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If you knowingly know something is wrong, but do it anyway, you are part of the problem.
It would be like giving your kid bad medicine and you know it will hurt them, but hey, "The doctor said so!"
You can get students talking to each other just as much by assigning homework as you will having them waste class time doing so. Except with assigning homework, you ALSO have the class time.
I could justify the proofs in geometry, but that's like 2 weeks of work in one year of one class. Using that as why every class should go to packets all the time is ridiculous!
*********r performance evaluation. That's just you being selfish. It's a trap. The district puts it on your evaluation and then if you do it, claims that "you weren't forced into packets. You CHOSE to use that system." And then you have no recourse.
WHO CARES about the powers that be? Those powers aren't going to teach a class. YOU do! If YOU stand up for what you believe is right, then enough people like YOU will be heard and the new approach won't be mandated. In fact, a better experiment anyway is to have 2 groups of students and then compare. And no., one year with 60 students isn't a big enough sample size.
If it worked yesterday, WHY would you change it? Are you not happy that it's working? I swear you guys worship these powers that be! Just because they pay you doesn't mean they OWN you. "Times are changing" is the biggest con job in the book. The human brain takes centuries to evolve. Everything didn't magically change in the last 20 years. And yet when you go along with such tactics, it's no wonder you're taken advantage of.
You talk about teachers not being respected? Well, I for one, would not respect someone who does what someone says just because they are the boss. That's weak and lacking moral conviction.
lol, so now you're teaching less material too? Oh, I'm sure that will really improve learning!
After waiting patiently for days and reading literally hundreds of posts without seeing this point addressed, I must let you know this about teaching positions: Teachers sign a CONTRACT, legally binding them to do as the school district mandates. In order for them to receive their paycheck, they MUST carry out their end of the contract.
Additionally, being adults, most teachers must rely on their paychecks to provide their own sustenance, including housing, food, transportation, medical care and so on. Anyone with a mortgage knows that you must pay that mortgage or the bank will foreclose on your home. Further, many teachers are parents who have the sole responsibility of supporting their children and providing them with all their needs.
All of the factors make teachers reluctant to break their contracts by doing what is expressly forbidden or by failing to do what they have been contracted to do, namely to deliver instruction according to the current district mandates. Breaking a contract is also grounds for losing your teaching license under certain circumstances. For you to continually insist that people who honor their contracts are somehow selfish implies that you have no real understanding of what it takes be an adult, much less a parent or a teacher.
How do you think it helps anyone for a teacher to be dismissed in the middle of the year for failing to teach according to district mandates? At that point, the district would place a permanent substitute if they could not find another person who would be willing to follow the district's requirements.
You have no business telling me how to do my job if you've never done it. You don't have a clue how things work. You really need to buy a clue.
If I blow of my PR, I end up out of a job. How does that fix anything? I'll tell you what. Go teach for 5 years and get back to me.
Yeah, the teachers are trapped in a system that they probably can't fix if they want. Most likely plenty could not agree how to fix it.
So a reading list would enable students who want to learn and parents who want their children educated to proceed in some direction regardless of the schools.
So what motivation do lazy teachers have to improve if they are immune to all criticism from the public?
Oh, I don't know, how about constructive criticism from their colleagues and superiors, i.e. people that actually have some clue about what they're suggesting.
How do you think it helps anyone for a teacher to be dismissed in the middle of the year for failing to teach according to district mandates? At that point, the district would place a permanent substitute if they could not find another person who would be willing to follow the district's requirements.
Oh no, you don't understand. See, he watched 'Stand and Deliver.' He knows a real teacher when he sees one.
In my experience, teachers are paid a middle class salary equivalent to other white collar workers with 4-year degrees.
Thats all a teacher needs is a four year degree. It's the benifits that benifit them... Hello, how many teachers in the field are there because thats what they wanted to do, most, it seems to me, are there because this is the "best" they can do with what they got after getting out of college...
So what motivation do lazy teachers have to improve if they are immune to all criticism from the public?
Read the post again, genius.
Is it mentioned once that I stated criticism of every teacher is wrong? Nope. I didn't.
What is posted is that you can't tell someone how to do a job you either cannot/have not ever done nor have the inclination to learn/do.
If you use those reading comprehension skills you were supposed to have learned, you would have seen that I actually stated that criticism of those professionals - be they teachers or plumbers - who aren't doing their jobs well is justified. What is not justified is telling them how to do it when you either haven't ever done it yourself successfully or refuse to try to do it. And if you truly think being acamp counselor is similar to what goes on in a public K-12 classroom, you truly haven't enough brain cells to comprehend anything I - or others in here - say to you. You are a typical youth that has an over-inflated sense of self, with just enough knowledge to give you the misconception that you can converse on an equal plane with experts in their fields. While all it does it make you look foolish. But you'll never see this - at least not until you've learned some humility. I hope that, someoday 10-15 years from now, that you will be able to come back here in this forum and read your previous posts. Lets see if you can do that without cringing with self-loathing. somehow, I highly doubt that will happen.
Until then, I'd like to send you a gift card for Wal-Mart so that you could buy yourself a clue. They're in the pharmacy section, right next to the home-lobotomy kits and the cranio-rectal removal gels.
Some of the comments about how teachers should be doing their jobs are downright insulting and ignorant. Without actually spending time in the classroom for some reasonable amount of time, you have no idea of the challenges teachers face, you can only make assumptions.
This isn't true. It is your responsibility to tell us what challenges you face and we can learn that way.
This isn't true. It is your responsibility to tell us what challenges you face and we can learn that way.
Nope. It ain't.
In the end, it's each person's responsibility to take care of themselves. If you just want to make teaching 'a job' and box them in a corner, fine, they'll just do their job. That's actually the real problem here. Everyone who thinks they know what education is actually knows f*ck all about teaching, but that won't stop them from having an opinion on the subject, and trying to influence the school system. So this is the result. So you get intimidated teachers who end up just doing their job and collecting a check. But as I say, in the end, a person's ultimate responsibility isn't to you; it's to themselves. Individual responsibility and all that. Teachers will probably get a paycheck from somewhere, whether it's teaching punk kids with an attitude or selling life their parents insurance. Whether they actually end up teaching your child something valuable depends on whether they're encouraged to do so by the community they serve.
The problem is that lecturing is also NOT the best way to teach for most students. This is research on students learning college physics, but the same holds for any high school class. The problem is that kids tend to hold onto their *intuitive* knowledge even when that knowledge is wrong. Unless they are engaged and have an *aha* moment, they will not learn the new concepts well. They will memorize what they need from the teacher's lecture to put it down on a test and then promptly return to their own ingrained way of thinking.
I read the article, but I think the problem is with their conclusion.
In order to learn through lecture, you have to actually do the homework and then the lecture helps you summarize what you learned through the reading/homework.
The 10% who the lecture works for are the 10% who actually do the homework.
So it's not that the lecture is ineffective, but that the other 90% aren't doing their homework.
Maybe we should stop automatically passing the students?
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