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loving amen on that DeVos poo poo. People don't know just how important public education funding is because in middle-class neighborhoods, the middle-class families subsidize the schools' needs. Like how loving ridiculous is it that my school's PTA fundraises for poo poo like our science fair? But they do. Because our district and school funds only go so far, and so the school science fair happens because the parents fundraise for it. That's bullshit. I've been all cute and silly with my students and their families, saying that all of my eighth graders just suddenly magically became teenagers in the last month, but I'll be honest with SA. My kids are loving terrified of their future and they aren't coping well. Betsy loving DeVos and what she represents is going to gently caress up their lives. Teaching was already hard before this poo poo, now it is loving exhausting.
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Feb 9, 2017 05:29
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| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 11:39 |
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on the left posted:It's odd that the demands for equal funding only go in one direction, towards the weakest and most marginalized groups. Almost as if demands for equality are being used to advance a true agenda that would be deeply unpopular if revealed in the current political climate. Easily the most hilarious tinfoil poo poo I've ever heard in my life. Like, what? Anyway. When we discuss SpEd we often forget who is covered under that umbrella. I had a student who was blind, and otherwise loving brilliant. SpEd services made it possible for her to be in her honors classes. She is in college now and will probably become some sort of badass. Wouldn't have happened without SpEd dough. Everyone thinks SpEd is 100% made up of kids with mental retardation or autism but even if that was true, poo poo is a spectrum. I have lots of students with autism, they're loving fine in my (general population) class since they have services and support. They will be totally fine as adults.
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Feb 9, 2017 21:54
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bag em and tag em posted:And it doesnt account for teachers not wanting to strike because they don't want their students to suffer in the meanwhile. Yeah like look it's a compounding problem. Those of us who teach in high poverty areas, our kids have been taught that they are the lowest priority over and over and over again. It takes a lot to get us to strike over poo poo because we can't justify it unless our unfair treatment is so severe it is hurting the kids (through us being stressed out and unable to support them).
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Feb 10, 2017 00:56
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Whoever said teaching is less about hours and more about intensity is right. You have to be "on" full time when you are teaching. You cannot get bored and dick around on the forums or YouTube. You cannot go hide in the bathroom and play with your phone when you are tired, even for 5 minutes. If you are not keeping an eye on poo poo, even during a test or worksheet time, 1) kids are not learning as effectively (teachers who wander the classroom have more successful students) and 2) some kid is going to bully, harm, or otherwise gently caress something up. Always in the back of your head is the understanding that if a kid up and died in your classroom, that is your rear end on the line. It's not the same as working in an office. It's not even the same as being a manager. At least your charges are adults. That you can fire if they are literally putting others in danger. "Just send disruptive kids out of the room." No. For a million reasons, but first and foremost because sending them out denies them their education. But also because we tend to do that to kids of color a lot more than the other kids. And because our job is to teach ALL our students, even if some are not interested in learning. Also because it undermines our authority in the classroom when we have to make someone else solve our problems. So instead we learn to be disciplinarians while also not letting discipline be the only thing we do. You know, so we can teach. Before I was a teacher, I would get like 5 hours of sleep at night and then go work or school or whatever. And I could handle it just like many of you likely handle your jobs with no sleep. If I don't go to bed on time as a teacher, it's loving better for me to just not show up. (If you're not a teacher you don't get how ridiculous that is. It's an order of magnitude more work to take a sick day than to just suck it up and teach.) That's how much intensity and focus being a good teacher takes.
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Feb 10, 2017 01:11
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shovelbum posted:I would like to say that the idea of the average job being watching cat pictures in your cube and talking about Game of Thrones around the water cooler is true for only the most useless of office jobs again. That's not what I said. Office work is work; I don't think teaching is the only "real" job or some bullshit. But I also doubt you're chained to your desk. Can you not go to the bathroom or just push out your chair and take a 30 second mental break whenever you need to?
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Feb 10, 2017 01:55
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on the left posted:Failing schools being heavily staffed by teachers in the top 10% of the talent distribution seems both mathematically impossible and improbable in the sense of "why wouldn't a great teacher prefer to work in a nice school?" That seems irrelevant? I don't see what about his post made you say that.
