A good bit of that would work Six.
Though I don't know how we'd make teachers better. I'm pretty sure that most math teachers don't know how to teach math.
More times than not, they just present the material and it is up to student to get it. Or they teach only with a method that they would learn well under.
I'm going to guess that this is because math minded teachers typically have poor emotional intelligence.
They lack the ability to look another human in the face and read them. The ability to see if material is being absorbed AND if it is not, change gears and try a different method until it is absorbed.
I've tutored a few people, and it almost always comes down to that. The ability to read someone and try different things. I've been able to teach kids from Mississippi stuff in a hour, things that a teacher could not do in a week. All because I pay attention to people and try different things.
But again, even if we had high school math teachers that could do these things, it would cost a lot of money to implement. At something basic like $13 an hour, what would it cost to sit down with every kid in the US and work with them until they understand every math subject that is giving them difficulty?
My first thought of something that could overcome this is 1. research kids and come up with profiles for different learning styles and 2. create teaching profiles for each. Hopefully if a student put forth any effort, they could use 1 and 2 to learn.
World Famous
Student teacher ratio will help most of what you posted.
It's IMPOSSIBLE for the Algebra teacher to teach each individual student because she sees 35 at a time for 55 minutes repeated 6-7 times a day plus grading work, teaching tutorials and dealing with the educational bureaucracy. Hell, if I was a classroom teacher I'd have quit 6 years ago.
Drop the number of students and achievement goes up. It's not magic.
Wild Arms Junky.
None of this will matter that much if we don't fix the curriculum. School is boring as shit. Teachers have to teach boring ass shit in a usually boring ass way. Paying them 100k a year w/ no union won't make this shit more interesting, even if there's a thousand teachers per high school.Originally Posted by Six
http://www.fvza.org/index.html
I think teaching kids that not everything has to be exciting to be worthwhile would be a lesson worth learning.
It infuriates me when my kid comes home and cries how boring school is. So what? You deal with some bullshit that you dont like right now, so that you have more of a chance to not have to spend the next 45 years doing shit you dont like.
No one is promised that every second of every day will be happy happy joy joy time. Life is pain and sacrifice and hard, though i guarentee that our version of hard is hell of a lot easier than our grandfathers. We are so spoiled and just plain childish.
SSJN wear your struggle and suffering as a badge.
The pride of passing the gauntlet is why nothing really improves in this country. The people who know better and did better don't want anything to change because they look back on their past torments with pride. They could work to make the system better, but why bother? The past system was good enough for them. It made them into a special snow flake. Why change it and have no more special snow flakes?
Sure, life is not going to be fun all the time. But do you think it is the job of 12 years of public education to teach this? And another 4+ years of college?
And are you happy with putting your child at a disadvantage compared to lesser developed countries? Assuming all public education is equal, if you go to a third world country, school is more fun than home. They can't afford toys or video games or satellite tv with 30923923894823 channels. School is awesome to them. And they excel and do well, partly because school is the best thing they have going for them.
And no one said school has to be exciting. Just not boring washed out drivel. Like, I don't know about you, but I learned about the Aztecs and native Americans like 5 different times before high school. Each time, it was washed out history not worth the paper it was printed on. Why waste a child's time with that?
Youre right cheeks, thats what i do.
Well said. The curriculum needs to be useful not exciting. If those things converge, all the better.
can't wake up
Our best public schools are located in the most affluent districts. And our best public schools are better than the public schools in countries commonly touted as having great public schools (Scandinavia, Japan, etc.). Yes they produce better outcomes. They also tend to be in the states with the most entrenched teacher unions.
The issue here is poverty. The charter school/anti-union people are rich assholes who are getting traction in the debate because they are rich. Michelle Rhee is a fraud.
good article: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/arch...failing-grade/
Last edited by Diff-chan; 21 May 2012 at 11:04 AM.
So is it wealth or the unions? You just threw up correlation without causation. When the unions won't let us can tenured teachers who suck, that's a fundamental problem that would span income ranges.
can't wake up
Wealth is what matters. New Jersey has a very strong teachers' union. The schools in my part of the state, an affluent one, are great - some of the best in the nation. The ones in Newark and Camden are very poor. I submit that the issue is not the union but the wealth of the area.
The second order effects of wealth on a child's education strike me as so obvious and important that it seems silly to discuss anything else before it. "Smash the union" will not solve this problem as long as people remain poor and are getting poorer.
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