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And then teachers expect students to give a damn about their egos.
Is this why we don't have National Recommended Reading Lists? Students must be kept dependent.
Not A teacher, but THE teacher.
psik
Talk to me when you pay 600 dollars for a class where you spend all your time working in small groups with people who don't know any more than you do. I give my students their money's worth.
Talk to me when you pay 600 dollars for a class where you spend all your time working in small groups with people who don't know any more than you do. I give my students their money's worth.
How can anyone comment without even knowing the subject you teach?
And then teachers expect students to give a damn about their egos.
Is this why we don't have National Recommended Reading Lists? Students must be kept dependent.
Not A teacher, but THE teacher.
psik
So your suggestion is to make them dependent on a reading list someone else chose for them???
Do you not see your reading list is just another way of telling them what they should do? ...Pot meet Kettle....
To whom should we give the power to make this list of "right" books? You need to get off this reading list kick. Controlling what our children read is not going to lead to critical thinkers. It's going to lead to drones who read the "right" books.
A national reading list would only add one more level of national control that the rest of us don't want. As a parent, I am quite capable of reading reviews and deciding whether a book is right for my children to read. I'm also capable of doing this for myself. So far I haven't had any issues with the books my children's English teachers have chosen for them to read. What in the world do you think a national reading list would accomplish other than standardizing what everyone reads in school and how do you think that would lead to independent critical thinkers? It sounds like group think to me. You'll think how the government wants you to think if you read the books the government says you should.... No thank you.
Last edited by Ivorytickler; 03-16-2014 at 07:16 AM..
Oh, please. I don't know why we don't have a national reading, but I know this isn't the reason. Most likely it has to do with people disagreeing on what should be on there. By the way, some states do have reading lists.
Or that people are expected to think enough to pick what they want to read themselves.
One of the things you have to consider when choosing books for students to read is their background. If they don't have the background knowledge to understand a book, they aren't going to get much out of it. Kids need books to read that they can relate to and what kids can relate to is going to be different in different demographics. The choice of books to read has to be left up to the individual schools and families involved. There is no national reading list because there is no one size fits all when it comes to which books are the right books.
We don't have a national reading list because we do not need the government telling us on a national level what we should read plain and simple.
And then there is the simple fact that less than 40% of high school graduates read on grade level at graduation and appx. 14% of adults are functionally illiterate (defined as unable to read well enough to fill out a job application). Yes, a national reading list is just what the doctor ordered. Yes, that's going to solve all our problems in education. Just make them read the "right" books .... Seriously? The solution is more national control? I don't think so.
Last edited by Ivorytickler; 03-16-2014 at 07:18 AM..
Talk to me when you pay 600 dollars for a class where you spend all your time working in small groups with people who don't know any more than you do. I give my students their money's worth.
This, unfortunately, describes the graduate class I'm taking on reading diagnostics only it's mostly individual work with chats online with the rest of the class while we try to figure this stuff out and I paid over $2000. What a waste of my time and my money but I cannot renew my certificate in August without this class so I paid the tuition, bought the books and I'm doing what I'm told so I can get a passing grade... Six more weeks and this class is done. I can't wait.
I get to take another one this summer on how to teach my kids by putting them in small groups and making them teach themselves at the bargain price of $1500 for three full weeks of class (7 hour days for 3 weeks. I get 6 credits for the class though so it is a bargain.). This is the wave of the future. Teaching through investigation...having kids discover the material you want them to learn... If you want a teaching job, you have to drink the Kool-aid. Lecturing is out as is the Socratic method. It's discovery packets that the kids work on in groups while the teacher hovers to help them get unstuck when they get stuck. We'll see how well it works.
This, BTW, is why we need tenure. A tenured teacher could say "I don't think so" and not lose their job. I think some subjects lend themselves to investigations but others don't and some topics within the subjects that do just don't. Short of having my students repeat Rutherford's experiment, I'm not sure how they can discover the structure of the atom and I'm not sure they would draw the same conclusions he did if they did do the experiment.
This, unfortunately, describes the graduate class I'm taking on reading diagnostics only it's mostly individual work with chats online with the rest of the class while we try to figure this stuff out and I paid over $2000. What a waste of my time and my money but I cannot renew my certificate in August without this class so I paid the tuition, bought the books and I'm doing what I'm told so I can get a passing grade... Six more weeks and this class is done. I can't wait.
I also had this experience numerous times during license renewal. Interesting that ed courses are most guilty of non-teaching. And ironic and yet predictable that the one really great grad school teacher I had (for reading) worked only at private school and said she'd worked one year at public and would never go back.
