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Vermain posted:Figured it might be relevant: Jacobin has an article about the failure of the charter school experiment in New Orleans. It's got the same sort of soul-grinding factory method of education mentioned above: I was in TFA in Baton Rouge in 2009, and can pretty much confirm everything in that article. It was horrible.
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Jul 26, 2014 18:41
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hobbesmaster posted:That is the goal of the people implementing it, as the nyt article says it isn't the goal of the authors. Public discourse has conflated the Common Core standards with the package of neo-liberal bullshit school reformers are pushing like score-based teacher evaluations. It doesn't help that the Department of Education endorses both. That NYT article was excellent. Having spent some time helping in fourth grade classrooms, I've noticed a lot of the same things. One thing they don't touch on, though, is that students are not keen on discovery either. Getting the kids to guess or discuss why they thought something was right or wrong was like pulling teeth. It's not just a matter of teaching teachers to teach. We also need to think about how to teach students to learn, because we've done a helluva job teaching them not to.
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Jul 26, 2014 18:52
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Malmesbury Monster posted:Public discourse has conflated the Common Core standards with the package of neo-liberal bullshit school reformers are pushing like score-based teacher evaluations. It doesn't help that the Department of Education endorses both. Both are being pushed hand-in-hand from the top down, so it doesn't really matter in practice if they're not actually the same. The DoE and these billionaire's foundations are pushing this (Common Core, for-profit charters, union busting) as a single package. Even though parents, students, and teachers all seem to hate it, it will probably just be rebranded as many times as needed to muddy the waters enough for a top-down implementation of it.
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Jul 26, 2014 19:01
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Papercut posted:Both are being pushed hand-in-hand from the top down, so it doesn't really matter in practice if they're not actually the same. The DoE and these billionaire's foundations are pushing this (Common Core, for-profit charters, union busting) as a single package. Even though parents, students, and teachers all seem to hate it, it will probably just be rebranded as many times as needed to muddy the waters enough for a top-down implementation of it. It's an important distinction because there's not a drat thing wrong with the standards themselves. That school "reform" assholes like it is regrettable, but not a good reason to go back to lovely state educational standards. It's possible to vigorously oppose union-busting, school privatization, teacher evaluation based on student test scores, etc. without ever mentioning Common Core.
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Jul 26, 2014 19:38
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the boston bomber posted:The teachers in my family are convinced common core is just an elaborate way to close down public schools and gut the teacher's unions so we can have non-union charter schools. Maybe someone who knows more about it can say whether this is at all accurate or not.
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Jul 26, 2014 20:33
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Forgive me for my lack of fully understanding the structure of Common Core, but my question about it is related to No Child Left Behind, its biggest criticism as far as I remember was that it set up for children to learn enough to pass tests/benchmarks rather than expand and help children learn like what they needed. Is this a criticism that follows Common Core? Again, I must shamefully admit I lack little knowledge of it other than students at a particular school had to write a essay about the holocaust being a myth or something to that effect.
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Jul 26, 2014 21:01
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I will admit that one of the big problems with common core is that if the teachers do not understand the reasoning and procedure behind it, it could make things worse for students. I am lucky as my regional superintendent is extremely supportive of common core so she has set up a group of teachers to go around and explain the process of it. I just went through a training 2 weeks ago for Math 1. She explained everything out (the "you, ya'll and we" set up). She even shared with us a drop box which has every unit explained and other teachers in the region can add their own home made worksheets. If you were a teacher who did not have that support, it could be more harmful. I saw relatives from Texas this week. My aunt asked me if I taught at a charter school (I teach at an alternative ed high school set up through our regional office which seems similar to a charter school). She was telling me about how they have some charter schools in Texas that have Teach for America teachers ("who are kick rear end"). I have heard general things about them but nothing specific. I know charter schools have some major issues: "brain drains" on public schools, being able to deny students with IEPs, being able to dismiss students whenever and for whatever they want (I mentioned those to her about charter schools but I had to admit that my school had the ability to do the same as well). I guess I was wondering what the Teach for America set up is all about.
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Jul 26, 2014 22:20
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Bizarro Kanyon posted:I will admit that one of the big problems with common core is that if the teachers do not understand the reasoning and procedure behind it, it could make things worse for students. I am lucky as my regional superintendent is extremely supportive of common core so she has set up a group of teachers to go around and explain the process of it. I just went through a training 2 weeks ago for Math 1. She explained everything out (the "you, ya'll and we" set up). She even shared with us a drop box which has every unit explained and other teachers in the region can add their own home made worksheets. If you were a teacher who did not have that support, it could be more harmful. From what I understand they basically take completely untrained college grads, pay them poverty wages (as in you need to go on food stamps to live) and throw them into abysmal school districts to teach for 2 years. This might work in some cases but the TFA people tend to not stick around and are making it very difficult to make any real progress in improving the worst schools. Someone who knows more about TFA can probably clarify.