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Feb 10, 2017 02:12
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It's just a trap, no one wants to actually do any of that stuff, they just want someone to blame for not doing it. 
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Feb 13, 2017 00:44
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Babylon Astronaut posted:I think a mandatory class on how to clean things and basic home maintenance would be great. Also, personal finance. I also think they should learn things for the sake of learning, like arts and the humanities. Really, your reading, writing, arithmetic does not need to be immediately applicable to anything to be a great help in life. You're learning empathy, critical thinking, and logical reasoning by studying these subjects. Those classes would be super impractical. Who would teach them? How would you get kids to buy into them? Home Ec covers a lot of this stuff, but also covers a lot more like cooking, sewing, hospitality, etc that help kids get interested and involved.
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Feb 19, 2017 00:39
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Babylon Astronaut posted:You just answered your own question. Your goal wouldn't be to make a boring horrible class. So Home Ec mandatory for all students basically?
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Feb 19, 2017 04:09
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Babylon Astronaut posted:Sure. I mean the bar is "more interesting to kids than algebra." That's an odd way to put it, because as soon as you require something in the curriculum, it diminishes the appeal quite a bit. Generally, the motivational issue in a classroom is down to the 5-10% of the kids who hate the poo poo out of the subject so bad, their attitude affects the other kids in the room. It helps a little that Home Ec works a lot differently than their other classes, but not enough to offset the effect of making it mandatory instead of an elective IMO. That said I think you're right that there would be a net benefit to kids to make them take it, just not as much as it might seem if it is a required class. Best would be to say "ok for your Home Ec core class you have a choice of cooking, hospitality, or sewing and fashion design" and make sure each class included some basic Home Ec stuff in addition. It would likely require an extended school day to give kids Home Ec AND core classes AND PE/electives, but extended school day is way better for the kids anyway so let's do it. Wish that's how easy changing poo poo was...extended school day WOULD be great for kids. But would require a humongous investment to pull off. One of the biggest problems at least at my school would be admin presence. We have a principal and an AP and that's it. They already spend like 80 hours a week at school. If they had to spend 100 hours a week covering an extended school day and supervising/evaluating a bunch more teachers (to cover all the extra periods from extended school day), I'm pretty sure they'd die. That doesn't even get into the issue of having space for specialized stuff like Home Ec classes. Home Ec needs weird stuff like stoves, sinks, dishwashers, sewing machines, and washing machines. That kind of stuff does not easily fit into regular classrooms and needs specialized space. If you're serving a whole school with Home Ec, you need a LOT of space - like half a given school would need to be set aside for Home Ec.
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Feb 19, 2017 05:13
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silence_kit posted:You are talking out of both sides of your mouth here. On one hand, you are saying that teachers serve an important function to society, and so it is absolutely vital that we attract more and better talent to teaching, pay teachers more, and so on. But on the other hand, you are saying that 90% of student educational outcomes have nothing to do with the teacher, and instead are due to factors outside of teachers' control and that trying to evaluate teachers' performance is a waste of time and money because the teacher has little effect on educational outcomes anyway. Don't you see the contradiction here? You are arguing that teachers are simultaneously valuable and also not that valuable. He said 90% of HIS educational outcomes were about himself and not his teacher. It's weird that you think that "not 100%" means "0%"
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Feb 19, 2017 20:29
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silence_kit posted:Obviously the wealth of the students' parents and teacher quality both matter. Since you are willing to grant that teacher quality is important, you would agree with me and disagree with Oxphocker that it doesn't make a lot of sense to categorically oppose evaluation of teachers' performance on the basis that teachers' performance has little effect on student outcomes. Teachers do get evaluated, the part up for discussion is how. Standardized tests don't really tell you anything about a kid's future/outcomes either, so why should we connect teacher performance to it?
