also, as a faculty, apparently terrified a good number of our students who want to teach but don't want to do research or don't want to face the university prof job market, and so instead of going to get a PhD, a lot of them go and get MATs.  

And we have a few who still think that women are supposed to either be nurses or teachers.  They give me practice in maintaining a composed face during advising sessions.  

[jonesey]

Quite a few Ed majors are looking for their Mrs. degree.  No, seriously, I get these all the time and have to look at the calendar to see what year it is.  I get Nursing students like that as well.  As in "Well, I got an Art History degree because I was supposed to marry this guy by the time I graduated.  I didn't, and now what the heck am I supposed to do with this degree, oh, wait, I'll go back to school to be a nurse." 

That said, I'm always surprised that HS biology teachers don't have to get a degree in Biology.  I thought you had to have your BA/BS in whatever you wanted to get your single subject credential in.  Once upon a time I tried to become a HS English teacher (after grad school); no one was hiring.  It was worse than colleges (this was 2005)!  At least with a college, I can adjunct. : )

[karmann]

It's easy to bash education majors but I for one am appalled by how many people stand in front of classrooms in academia every day who have obviously never given one iota of thought to what makes for effective teaching and pedagogy.

I majored in Basketweaving Education, then got my graduate degrees in Subfield of Basketweaving.  Bloom's was never discussed in my education classes, but it was central to the Basketweaving Pedagogy seminar we all took in my PhD program.  And everything I know about learning styles I learned in Beginning Russian class to fulfill a grad language requirement.  Overall, I learned more about teaching from my research-focused grad departments than I did from my education degree.  I'm not sure what I learned from my education classes, actually, other than the realization that some people really like rubrics.

[concordancia]

One way to address the "which step went wrong" problem for critical thinking is to evaluate each step. That is, there can be a short quiz that tests for the the skill (2+2=4) and the prior knowledge (there are two units in a pair) all before the big test that asks how many units there are in two pairs. When I can do this successfully in my own classes, the quizzes let me know what we need to review and when we can move forward. Unfortunately, the answer is so often "review" that it sometimes becomes hard to introduce new material. This semester I have made a compromise, by not asking for analysis on the first exam - they have the material and I mostly want it back; we will spend more time in the next unit on the process of analysis, which will then be tested.

[cgfunmathguy]

That said, I'm always surprised that HS biology teachers don't have to get a degree in Biology.  I thought you had to have your BA/BS in whatever you wanted to get your single subject credential in.  Once upon a time I tried to become a HS English teacher (after grad school); no one was hiring.  It was worse than colleges (this was 2005)!  At least with a college, I can adjunct. : )

To teach HS (at least anywhere I've been; states = 4 here), you had to have the education degree and the credits of a BS (or nearly so) in the subject area. Those on emergency certificates (granted to those hired with a BS/BA in subject but without the education credentials) got up to two years to complete the education requirements. Failure to do so resulted in termination. Qualification-wise, adjuncting developmental classes at the college level is easier than K-12 teaching.

It's easy to bash education majors but I for one am appalled by how many people stand in front of classrooms in academia every day who have obviously never given one iota of thought to what makes for effective teaching and pedagogy.

I majored in Basketweaving Education, then got my graduate degrees in Subfield of Basketweaving.  Bloom's was never discussed in my education classes, but it was central to the Basketweaving Pedagogy seminar we all took in my PhD program.  And everything I know about learning styles I learned in Beginning Russian class to fulfill a grad language requirement.  Overall, I learned more about teaching from my research-focused grad departments than I did from my education degree.  I'm not sure what I learned from my education classes, actually, other than the realization that some people really like rubrics.

Given what you've said, I'd question whether your ed department could pass the NCATE review the next time around.

[glowdart]

That said, I'm always surprised that HS biology teachers don't have to get a degree in Biology.  I thought you had to have your BA/BS in whatever you wanted to get your single subject credential in.  Once upon a time I tried to become a HS English teacher (after grad school); no one was hiring.  It was worse than colleges (this was 2005)!  At least with a college, I can adjunct. : )

To teach HS (at least anywhere I've been; states = 4 here), you had to have the education degree and the credits of a BS (or nearly so) in the subject area. Those on emergency certificates (granted to those hired with a BS/BA in subject but without the education credentials) got up to two years to complete the education requirements. Failure to do so resulted in termination. Qualification-wise, adjuncting developmental classes at the college level is easier than K-12 teaching.

Can someone with a more working knowledge of the specifics of NCLB speak to this requirement of a BA/BS in a subject area? I was in grad school when NCLB went into effect, and I seem to remember the university radically overhauling a number of the secondary ed programs as a result of NCLB because the students would no longer meet licensing requirements unless they had a full major in a content field.  Those changes caused some uproar in some majors which were not traditional H.S. content areas but rather corollary disciplines or interdisciplinary majors which had been producing a number of secondary ed teachers.  Is a full major in a specific content area actually an NCLB requirement? 

My current place requires that students have a major in a content area and nearly a second major in Education, but that could be a state requirement and not a national one. 

[mdwlark]

Quite a few Ed majors are looking for their Mrs. degree.  No, seriously, I get these all the time and have to look at the calendar to see what year it is.  I get Nursing students like that as well.  As in "Well, I got an Art History degree because I was supposed to marry this guy by the time I graduated.  I didn't, and now what the heck am I supposed to do with this degree, oh, wait, I'll go back to school to be a nurse." 