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Jul 26, 2014 22:28
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Although I didn't teach math, I taught English in a lovely charter high school and my master's thesis is, in part, about education reform efforts in social studies. I'm close to this subject. In my experience, the poster who mentioned education as a classic intersectional problem is dead on. I'd also like to add that talking about the problems of the American education system is pretty fruitless. Firstly, we don't have a system. We have a few thousand mini-systems. Most schools work more like private bureaucratic fiefdoms than a coherent part of a national system. Efforts like Common Core might help this problem, but so far, nationwide reforms, gloss over the unique problems faced by each individual school. A personal illustrative anecdote: within the miniature chain of under performing charter schools I worked at, with the same curriculum and mission across each school, the problems of each school were still different. One school mostly dealt with poor students and one school mostly with behavior cases. An impoverished student and a student with behavioral issues can have similar educational outcomes and even act the same in a school setting. However, the interventions and solutions end up being different. Making sure every child has breakfast can help with poor food insecure students but won't help a well fed student with PTSD. Since the schools were consistently poorly performing, my state's NCLB implementation required the school to work with outside consultants and the state education department to create a reform plan for the entire chain of charters. This plan didn't account for any of the subtle but important differences between the individual schools. Secondly, in addition to not having a system, we arguably don't have a problem. In the International Mathematics and Science Study of 2011, the US as a whole had above average scores in both math and science. Students in the state of Massachusetts out performed every other country on the planet on the 2012 PISA in reading and came in within the top 5 for math and science. (This isn't counting the various cities and city states the PISA includes in the tests but even including them Massachusetts comes in the top 10.) The US' overall score on the 2012 PISA was 492. The OECD average was 497. But that's sort of like coming in at 11th out of 20 in the Olympics. Comparisons to and within the OECD include only the worlds best and highest performers. On the NAEP scores have risen slowly but steadily since the test began in the 70s. The achievement gap on the NAEP has shrunk across all areas, in some cases quite considerably. While there is still a work to be done to eliminate the achievement gap it's smaller than it was. The trend lines for the NAEP are basically good ones. Pretty much the worst thing you can say about America's systems (and this is a gross generalization) is that if you disaggregate these scores what you find is that the US has a cluster of mostly white and well off students that receive one of the best educations in the world and a cluster of mostly poor and brown students that receive somewhere a mediocre or even bad education. When you combine good and bad you end up with average. There are much bigger questions about the usefulness of these tests and the purpose of education.
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Jul 26, 2014 23:03
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Bizarro Kanyon posted:I guess I was wondering what the Teach for America set up is all about. Teach for America lures in college grads with flowery idealism, gives them one month of educational training, and then sends these barely-trained kids to the worst schools in the nation to carry out a two-year teaching commitment for a salary that's low even by teachers' standards. Once they've worked the two years in a lovely school for lovely pay, they have a high chance of quitting teaching, if they didn't already burn out or have a breakdown during the two years. Not to worry, though, as they'll just be replaced by another fresh-faced barely-trained TFA teacher. Some school districts have even taken to saving money by firing their decently-paid experienced teachers (whose experience is included in their salary, and who are likely union) and replacing them with amateur TFA grads who have so little qualification to teach that the district can get away with paying them less than entry-level.
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Jul 26, 2014 23:07
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Main Paineframe posted:Teach for America lures in college grads with flowery idealism, gives them one month of educational training, and then sends these barely-trained kids to the worst schools in the nation to carry out a two-year teaching commitment for a salary that's low even by teachers' standards. Once they've worked the two years in a lovely school for lovely pay, they have a high chance of quitting teaching, if they didn't already burn out or have a breakdown during the two years. Not to worry, though, as they'll just be replaced by another fresh-faced barely-trained TFA teacher. Some school districts have even taken to saving money by firing their decently-paid experienced teachers (whose experience is included in their salary, and who are likely union) and replacing them with amateur TFA grads who have so little qualification to teach that the district can get away with paying them less than entry-level. It's basically this. You get around that nefarious ~*~tenure~*~ problem and the union by claiming budget shortfalls then bring in TFA scabs that'll probably 95% of the time either take their two years and leave running and screaming for the hills or quit before then. Bring in another idealistic scab and the cycle continues. More short term gains for long term losses, The American Way! I'm not shocked at the audacity of the program, just saddened by it. All it does is drive out people who want to teach and not end up on food stamps in the process. They tried to pull the same trick on my sister but she declined after I mentioned how it worked. Of course now she's dealing cards in a casino instead.