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Feb 19, 2017 22:31
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silence_kit posted:I'd be shocked if you could support this claim with evidence. It is extremely hyperbolic. You know, I did look it up and I guess there's no studies on it yet. The closest things I found were 1) standardized tests don't predict undergrad college performance very well, and 2) standardized tests DO predict graduate school performance fairly well. Both aren't about the types of standardized tests we were discussing, of course, so not related but interesting.
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Feb 20, 2017 00:43
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silence_kit posted:Can you post a source showing that teachers have poor job security? I think you are exaggerating the job security issue. 1) I believe people are saying that evaluating teachers on test scores would lower their job security, not that their job security is poor. 2) Proposals nothin; states were incentivized to use test scores to evaluate teachers with Race to the Top. Here's an example of teacher evaluations that incorporate student test scores: https://cms.azed.gov/home/GetDocumentFile?id=54b589481130c00dd469e8e1
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Feb 20, 2017 05:34
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See, the problem that crops up when we say "not everyone should go to college" is that all the rich, privileged families still can and would send their kids to college. College remains one of the few ways that people can be upwardly mobile. Considering the issues we face in America today, "less people should have education" seems like a really poor position.
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Feb 20, 2017 20:57
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Yeah, so let's incorporate tertiary education into our public education system a la Finland. Telling poor people "our system is really hosed up, so don't even bother trying to have a better life" is also pretty perverse.
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Feb 20, 2017 21:06
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Shbobdb posted:We should also incorporate a comprehensive voucher system like Finland. Can you source that info on voucher systems in Finland? I have never heard anything like that in regards to Finland's education system. Why can't we fix more than one thing at a time? That seems like an argument designed to keep poor people poor.
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Feb 20, 2017 22:02
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But she caved so extra gently caress her. "Transgender students are important, but not as important as my job." gently caress that.
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Feb 22, 2017 20:10
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Here's an interesting summary on research on homework from March 2007: http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/mar07/vol64/num06/The-Case-For-and-Against-Homework.aspx I'm trying to figure out what the current research on homework says but I'm not doing a great googling job today.
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May 2, 2017 03:39
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litany of gulps posted:The assumption of busywork seems questionable on its face. Maybe they're being assigned reading so that during class time they can actually analyze and discuss. The automatic dismissal of any homework as being invalid I think is faulty. You can't just say that all work outside of class is harmful or excessive. Actual independent practice or study obviously has value, does it not? When misapplied, it can certainly be ineffective. The automatic assumption that it will be and can only be misapplied comes from where? Right. The agreement research-wise seems to be that we can be better on homework in general and that young kids below 3rd grade should have 0-20 minutes of homework a night. That's not the same as don't give anyone homework because it's all busywork.
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May 2, 2017 03:53
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sheri posted:My point was my job doesn't require me to put in hours of work at home every night on a regular basis, so your argument of sending kids home with hours of homework every night to prepare them for "jobs and reality" isn't the best argument. Yeah. I would say my argument for sending kids home with homework (not hours upon hours of it though) is that independent practice is legit and necessary and learning things super slow because you never independently practice them is boring and too repetitive. edit: I don't really approve of our overworked culture so I'm kind of cool with not raising our kids to think that working 60+ hours a week at a lovely job is ok. But homework is still useful and important.