Even in our community college, the nursing program is extremely competitive.  They can study pre-nursing under open enrollment, but they compete to get accepted in the nursing program.  It is even more true at the local university.  To get into the BA or RN program, a student has to have a B+ average and usually closer to an A- as a minimum.   If a student wants to have fun attending college while looking for marriageable dates, there are a lot of easier majors than nursing. They will get drummed out in the anatomy and physiology classes. 

[jonesey]

Given what you've said, I'd question whether your ed department could pass the NCATE review the next time around.

For profit ed schools aren't usually NCATE accredited, in case you were wondering.  They're also one of the largest majors offered at FP schools. 

Even in our community college, the nursing program is extremely competitive.  They can study pre-nursing under open enrollment, but they compete to get accepted in the nursing program.  It is even more true at the local university.  To get into the BA or RN program, a student has to have a B+ average and usually closer to an A- as a minimum.   If a student wants to have fun attending college while looking for marriageable dates, there are a lot of easier majors than nursing. They will get drummed out in the anatomy and physiology classes. 

I know; Nursing is the largest major at my school.  The workload and prereqs are usually a big surprise for them.

As far as NCLB and single-subject competency, here's the guidelines for California (where I got my CLAST after my BA):

Options for demonstrating NCLB core academic subject competency for middle/high school teachers
Single Subject Credentialed Teachers – Middle/High School
“New” middle/high school teachers have two options to demonstrate subject-matter competency:

Exam option: Pass a CTC-approved subject-matter exam in the NCLB core academic subject area.

Course work option:
a)
CTC-approved single subject matter program in the core area;
b)
Major in the core area;
c)
Graduate degree in the core area; or
d)
Major equivalent in the core area (32 non-remedial units earned with a grade of C or higher); (It is recommended that districts use the CTC’s guidelines for issuing a supplementary or subject matter authorization when determining which courses should count. The guidelines are found on the CTC’s Web site at http://www.ctc.ca.gov/credentials/manuals.html).
e)
Advanced certification (National Board Certification) in the core area

[mystictechgal]

That said, I'm always surprised that HS biology teachers don't have to get a degree in Biology.  I thought you had to have your BA/BS in whatever you wanted to get your single subject credential in.  Once upon a time I tried to become a HS English teacher (after grad school); no one was hiring.  It was worse than colleges (this was 2005)!  At least with a college, I can adjunct. : )

To teach HS (at least anywhere I've been; states = 4 here), you had to have the education degree and the credits of a BS (or nearly so) in the subject area. Those on emergency certificates (granted to those hired with a BS/BA in subject but without the education credentials) got up to two years to complete the education requirements. Failure to do so resulted in termination. Qualification-wise, adjuncting developmental classes at the college level is easier than K-12 teaching.

Can someone with a more working knowledge of the specifics of NCLB speak to this requirement of a BA/BS in a subject area? I was in grad school when NCLB went into effect, and I seem to remember the university radically overhauling a number of the secondary ed programs as a result of NCLB because the students would no longer meet licensing requirements unless they had a full major in a content field.  Those changes caused some uproar in some majors which were not traditional H.S. content areas but rather corollary disciplines or interdisciplinary majors which had been producing a number of secondary ed teachers.  Is a full major in a specific content area actually an NCLB requirement? 

My current place requires that students have a major in a content area and nearly a second major in Education, but that could be a state requirement and not a national one. 

At least in Ohio, the answer would be "no". At least not if your first goal is to become a HS teacher. (http://education-portal.com/qualifications_for_being_a_teacher.html)

Step Two: Earn a Bachelor's Degree: All aspiring elementary school teachers must receive at least a bachelor's degree in education, secondary education or elementary education from an accredited university. Courses included in the 4-year degree program cover social science, physical science, mathematics, art and literature, as well as the philosophy of education and the psychology of learning.

The interesting part of this is that if you want to enter teaching as a second career (which my husband wanted to do) things become somewhat more complicated.  He had an AA in Computer Science and a BA in Business.  When he started to work as a substitute they were happy to have him, but he couldn't work as a "long-term" sub (more than 10 days in a row) unless his BA was in that specific subject area.  So, when he took over a (in this case 6th grade) math class for an entire term it didn't matter that he'd had quite a bit of math in order to obtain his degrees, he couldn't technically teach the class for more than 10 days because his BA was not specifically in mathematics.  Since the school didn't want to bounce the kids back and forth among subs (and since he was doing quite well at pulling them through the material) they played paper games.  Every 10 days they'd call him in to cover a different class, call someone else in to cover his class, and when they both arrived in the morning they'd "trade".  The following day he'd be called back in to take his class for another 10 days.  On paper he never covered the class more than 10 days in a row.

When he looked into getting into the fast-track to getting his Education license he wasn't eligible, again because his degree didn't meet the course specific requirements.  He was told that in order to become licensed he'd have to return to school and get a second undergrad in Education (note: no specific course BA required).  We found this to be quite ridiculous but he was still trying to figure out how he could make it work when he died and the point became moot.

Note also that, at least in the college he attended (and I am attending), classes in the education department are closed, available only to Ed majors.  So, if I want to teach (and I'd like to) I can't do my major in Biology (or English, or History, etc., or even Interdisciplinary) and add any education courses to it to round out my capabilities.  I'd have to specifically major in the Ed department and would have substantially fewer course specific classes on my transcript when I finish.

(The site I provided the link to has links to requirements in other States, as well.  This may well differ by State, but Ohio is supposedly one of the toughest in terms of regulation.  Presumably (from what we were told) because Ohio graduates a lot of teachers, which also makes it a very competitive market to enter.)