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Jul 26, 2014 23:14
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Stanos posted:Of course now she's dealing cards in a casino instead. That's a tipped position, and there's usually people around to respond immediately to any form of threat. A big improvement, actually.
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Jul 26, 2014 23:16
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BetterToRuleInHell posted:Forgive me for my lack of fully understanding the structure of Common Core, but my question about it is related to No Child Left Behind, its biggest criticism as far as I remember was that it set up for children to learn enough to pass tests/benchmarks rather than expand and help children learn like what they needed. NCLB created a series of guidelines that states were to use to create quantitative benchmarks that the state's schools then had to meet. These included graduation and attendance rates, and math and English scores. The complaints tended to focus on the elevation of math and reading over other subjects, the reliance on standardized test scores to determine progress in these subjects, the loose standards (some states managed to show test score growth by lowering their standards yearly). The sanctions schools faced were also problematic, since they usually revolved around mass firings or budget cutting. There was also a worry about the erosion of traditional local control. Common Core would be an attempt to fix the loose standards. Some of the objection to CC is based around education system philosophy rather than education philosophy. Another piece of the objection is based around who is pushing common core and how common core is being implemented. wallawallawingwang fucked around with this message at 23:31 on Jul 26, 2014 |
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Jul 26, 2014 23:27
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You know what would be awesome for education in the united states? Poor children showing up with paper, backpack, pencil, calculators, binders, anything at all would be great really. Our lower class is hosed hard by economic policies. Many see no point in high school because they can't afford college. They need to get a job and help pay bills.
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Jul 26, 2014 23:34
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PT6A posted:That's a tipped position, and there's usually people around to respond immediately to any form of threat. A big improvement, actually. Oh don't get me wrong she's doing very well for herself but she did have a passion to teach before it was slowly but surely beaten out of her. It's just sad to see.
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Jul 26, 2014 23:34
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spunkshui posted:You know what would be awesome for education in the united states? Definitely. Working with poor students at my current school has turned me into a "socialist/liberal" more than anything else (also having two daughters who will grow up into women that will be treated like a lesser). Example: A few years ago, my daughter got sick in the middle of the night. I was going to stay home to take care of her but I needed to get my sub plans set up. I went in at 4 am and as I pulled into the parking lot, I see a 18 year old senior's truck. I park beside it and head in (assuming that the student parked there and got picked up by someone). As I am walking through a hall, I look out and see that the student is in his truck. I go back out and ask him what he was doing. Our school gets out at 2:15 and he goes to work at 3 and works until 11 (he helps pay bills so they do not get lose their apartment again). Apparently when he got home, he got into an argument with his mom and she kicked him out (she said he ran away). He had nowhere else to go so he came to the school to sleep in his truck (middle of December and it is freezing outside). I brought him in and called the principal to let her know. We set up a cot in an office area for him to sleep on. I called another male teacher who was going to come in early so I could get home to my daughter. I got my sub plans ready, got a sub set up (side note: I have had subs hang up on me when I mention "alternative high school") and the other teacher came in with some breakfast for the kid to eat. My main point of this story is that there is no way a student can care about my first hour current affairs class when he does not even know where he is going to be sleep at that night.
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Jul 26, 2014 23:59
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axeil posted:From what I understand they basically take completely untrained college grads, pay them poverty wages (as in you need to go on food stamps to live) and throw them into abysmal school districts to teach for 2 years. This might work in some cases but the TFA people tend to not stick around and are making it very difficult to make any real progress in improving the worst schools. This is accurate. As I indicated earlier, I was in TFA in Baton Rouge back in 2009. I joined with pretty much no teaching experience; the closest thing I had was a couple years of tutoring in our campus writing center. The TFA training was pretty abysmal. It lasted about five weeks, and each week I only actually spent probably 15-45 minutes per day in front of a classroom. The rest of the "training" amounted to sitting in a classroom being told how to teach by former TFA teachers, many of whom had recently completed their two-year commitments and were now TFA staffers. I ended up getting placed in a charter school that was more than ninety percent staffed by first-year TFA teachers (every single teacher from the year prior had been fired prior to the school getting handed over to a charter); our most experienced teacher was in her second year of TFA. In addition to pretty much all of the teachers being first-year TFA teachers, our principal and vice principal were first-year administrators, and our guidance counselor was a first-year guidance counselor. We also had a first-year TFAer as our sole special education teacher, which is particularly troubling since special ed teachers were not receiving any special training beyond what the rest of us got. Anyway, the year was completely hosed up. They used that SPARK (Sit up straight, Pay attention, Ask and answer questions, React to show I’m following along, Keep tracking the speaker) stuff, had the "behavior intervention rooms", and