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May 2, 2017 03:55
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sheri posted:I work in IT. I have a masters degree. I think we are all in agreement 
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May 2, 2017 03:59
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Hastings posted:The problem however, is that homework is almost never anything other than worksheets. I'm glad you would take the time to think through writing portions and questions, but when educators have limited time to prep and grade as it is, homework tends to take the easy way out and is done in a way to quickly review and grade. It's designed to fit a perceived requirement, not for what is actually best for the students learning and retention style. Also, child development theory and psychology have had numerous studies show that children 13 and under learn through play. Giving kids outside of secondary education any homework quite frankly, seems ineffective when you consider that at that age range children need to fully interact with learning material. Time with family and playing might actually help them intentionally retain more effectively. Can you cite a source that homework is almost never anything other than worksheets in language arts class? (Since you are disagreeing with a language arts teacher. I'm sure there is plenty of evidence that homework is almost never anything other than worksheets/problem sets in math, for example.) What is your basis for saying that educators try to take the easy way out with homework? We discuss in our teacher thread a lot of alternate ways to handle workload and none of them are ever "just give them dumbass busywork worksheets so that you can grade them real quick and be done." Mostly because that actually creates more work for us. Hawkperson fucked around with this message at 04:41 on May 2, 2017 |
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May 2, 2017 04:38
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litany of gulps posted:Cutting out all homework, though, because most people gently caress it up? There are frankly just some things that should be done outside of class. If I'm teaching AP Language and have my students only read in-class, they're not getting what other students are getting. At that point, I'm sacrificing valuable class time to a dogmatic ban on homework. Is that the right way to teach? I don't think anyone would agree, any more than anyone here believes that 3rd graders should be doing hours of homework. Agreed. To me, class time is valuable for the following things: Guided practice (which can be, for example, doing your homework in class where the teacher can help you if you get stuck), group/social work, and, you know, learning poo poo. Getting introduced to the new concept that, if a kid were brilliant and driven, maybe they could pick up from google, but it's easier and faster and better curated if a teacher decides what is best to learn next. There's probably an upper limit to how much of this a student can realistically do in a single day without being exhausted, but I would say that our 45 minute to 1 hour daily class periods (or 1 hour 30 minutes every other day maybe) in secondary school is not that upper limit. Incorporating independent study into our school day without extending our school day would not result in good outcomes IMO, and as far as I can tell from google this is at least partially supported by research. Like I said, the research on homework seems to say that at grade 4 and above, nightly homework DOES increase achievement. edit: litany of gulps posted:Even in a math class, is it inherently problematic to practice doing similar types of problems outside of class? How much of math mastery is pattern recognition? If you understand the principle and can solve problems of that pattern, the homework shouldn't be a serious burden. If you failed to grasp it from in-class instruction, then maybe some independent struggle will be beneficial. No, I don't think it is. In fact, as far as I've read the research is pretty clear that in math of all subjects, homework is absolutely vital. You just can't learn a concept by doing it once or twice. You have to do it several, several times before it sticks. It would be like learning how to ride a bike by trying for ten minutes once every two weeks. I don't assign written homework in my class, ever. Then again, I am an elective teacher so my role is a bit more fluid than most teachers. But I expect my students to practice their instruments independently, outside of my class, because otherwise they suuuuuuuck. Hawkperson fucked around with this message at 04:52 on May 2, 2017 |
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May 2, 2017 04:47
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Well, and I should be fair/clear too that I am not a language arts teacher so I'd probably do a lovely job of assigning homework for that class too. That said, thinking on what the language arts teachers assign for homework at my middle school -- there are reading logs, the kids write essays or do tasks relating to writing an essay (brainstorms or whatever), and there is an "article of the week." The article of the week IS a worksheet/packet, with a one page, generally 4-6 paragraph article, with critical thinking questions - I think 8? As far as I know, the language arts teachers don't assign homework out of those three options, only one of which is a worksheet. I'm curious now so I'll be sure to ask some of my students tomorrow to be sure. Oooh maybe they do vocab stuff, but I don't think it's on a worksheet? I think they just get word lists they have to study. There's definitely teachers at my school that do cool awesome project-based homework assignments, like hey you read this play now write your own play about the play or make a speech about this play or write a musical composition about this play (also write a short paragraph on how it matches up with the play) or make up your own way to show you read the play and understand it. I teach in a poorass district and we are doing more and more professional development on good teaching techniques and student engagement. The last one I went to was on exactly this sort of homework assignment plan, where students get more of a voice and choice in what they learn and how they show mastery in it. Even before that I didn't see much of a default "just give them worksheets" but then again I do teach in California. Yeah we've got some bad situations out here but on the whole we teachers, and our students, are a lot better off than equivalent socioeconomic areas in other parts of the US.
