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Old 05-13-2013, 12:12 AM
 
298 posts, read 331,300 times
Reputation: 121

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Quote:
Originally Posted by Ivorytickler View Post
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. You have no idea what you're talking about. You're just blowing smoke out of your ass. One of the problems with education, in this country, is people like you who have never done the job and have no idea what we are up against think you know it all. Well, you don't. When you have a job, you do what your employer wants you to do. That's how you keep your job. Losing your job just means you're broke and nothing is any different because the next person will just do what was asked of them and keep the job. I might as well be the one to keep the job. In 5 or so years, something new will come along to replace student talk. That's the way it works.

If you really want to change things, go talk to the politicians who make education policy. They won't listen to me because I'm just a teacher whose only concern is keeping my job (it's not like we got into this profession because we care about kids learning or anything like that).

You don't need to do a job to know basic matters of principle. It doesn't matter how things work. That shouldn't change your inner convictions.

Because when you make a decision about something, it should be based on your inner convictions. And if each person makes a decision on inner convictions, then those in charge will be unable to take advantage of you. But when people go and do what you are doing and say, "Screw everyone else. I care about MY job." they are being selfish and undermine the strength of the labor force to be treated fairly.

When you have a job, you absolutely DO NOT just bend to your employer's will if it violates your principles. When you go ahead and throw your students' best interest out the window in favor of keeping your boss happy, yes, you no longer truly care about the kids' learning.
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Old 05-13-2013, 12:15 AM
 
4,734 posts, read 4,314,020 times
Reputation: 3225
Quote:
Originally Posted by Beat_the_Streak_MLB View Post
I actually think children should have that right.

They never picked their parents to be their parents.

It's different with a job because you choose your boss.
Not necessarily. Your boss also has to decide to choose you, too. I can tell that you're young.
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Old 05-13-2013, 12:18 AM
 
4,734 posts, read 4,314,020 times
Reputation: 3225
Quote:
Originally Posted by Three Wolves In Snow View Post
Yah, you wasted your time. As soon as I saw, "period", I stopped reading. You don't get to dictate how other people feel. Your opinion is not THE opinion, "PERIOD".
Yep, the truth hurts. Well, go ahead and feel outraged then. More skilled foreign workers will keep taking your jobs and those of people you know. Oh Americans will still beat out their foreign competitors in underpaid, undervalued jobs like retail, I reckon, but the tech jobs...not so much. And it really won't matter to them, to me, or to anyone else how you feel about it.
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Old 05-13-2013, 12:18 AM
 
298 posts, read 331,300 times
Reputation: 121
Quote:
Originally Posted by lhpartridge View Post
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.

Does the contract force you to blindly follow what the secret task force recommends, regardless of its usefulness, or does it just bind you to do specific things?

If it is the former, than you weren't smart in signing such a one-sided contract. If it is the latter, what does your teaching contract bind you to do specifically?


All of that stuff in being adults is irrelevant. I would have more respect for a starving homeless man in the street who stood up for his principles than a wealthy, hypocrite. Your own interests are irrelevant. You claim the kids are your # 1 priority? Then stop putting you first and them second.

Considering this student talk nonsense just came into vogue a few years ago, it was likely not included in your contracts that you must teach that way. So this isn't a contractual issue.

If the contract forbids you from doing A, B, and C, and student talk is X, then the district CANNOT just draft new rules to include X. Those rules don't apply to contracts already in place. So they wouldn't affect you. So you cannot use the excuse "Oh, well my contract makes me." Because that's not true.
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Old 05-13-2013, 12:19 AM
 
298 posts, read 331,300 times
Reputation: 121
Quote:
Originally Posted by chickenfriedbananas View Post
Not necessarily. Your boss also has to decide to choose you, too. I can tell that you're young.

Yes, but you still choose to apply to work for your boss.

A child never chooses to apply to be a specific parent's child. He/she is forced into it.

So yes, I think he/she should be allowed to leave by 10 or 11 if the relationship isn't working out. At that age, kids being to reason and think critically, so that is when I think they could make an informed decision.
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Old 05-13-2013, 12:21 AM
 
298 posts, read 331,300 times
Reputation: 121
Quote:
Originally Posted by chickenfriedbananas View Post
Yes, but until you shut up and offer to pay my salary until I find the perfect teaching job, I'm not going to listen to you.

How much is your salary?