used collective punishments like banning recess for the entire fifth grade for a month because there were a couple fights one day during recess. The charter I worked for controlled five schools, and they got all of the teachers together for an all-teacher meeting and told us that literally all they cared about was test scores and if we couldn't deliver on those during the first year, we would be replaced. The charter also pretty much covered up a rape that occurred at the middle school where some of my TFA colleagues worked. Fortunately, the charter has since gone under. Oh, and my classroom also had asbestos warnings on some of the walls . . . ugh. I think all but one of my TFA colleagues has left the classroom--mostly for either law school or grad school. A bunch of them are still very involved with TFA or charter schools in general, and one of them is now a principal at Rocketship Academy, a school whose classrooms look like this:  I left after my first year because I was grossly underprepared for TFA and it ended up making me feel like a part of the problem. I am happy to answer any other questions folks have about TFA, keeping in mind that I am several years removed from the experience at this point. I do not really know how I feel about common core, but I have some pretty strongly negative opinions about TFA from my experience. Edit: I also saw the question of pay come up a couple of times, looking over some of the earlier posts. I do not know what it is like in other regions, but in Baton Rouge I was making somewhere between $40k and $45k as a first-year teacher, so I was definitely not on food stamps. I think the only decent thing about the charter was that it paid decently compared to other schools in the area. A lot of teachers at other schools in Baton Rouge were getting paid a lot less, though. B B fucked around with this message at 00:48 on Jul 27, 2014 |
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Jul 27, 2014 00:43
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Wait, did you even go to school to become a teacher?
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Jul 27, 2014 01:04
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TFA recruits usually don't go to school for teaching in my experience. It's more along the lines of 'poo poo I got a degree but all the jobs I can find are stocking shelves or serving coffee, help me out here!'
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Jul 27, 2014 01:17
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Bizarro Kanyon posted:Wait, did you even go to school to become a teacher? Teach For America is specifically for people that aren't teaching majors. They're for graduates from elite universities to spend 2 years at problem schools. http://www.teachforamerica.org/why-teach-for-america/who-we-look-for
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Jul 27, 2014 02:02
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Bizarro Kanyon posted:Wait, did you even go to school to become a teacher? Nope. The closest experience I had was becoming a writing tutor at our writing center, and the training for that was about 100% more intense than TFA's training. To be a campus tutor, I had to take a semester-long class under the direction of our campus's writing director, and I shadowed current writing tutors a few hours a week and got eased into doing my own independent writing consultations. I probably had like 50 hours of shadowing/tutoring experience before they let me actually tutor on campus. Contrast that with TFA, which literally put me in front of a classroom with maybe 6 or 7 hours total in front of a room of students before setting me loose full time. Ugh. I graduated with a BA in English in 2009 during the recession and was jobless around the time of graduation. Some TFA representative stalked* me because I went to a decent public school and had a high GPA and badgered me into going to a recruiting event. Brainwashing ensued, and I ended up being convinced that it was a really great idea and I'd totally be helping poor kids and I'd change their lives. * And I really do mean stalked me. When I was in TFA, one of the TFA recruiters reached out to me with a list of students at my university who they were targeting because they had high GPAs. I was presumably on one of these lists during undergrad, because I was getting weekly, personalized e-mails from TFA reps during my senior year of college. And hobbesmaster is correct--having a teaching license is actually considered a downside on your TFA application from what I have heard. It's harder to brainwash people who have something resembling a realistic concept of what it is to be an actual teacher. Edit: quote:TFA recruits usually don't go to school for teaching in my experience. It's more along the lines of 'poo poo I got a degree but all the jobs I can find are stocking shelves or serving coffee, help me out here!' This was pretty much it for me. I had an offer from TFA, and everything else I was going for fell through. It was literally either move back into my parents basement or go to Baton Rouge and teach. I, unfortunately, chose the latter. B B fucked around with this message at 04:16 on Jul 27, 2014 |
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Jul 27, 2014 02:28
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Can you turn on your PM's?
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Jul 27, 2014 02:53
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Holy poo poo! When I first read your experience I thought that the TFA training was not too bad because you already had a background in education so this was simply focusing on their ideology. drat, I had my semester of student teaching (which was a month of watching the current teacher teach and then him throwing me to the wolves while he worked on getting his principal license but he at least would talk with me and go over what happened throughout the day. By the end of my first month alone, he trusted me more and the talks became less and less.) Besides that, I had hundreds of hours of classes, shadowing, principal interviews, etc.
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Jul 27, 2014 03:31
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PT6A posted:Jesus Christ, what are they trying to do: make it the most like a prison that it can possibly be? That's my background; before I quit in disgust, I was a behavior intervention specialist working in an alternative school that was run by a psychiatric hospital. Whatever Orwellian scenes you are imagining, imagine more overt ones.