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May 2, 2017 06:09
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wateroverfire posted:IDK about homework, but my impression looking back at my schooling is that a lot of our lecture time was a waste. Like...there is probably a more efficient way to teach some subjects than to have someone stand in front of a class and talk. Maybe homework wouldn't be such a problem if students could reclaim 3 hours out of the school day. Yes, this is the basis of a lot of research in education right now. We are strongly discouraged from lecture-style classes.
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May 2, 2017 17:17
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Yep, that's a thing too! I forget what it's called too, but I don't think it's going to gain much traction. It's another thing that services rich kids with secure home lives and makes poor kids with somewhat more unstable lives fall far behind. It's kind of stupid IMO to base education policy and pedagogy decisions on the assumption that kids have stable home lives and financial and emotional support. Because that's just not how things are. It goes back to the base problem that we try to solve problems of poverty through education and nothing else. But education needs to be a part of helping people out of poverty, and we need to make sure that whatever newfangled research-supported thing we pick actually helps as many students as possible, not just the ones it's easiest to help. Edit: ^^ that too, well said. Hawkperson fucked around with this message at 21:48 on May 2, 2017 |
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May 2, 2017 21:45
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Yeah this discussion is kind of weird. You teach kids intrinsic motivation by giving them an age-appropriate task they can achieve, and then let them bask in the glory of completing it. One of the tasks we can give kids (that is super important for their adult life!) is "hey, I'm trusting you to finish this assignment out of my sight in a timely manner."
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May 3, 2017 04:51
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How big of a class are you thinking for this? 20 kids per teacher? Edit: asking Hastings I mean To Accretionist: gently caress YEAH I hate it when kids are pulled from my class because they suck at math. What the gently caress is that teaching them. Honestly I'd fully support cutting all "intervention" classes that replace a kid's elective. But then, of course I would, so no one wants to listen about it. :/ Hawkperson fucked around with this message at 05:09 on May 3, 2017 |
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May 3, 2017 05:06
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Hastings posted:I would be okay with up to 30 kids, but preferably 20-25. The "check in" days could have the first 15 meet with the teacher and the second group the next day. Also then, you'd have to consider setting aside certain days for the kids to show final presentations and such. Yeah, all I can think of is "ok, but what about the 5 kids who see an opening when the teacher's working with the other 15 students and take that opportunity to start bullying the other kids." Like I think you're advocating for a much bigger revolution in how we teach in the US than you realize. The class sizes at my MS are required to be 37 or lower, which means they are 35-37 kids. Class size reduction has been a big issue in education (and gently caress yeah, smaller classes for everyone else would be great. Give me all the leftovers) but it is incredibly difficult to fund. To implement your idea at my school we'd need to almost double the number of teachers at our school, or actually, just halve the number of kids, because we do not have any more classrooms for more teachers. We would have to build a second middle school to accommodate all the students in our district. This is all as an aside to your core idea, I know, but I am curious to know your thoughts on the logistics. Is it your opinion that we should basically scrap our schools as is to implement smaller class sizes/more teachers for project based learning? And if yeah, what does your ideal school look like as far as schedule, classes offered, and layout? Sounds like you might want some team teaching going on as well (solves the bullying issue at least, and doesn't waste the 15/30 kids' time that aren't starting their project).
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May 3, 2017 15:08
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Accretionist posted:Any strong opinions on relaxing GED test-eligibility requirements? The program requires you to be 16+ and not enrolled in high school with states being able to add restrictions. How many bad schools do you think there are in the US? And why do you thinking fixing them involves encouraging certain students to abandon them? This is basically the issue with charter schools/vouchers. Why do you feel like the GED is better than a HS education?
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May 7, 2017 23:47
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Accretionist posted:I find the maturity/socialization angle persuasive. Although if testing out of classes meant taking more electives, I'd be inclined to see value in that. Nah, I see why you're saying that, but it's not the intent. My basic question is, why is this a thing that needs fixing? You assert that this would help students, I'd like to see some support for that.
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May 8, 2017 03:43
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| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 11:39 |
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There's a couple of places that do a "middle college" program, like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_College_Program which seems like it might be the kind of solution you're looking for.
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May 8, 2017 04:29
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