And you could likely find a decent teaching job in a private or parochial school. They don't follow these silly district requirements.

Or you could try another district.
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Old 05-13-2013, 12:23 AM
 
298 posts, read 331,300 times
Reputation: 121
Quote:
Originally Posted by Clevelander17 View Post
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.

Oh, please the clipboard guys are even more uneducated than the average forum user on here.

All they're interested in is making changes for the sake of making changes.

It reminds me of the latest Internet Explorer update, which they always tout as being "better than ever."

Better? You moved a bunch of icons around. That's not better. That's being a hassle.
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Old 05-13-2013, 12:26 AM
 
298 posts, read 331,300 times
Reputation: 121
Quote:
Originally Posted by Starman71 View Post
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.

You're saying that any non-teachers cannot criticize teachers. That's essentially immune to all criticism.

In terms of the actual disciplining of students/campers, yes it is similar within your own age group of course.

Controlling 2nd grades is a lot different than 10th grades, but 2nd graders in each field are comparable.
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Old 05-13-2013, 12:45 AM
 
298 posts, read 331,300 times
Reputation: 121
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ivorytickler View Post
My point was not the computers we have today. Today, you can buy a calculator with more computing power than they used back then. And yes, I'm serious. I think the human brain hasn't changed and the basics we need to learn/teach have not changed and I think technology is more of a hinderance to learning than a benefit. I think kids should be taught to do math before they're handed a calculator. I think cell phones should be blocked in schools. I think computers should be used as tools. I think kids should be taught to read and arrive at answers instead of being allowed to google them. I think, in many ways, education had the technological cart before the horse today (unfortunately, there is so much money to be made selling technology to education that this will continue). I'd like to see a return to teaching kids to think but to do that, you'll need to take away their toys.

As to the student talk method of teaching, I'll let you know how it works in chemistry next year as I'll be dumping the lecture format in favor of packets and student talk (as I've said before, I do like this model for teaching geometry and I think kids learn more by struggling to learn the material rather than just trying to copy what I do but, interestingly, this is where I get my complaints. It's not the kids and their parents are used to.). As with anything in education, we throw the baby out with the bathwater and start fresh with the new kid. This will be interesting. Chemistry is one of those subjects I cannot imagine learning without lecture but, then again, as has been pointed out, I, obviously, was successful learning in a lecture format...as were all the other engineers I graduated with. While many of us could not have learned this way, no one really cares. We don't look at what works in education, only what doesn't and we toss things that work all the time in an attempt to fix what isn't working. It's just the way it is.

Personally, I'm glad I came through school when I did. I cannot imagine learning subjects like chemistry, organic chem, p-chem or advanced engineering mathematics, through discussions with my peers but who knows, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe my students can discover in 9 months what took hundreds of years and highly educated minds....I mean the human brain has changed so much since the computer was developed, right???? (sorry for the sarcasm but chemistry is so abstract, I really don't see this experiment going well. You could do basic physics, with motivated students, because you can see what happens. You can experience it, relate it to past experience and get it. In chemistry, when I hand you two test tubes and you mix them and get a red solid, even my best students will only get that you know is test tube A plus test tube B makes a red solid. I can just hear the peer discussion now...would you call that a rusty red or a dusty red....oh the high level questions this will NOT generate...but I might as well be a good minion and do as I'm told. The faster we get this experiment over, the better off we'll be either way it works out.)

Seriously, I think the end result will be a lot of material will be cut out of chemistry but maybe I'm wrong. We'll see.

It's interesting while I cannot fathom teaching chemistry this way, I see this as the best method for geometry and already use it (but I use the book rather than packets. The sections in the book serve as the packets. Chemistry will be done with packets and the book will get shelved. This will make my students who hate doing reading notes (I believe reading the book is very valuable) very happy.). I wouldn't use it for algebra though or calculus. In geometry, I can have you take measurements on triangles and lead you to the trig ratios...or have you measure distances and lead you to the distance formula...I'm not sure what I'm going to do to get my students to conclude that the red stuff in the test tube is a complex ion though....Who knows, maybe my students will surprise me. One nice thing about the peer discussion method of teaching is you don't even need a teacher who knows the subject anymore. That could prove to be a major cost save to education and that could pay for a lot of computers.