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Jul 27, 2014 04:25
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SedanChair posted:That's my background; before I quit in disgust, I was a behavior intervention specialist working in an alternative school that was run by a psychiatric hospital. Whatever Orwellian scenes you are imagining, imagine more overt ones. That's really quite horrible. The worst I ever had to deal with was having the unmitigated audacity to stand in the hallway during lunch in Jr. High. The misanthropic teacher who was in charge of lunch supervision asked me if I wanted to go to the Principal's office. I said I didn't really care, as I'd not done anything wrong. Luckily, it being Canada, even having a less-than-clean record for other issues, nothing happened. I imagine if I were in America and, god forbid not white, I'd have been expelled. Now, on another subject, which I'm sure it going to cause no small amount of disquiet: I think we were honestly better off when schools were more easy-going and you could literally still hit kids with a big chunk o' wood if they pissed you off. I don't approve of that by any means, but I think ultimately even corporal punishment is less damaging than what's going on right now. The story I initially responded to sounded worse than poo poo I've seen on prison documentaries.
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Jul 27, 2014 04:57
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Malmesbury Monster posted:Public discourse has conflated the Common Core standards with the package of neo-liberal bullshit school reformers are pushing like score-based teacher evaluations. It doesn't help that the Department of Education endorses both. Race to the Top grants (which in part involves shutting down public schools and shunting money off to charters) were tied to CC implementation.
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Jul 27, 2014 05:35
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BetterToRuleInHell posted:Forgive me for my lack of fully understanding the structure of Common Core, but my question about it is related to No Child Left Behind, its biggest criticism as far as I remember was that it set up for children to learn enough to pass tests/benchmarks rather than expand and help children learn like what they needed. Before common core, every state just had their own set of benchmarks (content strands, standards, etc.). Most of those standards were pretty drat similar to the common core. Where they were different they were most often worse.
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Jul 27, 2014 07:28
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SedanChair posted:That's my background; before I quit in disgust, I was a behavior intervention specialist working in an alternative school that was run by a psychiatric hospital. Whatever Orwellian scenes you are imagining, imagine more overt ones. PT6A posted:That's really quite horrible. The worst I ever had to deal with was having the unmitigated audacity to stand in the hallway during lunch in Jr. High. The misanthropic teacher who was in charge of lunch supervision asked me if I wanted to go to the Principal's office. I said I didn't really care, as I'd not done anything wrong. Luckily, it being Canada, even having a less-than-clean record for other issues, nothing happened. I imagine if I were in America and, god forbid not white, I'd have been expelled. These are both excellent points. American school systems seem to be run in a very authoritarian and prison-like fashion. I can't imagine it's conductive to learning when you know you can get strip searched for ibuprofin. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/25/AR2009062501690.html WaPo posted:Arizona school officials violated the constitutional rights of a 13-year-old girl when they strip-searched her on the suspicion she might be hiding ibuprofen in her underwear, the Supreme Court ruled yesterday. When you need the Supreme Court to say, "no you can't strip search pre-teens for over the counter medication" I think we're in trouble.
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Jul 27, 2014 16:39
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PT6A posted:That's really quite horrible. The worst I ever had to deal with was having the unmitigated audacity to stand in the hallway during lunch in Jr. High. The misanthropic teacher who was in charge of lunch supervision asked me if I wanted to go to the Principal's office. I said I didn't really care, as I'd not done anything wrong. Luckily, it being Canada, even having a less-than-clean record for other issues, nothing happened. I imagine if I were in America and, god forbid not white, I'd have been expelled. I mean, at the time I felt the feelgood bullshit that the principal told me every time I visited him was annoying but in retrospect it meant that I listened, if only because the underlying thread to it was him showing me respect. That's why I shaped up eventually, because opposition and hostility just made me answer with the same. I thought this "Zero tolerance" poo poo was more a result of how sue-happy American parents are and school admins just take the easiest way out?
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Jul 27, 2014 18:13
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Wait you're telling me there's teachers that are paid even worse than recent grads? My friend just got a teaching position at a low-income elementary school and she had to put up an Indiegogo page to pay for classroom supplies for gently caress's sake.
