Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
I haven't watched the movie, but I probably should. I just figured it was just another media avenue used to demonize teachers.
With Common Core coming it, I think it is going to get worse. I teach Algebra 1 and Pre-Algebra.
I cannot tell you how many students come to middle school unable to add, subtract, multiply, and divide, with mastery. I blame the teacher preparation programs for elementary teachers and the curriculum machine in elementary school. When I was in college 15-20 years ago, there was a downplay of the importance of memorizing math facts. Anything having to do with memorization was portrayed as "bad". I have even heard teachers (yes, teachers, and plural) say, "I don't know why I need to teacher long division. If I need to divide I use a calculator."
This is one of the pitfalls of not using highly trained mathematics teachers at the elementary level. Something clicks (I have research to back this up if you have access to ERIC EBSCO) when you learn long division. A math sense develops. Without the memorization of facts, a student's ability to advance any further is stunted. Every math teacher in the city in which I live, has the same complaint. I don't know if that is going on elsewhere or not and we have some of the worst test scores in the US. Students are not memorizing their addition and subtraction facts either. They are constantly making errors because they are counting on their fingers.
The federalization of education is another reason that education is going down the tubes.
There is more to it, of course, but I don't want to be too verbose in this forum.
Everdeen, I think I've found a soul mate.
Replace "math" with "English" in your post, and I could've written it. We have the same problems -- English teachers doing anything *except* teaching writing and literature (e.g., "Instead of writing, they can do tableaux to act out their understanding of the text!" "They can read The Hunger Games -- it has a lot of good themes") and generally wasting students' time with nonsense.
Confronted with Common Core, many of these same teachers quickly turn to defensive anger mostly because their essential lack of preparation and expertise is finally coming to kick them in the tail. I'm afraid I cannot be more sympathetic than I am, mostly because bad English teachers have wasted their students' time and mine in much the same way that bad math teachers have done the same for you.
As many of you know, I am student who wants to be a teacher. Being the nerd that I am, I was really excited to watch Waiting For Superman. I have my own thoughts on why the system fails those in lower income areas but I want to know what your guys' opinions are on education reform/issues and the movie itself.
It's the biggest lie, system doesn't fail, it does what it's supposed to do - reproduce social order. From the common sense, humanitarian point of view, educational system is absolute waste, absurd and insanity messing up children for good, but as long as you remember about its true purpose everything fits, you see the light (and keep your "educator" job). Take any component of education you find less than desirable and look at it through the prism of "reproduction of the social order", you would see the light 100%.
Race To Nowhere was better, but even that doesn't capture the whole story.
But to me the biggest problem with education is that practically everyone who sets policy, allots budgets, chooses curriculum, hell even gets hired as a superintendent.... has never actually been a teacher. Even the ones who did, didn't do it for the minimum 5 years or so it takes to actually be good at it. The field is controlled and the agenda set by people who don't know what the hell they are talking about.
Correct. It seems that these people that make policy decisions assume that because they sat on the student's side of the desk, they know what it's like to sit on the teacher's side. They are educated, therefore they know all about education. I can't begin to explain the flawed logic of this premise.
I've driven over bridges, but I certainly can't tell an engineer how to build one.
I have a brain, but I can't tell a neurosurgeon how conduct a lobotomy.
I have a bank account, but I can't tell an auditor how to do his/her job.
But since these people have been educated, they assume they know what educators do. This is so much bilge.
As for administrators & central office personnel, I have absolutely no complaints, but many have forgotten what's it's like being in the trenches. Another teacher - female - alluded to the pangs of pregnancy and compared it to teaching. "It's painful while teaching/delivering, but once it's over you forget about it. Until the next time."
What bothers me is that I - and every one of my co-workers - have never been asked to help policy makers make policy. Is this not absurd? Accountants at Ford do not tell the engineers how to build the cars. The engineers say, "this is how we need to build it. You accountants need to find a way to budget it." In education, it's backwards.
I would love for some of thses policy makers to come and do my job for a term, implementing the ideal policies they believe in their "educated minds" would work. Then they might see that "walking a mile in another man's shoes" can be an enlightening experience.
