Vassar vs Amherst

Bill_Marsh
Fri, 23 Apr 2021 21:29:48 +0000

You seem focused closely on a comparison of the 2 schools. Naturally. My suggestion is that you widen the lens a bit and look at the communities they’re in.

Vassar is in Poughkeepsie where there’s not a lot going on. And it’s not even in the city proper, so it’s removed from Marist, the other small college in town, and from CIA and Bard, small colleges in nearby towns.

The town of Amherst is crawling with college kids - about 30,000 of them. Two towns away is Northampton, a hip, almost counter-culture town with a lot going on. I don’t think you’ll have any trouble finding “my own people” in lots of different clusters in this scene. Amherst seems to me to be a better fit for you.

Your other concern was teacher preparation at Amherst. It’s not so much that teacher prep is new at Amherst, it’s that they really don’t have a teacher prep program at Amherst. They sent their students 10 miles down the road to Mt Holyoke College, op another member of the 5 college consortium, which has a long established teacher prep program.

This arrangement with Mt Holyoke makes little sense to me - not when another 5 college consortium member with a big School of Ed & a long established history of preparing teachers, UMass, is just a mile or so down the street. You could walk or bike over to UMass while MHC presents unnecessary commuting hassles.

I suggest that you call Admissions at Amherst and ask them to put you in touch with the person who coordinates teacher prep at Amherst to find out if you can do your education training at UMass. If you plan to teach grades 7-12, your major is what you’ll teach and you only need a cluster of courses in educational methods & theory as well as child development.

The other thing that doesn’t make sense about this partnership for prospective teachers with MHC is that the application for the program is to be made in junior year for a program that will be engaged in senior year. Wrong way to do it. Methods courses should be taken in junior year, so that you are ready to do student teaching in the first semester of senior year. Think about it. This is your professional training. What you most need to know is how to get a school year started, how to establish a tone in your classes and hoe to set expectations fo your students. You can’t learn that when you student teach in the 2nd semester, which is what this 1-year program with MHC is set up to do.

Taking education courses at UMass would put you back in charge of planning your courses and it would give you the flexibility to distribute your education courses over junior and senior year. The MHC option has the feel of a cram course for students who decide at the last minute that teaching is the best career path for them. Not a good way to go. Definitely not best practice.

BTW, the reason that Vassar has a well established Education Dept is the same reason that MHC has one. Vassar was for most of its history a women’s college and their history of preparing teachers dates back to the days when options for women were limited. Teaching was at the top of the list for college educated women. Colleges for the sons of the wealthy, like Amherst, Williams, and Wesleyan were preparing young men for careers in business, finance, law, and medicine. They weren’t training school teachers.