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Jul 27, 2014 18:26
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Luigi Thirty posted:Wait you're telling me there's teachers that are paid even worse than recent grads? My friend just got a teaching position at a low-income elementary school and she had to put up an Indiegogo page to pay for classroom supplies for gently caress's sake. TFA grads are paid by the school district, not TFA, so salaries vary, but since they've got no teaching experience at all and less teaching education than even the entry-level-est of entry-level teachers, their pay is often less than that of real teachers. On discipline, remember that the US is loving huge and has an absolute ton of schools, and that our system is so decentralized and fragmented that even the basic curriculum isn't really consistent from school to school. There's no single universal same way that discipline is enforced in every single US school; punishments and policies are often decided differently by each school. TFA is authoritarian as heck because, be honest, you can't learn to really handle a class in five weeks; it's faster and easier to learn to order kids to march in lockstep and apply collective punishment to any behavior than it is to actually train teachers on how to really handle misbehavior.
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Jul 27, 2014 18:54
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Much of the "No Excuses" stuff sounds like during even elementary schools into mini-prisons, if anything it makes a very sad amount of sense looking at the way our criminal justice system is designed. Anyway, the common core as a concept may not be such a bad thing, but I expect the implementation to most likely be quite haphazard especially since most teachers don't understand it and I doubt the federal government or state governments are going to pour serious money into fixing it. The most dangerous a bad system is, is when it seriously tries to reform itself. It doesn't help either it is likely to be tied to the hip to all the rest as others have said. Even if you are white and middle class, you have to wonder if you want to throw your kid into such a mess.
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Jul 27, 2014 19:53
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Oh man, I'm so excited that people are talking about math education. I'm a researcher in math education! Honestly one of the big problems is that administrators want to solve the problems with curriculum changes rather than the whole host of other issues that are at work. The article named a lot of the big ones. New curriculum are thrown at teachers often with no additional training or explanation on how they are supposed to work. Teacher certification often has almost no information about subject matter, but rather instructs them how to use manipulatives. A lot of teachers come out thinking okay I need to make my class engaging by using manipulatives but they don't know how to use them effectively so the whole thing is pointless. How really understanding why something works more than the procedure is key to picking the right example so you don't give your students the wrong impression that just because a method works for this example doesn't mean it'll work for all examples. There are some things that the article doesn't mention or only briefly touches on that I'd like to expand on why this is so complex. I'm not even going to get into SES factors or union factors which obviously add to the complexity. I'm from Canada which is also facing a math crisis, so it's not just US based. So some points. - Math teachers can hate math. If you are a high school math teacher there is a good chance that you selected math as a teachable, but if you are an elementary school teacher then you are teaching everything whether you are fluent or comfortable with it or not. In Ontario you aren't required to take any math beyond grade 10 to graduate high school, get into a BA program, and subsequently go on to get your B.Ed. where like I mentioned you aren't learning subject matter. It is very possible for people who stopped taking math as soon as they were legally allowed to, to be teaching math to children. They might think "oh I was bad at upper level math, but I can teach grade 3 math." but they don't understand, because of their aversion to math, that math is a complex web of ideas. These kinds of teachers are the ones who will choose the wrong example because they don't understand why one example is better than another. They won't be able to evaluate a student's idea or formula as right or wrong. Kids can ask really high level questions because they don't know that they are high level, but if you hate math or are afraid of math then what do you do in that situation? - Math anxiety is real and it can and does pass easily from teacher to student. Math anxiety is a serious problem that people aren't talking about. It can manifest in a whole bunch of ways from total panic over having to figure out a tip at a restaurant to being nervous over taking a high level math exam, and really everything in between. Stats are vague but it can affect around 25-50% (is it expected for me to provide a citation for this kind of stat? I can if needed) of the population to some degree and is much more likely to affect women. Which by the way like 90% of primary and junior teachers are women. Math anxiety also often comes with a whole bunch of gender stereotypes. There is still a belief that women are just not as good at math as men. There's also a believe that some people are just "not math people" or don't have the "math gene". Both of which are totally bullshit and unfounded, but these beliefs are widely held and some of those people become teachers, and whether they believe they are or not, they pass it on to their students. There's a study from 2010 (Beilock et al) where some female teachers who had negative beliefs about math and about women's potential in math were studied for a year. At the beginning of the year their student's scores and attitudes towards math were not at all related to the teacher's beliefs, but by the end of the year the boys were significantly outperforming the girls and the girls had a bunch of negative beliefs about their abilities in math. And this is 2010, this is not 50 years ago. And the kicker is that these teachers did not believe that their attitudes about math were being passed on to their students, they didn't think that it was influencing their teaching. Math anxiety is very real but nobody likes to talk about it and so it's hard to be fixed. - Math is a complex web of ideas but it is taught linearly. One math concept builds on another. Each year a teacher uses the concepts taught the year before to help students learn the new idea. But if you have one of the teachers I was just talking about who didn't understand the concept well enough