I will comment on what I see in geometry. The student talk method works well for the middle of the class. The bottom still copies answers (and thinks they've done something) and learns little and the top is bored. The're done in 5 minutes and go no deeper into the material because they have no desire to. IMO, it is better than the teach to the bottom method so maybe it will be a step up in chemistry as well...I'll let you know next year if I'm still teaching. It will be an interesting experiment. In the beginning of the year, the kids complained about the other teacher just giving out packets. Many kids switched into my classes at the mid year mark to get away from the packets. I wonder how those kids will fare when they have no choice but to do packets. I also had kids switch out of my geometry class at the mid year mark to get away from the student talk model as well. It doesn't seem to be something high school kids or parents like. I can see it working better in college because you're dealing with a more mature and self motivated group and you've already culled the bottom but, as usual in education, we push things down until we find the point where they no longer work. I just hope that doesn't prove to be my chemistry class next year but, then again, the other chem teacher's students seem to be doing fine with the packet method. We'll see.


We totally agree with your 1st paragraph, but then you just destroy yourself.

I think you should go to next year's students (a year below you now) and go to every science class and give them a presentation on lecture based learning VS packet based learning and at the end of the class, everyone votes on which one they would prefer.

They have to vote right at the end of class to avoid anyone influencing each other. And then tally up the scores. Unless packets win by an overwhelming landslide, (say 3/4 or higher) then stay with lecture format.



"Personally, I'm glad I came through school when I did. I cannot imagine learning subjects like chemistry, organic chem, p-chem or advanced engineering mathematics, through discussions with my peers but who knows, maybe I'm wrong."


They can't. They will get fried in college level courses and then they won't even know how to take notes.

In a super scholarly environment, maybe that works.

It doesn't work when 90% of the class doesn't really care.



"but I might as well be a good minion and do as I'm told. The faster we get this experiment over, the better off we'll be either way it works out.)"


NO! An entire generation of students are going to be obliterated with this experiment.

They are not lab mice!



"One nice thing about the peer discussion method of teaching is you don't even need a teacher who knows the subject anymore. That could prove to be a major cost save to education and that could pay for a lot of computers."

And yeah what do you think that results in? YOU eventually getting fired! That's why I have no idea why you're so in favor of this plan.

Why pay $50,000 per year for someone with a master's in chemistry, when we could pay $20,000 per year for a parent of an older student who took undergraduate chemistry?



"I just hope that doesn't prove to be my chemistry class next year but, then again, the other chem teacher's students seem to be doing fine with the packet method."


That only worked because the kids who hated packets had the option to switch out of the class and go with their preferred method. As a result, the kids who were left in that other teacher's class, by definition, loved packets.

So OF COURSE they did well! This is what I'm talking about when I say that the clipboard guys' suggestions are useless! They don't even know how to analyze data properly!
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Old 05-13-2013, 12:47 AM
 
298 posts, read 331,300 times
Reputation: 121
Quote:
Originally Posted by chickenfriedbananas View Post
Maybe not - period.

You know, another thing that strikes me is that about 10 or 12 years ago, we had this whole 'No Child Left Behind Movement' thanks to George W. Bush, in large part because there was a consensus that American school children were getting left behind their counterparts in other parts of the world (i.e. China, Japan, Scandinavian). Hell, even most 7th graders in Russia can outperform American college students in mathematics (might explain why they're getting hired in Silicon Valley over Americans who are always complaining about the H1B visa program ).

And how do you suppose school officials and the majority of average citizens in these countries with demonstrably superior school systems would handle this? I'll tell you what -- speaking as someone who actually has experience teaching in one of the above-mentioned countries. They would absolutely, positively make an example of this sort of unruly student - to the point where his family would be utterly shamed, embarrassed, humiliated to have even the same surname.

That's what.

So go ahead, and pat this idiot on the back and blame your public school teachers whom you don't support. I'm sure the Russians, Chinese, Japanese, Scandinavians, and Indians who keep beating out your children for all of the high-paying technology jobs won't mind it a bit.

The problem with Americans is that they have this willingness to have an opinion about anything and everything, even when they know absolutely nothing about the thing that they have an opinion on.


But those countries ACTUALLY have great schooling systems, so it would make sense to punish the unruly child for lying.

What the kid in this video said is mostly true.

Unfortunately, that method of shaming wouldn't work in the US because most adults these days teach kids to "only worry about yourself." Of course they also teach "Show concern for others."

Those kinds of examples are why I consider most adults to be hypocrites.
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