We ghettoize kids by never mainstreaming them into regular courses, we keep them in classes with teachers who don't speak proper Spanish, and they end up not learning proper Spanish or English.
Do you know why I know this? Because I was an ELL. I came to the US not speaking one word of English. I was dropped into an English speaking classroom in 2nd grade. There was no ESL, and I thank God for that! My husband learned English the same way. He spoke not one word of English, and he came to US in 5th grade. We both failed English. We both got "Fs" in English our first year in school. Why? Because we didn't speak English! Did that ruin our self-esteem? No. What ruins the self-esteem of a kid is the idea that the adults around them don't think that they're capable of learning another language. I can't imagine the shame of being stuck in an ELL classroom, watching the English speakers do the "real" classwork, while I was stuck in a watered down version of their classes. We both learned English within the first school year, and both speak our native language fluently as well. We've both gone on to obtain graduate degrees. Our stories aren't unique, any immigrant child can do it.
Then your ELL program was a lot different from ours. As I stated, we keep our high schoolers in the ELL classroom for 1, maybe 2 classes a day and the rest of their schedule is mainstreamed. Most of the time that's fine but it gets crazy when you get a kid who doesn't know any English into Shakespeare or astronomy or government. The kids love to come and hang out in our classroom during lunch and it's a very popular place to be---they enjoy it whether they're the good students or the poor ones. Maybe things have changed a bit since you went to school.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Starman71
I would love for some of thses policy makers to come and do my job for a term, implementing the ideal policies they believe in their "educated minds" would work. Then they might see that "walking a mile in another man's shoes" can be an enlightening experience.
I'm with you on that one--I think it's the policy makers who are ruining the schools. I think they just feel that they have to come up with all these "ideas" to justify their overpaid jobs.
Or, here's my other favorite: let's say there's a very bright teacher in California who does something completely different from the rest but it works really well for him/her. Somebody spots that and says, "Hey we should all do that!" So now in our high school we have all the teachers (and some nearing retirement) who're required to say, "Raise your righteous hand!" Well it does get the kids' attention, lol.
First off, we don't have an educational crisis in this country, we have poverty and cultural crises.
Second off, "Waiting for Superman" is not a documentary, it's a biased, slanted hit piece created to gain momentum behind the privatization of public education. It was funded in large part by individuals and groups that want to institute unproven, simplistic reforms to education.
Once you return a level of real standards to the schools and community at large things will change. Right now we have a culture where anything goes, few things off limits. This does not produce children with much character or self-restraint.
Bashing teacher unions, school funding etc. is just an easy out.
First off, we don't have an educational crisis in this country, we have poverty and cultural crises.
Second off, "Waiting for Superman" is not a documentary, it's a biased, slanted hit piece created to gain momentum behind the privatization of public education. It was funded in large part by individuals and groups that want to institute unproven, simplistic reforms to education.
We don't have a poverty crisis. We have a cultural deficit crisis. The kids in Chinatown NYC are just as poor or poorer than the kids in Harlem yet their schools produce many students that attend elite NYC public schools and host some of the best test scores in the city.
We don't have a poverty crisis. We have a cultural deficit crisis. The kids in Chinatown NYC are just as poor or poorer than the kids in Harlem yet their schools produce many students that attend elite NYC public schools and host some of the best test scores in the city.
Sorry, after spending time in an urban school, I can't agree with you that poverty (and all of its interrelated issues) isn't a big part of the problem. I do agree that culture is a big part of it, too.
That's an interesting anecdote and it illustrates that people in isolated communities (whether it's farms or ghettoes) who don't need to learn a new language, don't. One possible reason nobody in the 19th and 20th centuries cared about monolingual Germans in Wisconsin is they weren't asking for any money from the English speakers, unlike today.
However, I do agree that today's immigrants are probably learning English faster than older waves of immigrants did, due to the plethora of media mostly in English. And that includes my own Swedish and Danish ancestors (omitting my Irish ancestors whose native tongue had already been replaced by English), and the Italian and Ukrainian ancestors on my wife's side.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