to teach it to you then you may have missed it. Coupled with the idea that some people just aren't math people, you get this "dropped stitch" phenomenon where missing one concept early on can have profound ramifications since nothing that comes after will ever make sense because you don't have that base knowledge. If you miss an early concept in something like reading then there is usually huge pressure to catch up. There are school and parent interventions, extra assignments, afterschool programs, etc. Society tells you that reading and writing is a big deal and not knowing how to do it is seen are a problem. But when parents and teachers believe that math is something you can or cannot do then a small stumble can turn into a lifetime of hating the entire subject. This can happen very, very early. Math anxiety and math avoidance used to be thought of as issues starting in high school or during other complex math programs, but there's data now for kids as early as grade 1 having anxiety towards math. And it may have the ability to go younger but there's no formal way to test kids younger than 7 years old for math anxiety. I could go on and on about why the testing methods for this kind of thing are terrible, but that goes a bit off topic. - Textbooks are first and foremost a money making business. Textbooks standards are terrible. They are designed and sold based on how appealing they are not based on their strength of concept. Really, textbook companies go to trade shows and talk about "look at these cute ladybugs on the cover" not that their textbook is actually a better method of teaching than another textbook. I'm not an expert in textbooks so I won't speak too much on it other than to say that the content of the textbook is about the last reason that a textbook is chosen for an area. - Research dissemination into classrooms is loving terrible. This is really my area. I have a cognitive psychology background and there is so much information out there on how children learn about math and number as well as how they learn in general (which I won't go into because this is already too drat long), but it's all caught up in this ivory tower bullshit where researchers write for other researchers. To focus on trying to translate this to teachers and parents and policymakers is seen as a side project at best and more often a waste of time when you should be getting more publications! It's not fair to expect teachers in addition to their job of being teachers to also keep up on what's happening in cognitive psychology! People spend entire careers on figuring out how kids learn that 52 is 5 tens plus 2 ones. How could a teacher be expected to read all of that? It's very important that researcher consider the importance of dissemination or knowledge mobilization or whatever buzz word you'd like to call it. There's a model I like to use:  Content knowledge is basically how much you know about math itself, which like I already talked about can be not very much! Pedagogical knowledge is knowing how to teach. This is what most teacher certification instruction focuses on. Then there's pedagogical content knowledge which is basically about knowing how children learn. This is where psychology has a whole bunch of information about cognition and have passed on basically none of it. The basic idea though is that it's hard to teach someone something when they have a fundamentally different view of the world as you. To children first coming into school numbers are something that are used for counting physical objects. I have some ducks and I can do one to one correspondence with my number list to find out that there are 5 ducks. But now try to explain to that person the concept of fractions where you can divide numbers into smaller parts or that numbers can be negative. You as an adult understand it and it's hard to imagine not understanding it, but that's where PCK comes in. You have to know the level of the child's cognition to be able to bridge that gap between theirs and yours, and so many teachers don't have that knowledge. This all may seem like I'm being hard on teachers, but I'm not. Teachers do fantastic work and they are incredible, but they are suffering from a failure of a system that doesn't prepare them, researchers and policymakers who don't adequately share knowledge, and a stigma against math anxiety being seen as a problem. So yeah, math education is super hosed up.
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Jul 27, 2014 20:03
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Asiina posted:So yeah, math education is super hosed up. This is a fantastic post - thank you for it! What do you think would be the "best" policy options for strengthening how math is taught in schools? I'm interested in this kind of reform as someone who did horrendously at math back in high school, and who's still struggling with it years later.
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Jul 27, 2014 20:20
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Vermain posted:This is a fantastic post - thank you for it! What do you think would be the "best" policy options for strengthening how math is taught in schools? I'm interested in this kind of reform as someone who did horrendously at math back in high school, and who's still struggling with it years later. There's a lot of policies that could be put in place, but honestly I think more openness and knowledge sharing is what is needed most. There's the idea of a closed door classroom that is very common and a lot of teachers even take pride in. That whatever policies come down from the ministry/board/state are fine but in the end I can close my door and it is my classroom with my students and I can do what I want to get them to learn. But the problem with that is when that happens struggles also become secret. This is a lack of accountability on teachers, which is considered a dirty word in some circles, but also a lack of support. In that kind of environment teachers won't really feel comfortable saying "I don't understand this concept, can you help me so I can explain it to my kids?" to other teachers or to their principal or whoever is coming in with the new idea for them to teach. And then if teachers are more vocal about their lack of understanding then those who are giving the information will have to realize they need to do a better job explaining it. The issue is it's embarrassing to admit that you're scared of math or that you can't understand the new policies, so people silently try to push through. But that just leads to poorly implemented policy (which then can't really be evaluated) and a whole new generation of people who have math anxiety.
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Jul 27, 2014 20:42
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On the other hand, I know TFA corps members who are making $70,000 in their first year with regular raises thereafter.
