I just started broker classes this week. Requirements to become a broker in Arizona: 3 years as a sales person, another 90 hours of classwork, and a coupla tests. And the usual paperwork, fingerprints, etcetera.
But let’s go back to the 90 hours of classroom education.
Because I have to sit there for 90 hours, even if it would only take me, say 30 hours to learn the stuff on my own. We’re there 8 hours of the day, but with breaks and lunch, there’s only 6 hours of that time that counts. Out of the 6 hours of class today, we’ll say there was:
- 1.5 hours devoted to quizzes and quiz reviews (that’s two 20 question multiple choices quizzes, by the way)
- 2 hours of actual teaching of the material
- 1 hour of tangentially related story-telling
- 45 minutes of answering questions about the math section of the state exam from folks who can’t calculate the area of a rectangle
- 30 minutes of Powerpoint presentations timed to Enya songs or to that Secret Agent Man song
- 15 minutes of bagel eating and general crowd control
So now, I’ve got Sail Away stuck in my head and have started referring to my clients as “appurtenance purchasers.”
Did I mention there’s no internet at the school? I spend breaks during the first half of the day fiddling desperately with my phone, trying to reconnect the outside world, and during the breaks in the second half, enough life has been sucked out of me that I can only stare at the thermostat on the wall above me, which taunts me to my very soul with its “DO NOT TOUCH THE THERMOSTAT” sign.
There has got to be a better way of mandating education without having to mandate a specific number of hours of time spent in a classroom.