I also had this experience numerous times during license renewal. Interesting that ed courses are most guilty of non-teaching. And ironic and yet predictable that the one really great grad school teacher I had (for reading) worked only at private school and said she'd worked one year at public and would never go back.
What's really sad is that this course has some topics that I could really run with. For example we spent a week on comprehension. As a high school science teacher this is near and dear to my heart. I would have been more than happy to write a term paper on increasing comprehension within the science classroom but we had to move on to fluency and expression and now ELL learners. Next week is vocabulary (not teaching it but evaluating our student's vocabularies). At least we're done with decoding and phonemic awareness. Seriously folks, I teach HIGH SCHOOL. While any kids who cannot decode words who are in my class need serious help, they aren't going to get it from me. I am a content area teacher. They need intensive reading recovery teaching (more than 2 hours a day if the research is to be believed) not me analyzing their phonemic awareness as they read.
I agree that ed courses are guilty of non-teaching. My current professor seems more concerned that I put my papers in correct APA style than the content of my papers. This class is killing me. I want to run with ideas and figure out how to benefit my students but there's a prescribed topic, with prescribed prompts, to be put in prescribed format I must follow in a prescribed timeline in order to get a passing grade so I can renew my certificate....the exact opposite of thinking is going on here. If I had never been to engineering school, I would be of the impression that college turns out drones who all waddle the same way at the same time because that sure seems to be what the ed schools are trying to do.
The sad part is we get to repeat this process every 5 years for the rest of our teaching careers. I think it's a conspiracy for colleges to collect tuition. It sure feels like ticket punching rather than education.
Last edited by Ivorytickler; 03-16-2014 at 08:06 AM..
Not really... our kids went to a big district. In their high school, for example, there was a principal and 2 vice-principals and an athletic director. The combined salary difference in these individuals vs the highest paid teachers was maybe $50,000 extra. Sure, that seems like a big number but in reality that is one more teacher for the school. It's less than .1% of the actual school budget......
It's not the money for classroom teachers. It's special services and programs largely related to poverty. Many of the students in the inner cities have considerably more special needs due to poverty and the social, emotional, and developmental problems associated it. This adds to the cost of educating them since it necessitates the school picking up what isn't provided at home. Breakfast, lunch and in some cases dinner. Before and after school programs, intervention specialists, behaviorists, deans of discipline, increased special education, OT, PT, ELL, guidance, social workers, psychologists, etc. These services are more costly and frequently the cities receive students from surrounding suburbs that are unable to provide the services/programs for the fewer number of students they have that need them.
The problems of educating our children cannot be solved by education alone. Finland is not a fair comparison because of differences in government, social commitment and homogeneous culture expectations. The key driver is moving our country toward a culture that supports the belief in providing dignified economic opportunity for all that promotes pride and self-reliance while being watchful of policies that are opportunistic and not in the best interest of protecting the constitutional rights of our citizens.
My grandfather was a house painter who supported 7 children during the depression. All but one of his children went on to college and found success. He had pride in his work, had many diverse skills, and was one of the wisest men I've ever known yet today he would largely be looked down upon and considered "unskilled." He always said whatever you do is worthwhile if you take pride and do it well.
. This class is killing me. I want to run with ideas and figure out how to benefit my students but there's a prescribed topic, with prescribed prompts, to be put in prescribed format I must follow in a prescribed timeline in order to get a passing grade so I can renew my certificate....the exact opposite of thinking is going on here. If I had never been to engineering school, I would be of the impression that college turns out drones who all waddle the same way at the same time because that sure seems to be what the ed schools are trying to do.
That was my very first impression of education courses, too. Coming in as a PhD in another field, I was totally shocked when I took my first education grad course and realized that we were being taught what were obviously theories as if they were facts. We were never asked to question or criticize the theories, but only to memorize them. And I think many of my less educated classmates probably didn't even recognize that they were not facts at all, but rather just selected theories popular at present, and in fact not even the only popular ones. Drones for sure. And this is exactly the level at which our public education exists at. And then it becomes obvious why we have ill-researched and ill-informed reforms coming at us from all angles, and no one in the system is able or willing to question them. Thus I laugh when people say we need better-educated teachers - education is not a field welcoming to the truly educated and innovative. It's Borg-like.
I find that the problem in the United States is a mixture of poor teaching skills and changing values due to poor parenting. I was the department chair at a college. I had problems with faculty who wanted a 9-5 pm job and would not spend time on curriculum development. That isn't how teaching works. I also had problems with students who came in wanting all A's like they were given in high school. I wouldn't budge on it. Sorry...you had to earn your grades in my department. The students had to go on to pass boards. How would it look if I had "A" students failing their boards?
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