Just the other day, I heard a commercial on the radio about an SAT prep course. In the commercial, the company offering the course tried to distinguish itself from other courses in only one way: It boasted that, unlike the instructors of other courses, each of its instructors received between 40 and 60 hours of training before being “certified” to teach.
Call me crazy, but 40-60 hours didn’t sound like a whole lot to me, so I asked around a bit.
• Bank tellers (the people who deposit money and cash checks) receive around 80 hours of training before they are permitted to work independently.
• Grocery store cashiers receive around 40 hours of training, which includes instruction in etiquette and the technical aspects of operating a register.
• Public school teachers, like art teachers and physical education teachers, go through pre-certification academic programs that can take between 1 and 4 YEARS(!) to complete.
• Personally, I completed a two-year master’s degree program that included 6 months of supervised student teaching before becoming certified to teach in New Jersey.
Okay, I’m not crazy. Training college kids for only 40-60 hours before sending them out to teach SAT classes is a complete joke. There is no way I would leave the SAT preparation of my three children in the hands of some unknown person with a mere 40-60 hours of in-house training.
ePrep for the SAT provides students around the world with access to yours truly, an Ivy-League educated master teacher and proven SAT expert with more than 17 years of teaching and tutoring experience. It is not really like me to toot my own horn, but I am getting tired of one-dimensional entrepreneurs in the education space. Teaching should be left to teachers.
Thanks for indulging me as I speak my mind.