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Jul 27, 2014 21:12
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comes along bort posted:Race to the Top grants (which in part involves shutting down public schools and shunting money off to charters) were tied to CC implementation. I'm aware of the connection, but the CC standards were developed independently from Race to the Top. The standards themselves are excellent, which is why it bugs me to hear teachers assume they must be bad because they got lumped in with all the other reform bullshit. Since they're already suspicious, they bite the "Obummer national curriculum" or "it makes math too hard" line without question, which plays into the hands of people who want to mandate terrible state standards and curricula. Asiina posted:There's a lot of policies that could be put in place, but honestly I think more openness and knowledge sharing is what is needed most. There's the idea of a closed door classroom that is very common and a lot of teachers even take pride in. That whatever policies come down from the ministry/board/state are fine but in the end I can close my door and it is my classroom with my students and I can do what I want to get them to learn. But the problem with that is when that happens struggles also become secret. This is a lack of accountability on teachers, which is considered a dirty word in some circles, but also a lack of support. In that kind of environment teachers won't really feel comfortable saying "I don't understand this concept, can you help me so I can explain it to my kids?" to other teachers or to their principal or whoever is coming in with the new idea for them to teach. And then if teachers are more vocal about their lack of understanding then those who are giving the information will have to realize they need to do a better job explaining it. My father is a 4th grade Title I specialist, and we had a similar discussion about teacher openness. He pointed out that the average teacher has been in the classroom for years, if not decades, now and doesn't always take kindly to the suggestion that the way they've been doing things for 20 years isn't "optimal," to put it kindly. How do you think schools can facilitate that kind of dialogue? For what it's worth, I'm studying to be an elementary teacher and thus far I have mostly positive things to say about the content and pedagogy we're learning, but it pains me how many of my peers are in the program because they're bad at math.
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Jul 28, 2014 01:07
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Malmesbury Monster posted:I'm aware of the connection, but the CC standards were developed independently from Race to the Top. The standards themselves are excellent, which is why it bugs me to hear teachers assume they must be bad because they got lumped in with all the other reform bullshit. Since they're already suspicious, they bite the "Obummer national curriculum" or "it makes math too hard" line without question, which plays into the hands of people who want to mandate terrible state standards and curricula. It's a hard question, no doubt. You would hope that teachers would see themselves as life long learners who are open to new ideas, but that is unrealistic. There are always going to be people who will immediately reject any changes on principle. But the fact is that we know a lot more about how children learn now than we did 20 years ago and there's a lot of information that can be given to teachers that will make their work easier. I think it needs to be presented in a way that teachers will be receptive to rather than the aforementioned "here are the new curriculum standards, good luck" which immediately creates hostility and resentment. I think it also requires commitment from the principal and board officials (superintendents and the like) to promote a more open atmosphere where teachers can admit they don't know something or are uncomfortable with policy without fear of reprimands or loss of job security. Also that teachers will be heard if they have new ideas that have worked for them which others might be able to benefit from. The problem of course is that this is a board by board school by school process and ideally you want education experience to be as uniform as possible. There isn't really an easy answer and I don't know that there's a universal one. It's about classroom culture.
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Jul 28, 2014 01:33
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Malmesbury Monster posted:I'm aware of the connection, but the CC standards were developed independently from Race to the Top. The standards themselves are excellent, which is why it bugs me to hear teachers assume they must be bad because they got lumped in with all the other reform bullshit. Since they're already suspicious, they bite the "Obummer national curriculum" or "it makes math too hard" line without question, which plays into the hands of people who want to mandate terrible state standards and curricula. Oh I know, but a lot of the criticism of CC from the left or whatever we're labeling people who aren't total nutbars like Diane Ravitch for example is based largely on implementation rather than the content of the standards. And that implementation is tied to neoliberal reforms, which regardless of what curricula standard one develops will undermine it.
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Jul 28, 2014 02:11
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comes along bort posted:Oh I know, but a lot of the criticism of CC from the left or whatever we're labeling people who aren't total nutbars like Diane Ravitch for example is based largely on implementation rather than the content of the standards. And that implementation is tied to neoliberal reforms, which regardless of what curricula standard one develops will undermine it. If the reforms are implemented in such a way that the achievement metrics are basically impossible to achieve, and the consequence for failure is a dismantling of public schools/public worker unions, then it doesn't matter what the reforms are. I guess it basically becomes two different discussions. You can talk about what the original CC reforms were and their merits, which is a purely academic discussion with no real world relevance (because not in a million years will it get the type of funding and support needed to properly implement it). Or you can talk about what is actually being done to the education system by the group of monsters Obama has empowered to run the DoE under the name Common Core.
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Jul 28, 2014 04:42
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