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 frgsinwntr wrote:
As someone that is a teacher (HS physics)... i would tell people to never become one.

There are a multitude of issues. Money is a big one... but tossing a truck load o money at something will NEVER fix it... it will just encourage more failure... Pay me more for failing? yes please!

Good teachers do need to be rewarded. BUT they need to be rewarded with a reasonable schedule, fair compensation, respect, and help when it comes to difficult students.

The good teachers are instead beaten into mediocrity by the current system.

Qft. The sheer number of unpaid hours alone is enough that I wouldn't recommend teaching as a profession. The fact that a good portion of those unpaid hours have virtually nothing to do with student learning only adds to the difficulty of it all. I'll still never understand how selling tickets to a basketball game is a major job duty, especially when the same respect isn't afforded to other extracurricular events. It's also pretty much a given that you won't be respected as a teacher, either by your students, your supervisors, or the community at large, nor will you receive any real follow-through with disciplinary actions.

So those whole "teacher forced to change grade so the football player can play in the big game" is all true and not a figment?
Maybe I should become an electrician like everyone says.

 hotsauceman1 wrote:
That is my fear for becoming a teacher(and loss of not having money)
That i will not be respected, that people will walk all over me.

You really need to have thick skin...

Teachers are often stuck in the middle of the parents and the principle...

 Frazzled wrote:
The problem with that (no testing) of course is that, its perfect for an organization that doesn't want to actually be held to a standard.

There's a whole excluded middle there between 'no testing' and 'funding directly tied to performance in testing'.

You can, for instance, continue testing and use it to assess the overall performance of your system and even use it to assess how individual schools are performing from year to year. But it gets really stupid, really fast when you just say 'this school got high results, their systems must be awesome let's give them more money' and 'this school got poor results, their systems must be dreadful let's reduce their funding'.

 whembly wrote:

 hotsauceman1 wrote:
That is my fear for becoming a teacher(and loss of not having money)
That i will not be respected, that people will walk all over me.

You really need to have thick skin...

Teachers are often stuck in the middle of the parents and the principle...

Years of being bullied i kinda do.
Really, I just see teaching in High school as a stepping stone to my real dream, College teaching, and someday writing research papers about sociology.

 hotsauceman1 wrote:

 whembly wrote:

 hotsauceman1 wrote:
That is my fear for becoming a teacher(and loss of not having money)
That i will not be respected, that people will walk all over me.

You really need to have thick skin...

Teachers are often stuck in the middle of the parents and the principle...

Years of being bullied i kinda do.
Really, I just see teaching in High school as a stepping stone to my real dream, College teaching, and someday writing research papers about sociology.

Then you'll do fine! As long as it's a dream... go for it.

 azazel the cat wrote:
I've seen this. It's nothing but a commercial for charter schools, which they are in dire need of, considering on average charter schools perform significantly worse than public schools. Additionally, the film appears to worship standardized testing, which has been shown time and again to be a lazy evaluative tool that negatively skews results, and when paired with a top-down administrative approach, encourages 'training for the test' as opposed to actually teaching and educating students.

If you want to improve education, then listen to the teachers, and nobody else.

Absolutely agreed. Both on the problems with Waiting for Superman, and with listening to the teachers. In fact, I'd go one further, don't just listen to the teachers, back the teachers. Instead of building more standardised tests and more rigid curriculum, give teachers a bare bones, minimum curriculum, and then provide resources to let them expand any of those points or offer a wide range of elective units... and back the teachers to know what will best work for the kids those teachers see every day.


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 frgsinwntr wrote:
As someone that is a teacher (HS physics)... i would tell people to never become one.

There are a multitude of issues. Money is a big one... but tossing a truck load o money at something will NEVER fix it... it will just encourage more failure... Pay me more for failing? yes please!

Good teachers do need to be rewarded. BUT they need to be rewarded with a reasonable schedule, fair compensation, respect, and help when it comes to difficult students.

The good teachers are instead beaten into mediocrity by the current system.

Thanks for posting from experience.

And I hear the part about help with difficult students a lot. A lot of teacher friends of mine say the most infuriating thing is the lack of support they get from within the system.

 sebster wrote:

 Frazzled wrote:
The problem with that (no testing) of course is that, its perfect for an organization that doesn't want to actually be held to a standard.

There's a whole excluded middle there between 'no testing' and 'funding directly tied to performance in testing'.

You can, for instance, continue testing and use it to assess the overall performance of your system and even use it to assess how individual schools are performing from year to year. But it gets really stupid, really fast when you just say 'this school got high results, their systems must be awesome let's give them more money' and 'this school got poor results, their systems must be dreadful let's reduce their funding'.

I agree, This wonderful book I read called "Unequal Childhoods" showed several families from varying social statuses and their approach to education.
Basically that families who where poorer(such as on welfare or barely making endsmeet) tended approach education as though it is only the schools duty to educate them. Basic living took up so much of their time that they did not have the energy to help kids or cultivate their kids interests, one such example is the kids where interested in doing a skit for the parents, the parents ignored them and watched television.
While Middle Class parents where often more co-operative with the teachers. Going to them when their kid is failing, often staying up late in the night to help them.
They later did a follow up of that book, where the kids grew up, All of the middle-class kids(excluding one, who I think had a learning disability. but the parents refused to put them in the special education plan) all ended up going to high end colleges. While the poorer students went to lower end schools or dropped out.
Granted its several families, so it is not cold hard fact.

One thing that I think should still be done, IF we have to have a "national standard" is in the realm of the standardized tests... but here's the thing, those standardized tests should not be published prior to students taking them...

If every school district in the country has the same textbook for the same class, then the answer to every test question will be in the book... Every final that I ever took, when a student asked a question prior to the test, my teachers always said "it's in the book"

If you have a "standard" to hold everyone to then you can still see what teachers are doing satisfactory work or not.. especially if they don't know what is in the test that people take.

My wife, both my parents and one grand parent are/were teachers.

At one of the yearly "change the stuff we each based on the latest fads so we can sell more text books" meetings for science the speaker was asked where the students would learn any science, since they were learning history, geography and civics rather than actual science. His reply was that they "hoped students would pick some up along the way".

Similarly, at the regular school inspection, the inspector asked if students doing A level physics but not maths were struggling because of the calculus... Despite calculus not being part of the physics A level for about 10 years...

Return teaching to the teachers, remove the interferance from administrators and politicians and private exam boards.


ents would learn any science

Yeah, I think the teachers hold there end of the bargain up admirably well. I think the big disconnect is how the community (i.e. School Boards, Super Intendents, Parents, etc.) support the Teachers.

But what about bad teachers? I mean one of the big messages of the Waiting for Superman film was the fact that it is incredibly hard to get rid of teachers that are actually bad at teaching. Especially the use of tenure with public and high school teachers seems rather extreme.

Tenure is kinda bad if you ask me when it's used is such a fashion. In my Hs we had a teacher teach the Bible because they could not fire him.

 Ratbarf wrote:
But what about bad teachers? I mean one of the big messages of the Waiting for Superman film was the fact that it is incredibly hard to get rid of teachers that are actually bad at teaching. Especially the use of tenure with public and high school teachers seems rather extreme.

I'm not a fan of wasting a lot of money, energy, and resources on such a small sliver of the problem. The vast majority of the "problems" aren't the people but process and culture driven.

I had a neice of mine start University to become a teacher. I looked at her and asked her, "Is there a reason you want to go to school longer, get paid less, have no social standing, and be treated like the enemy by most of the people you are trying ot help?" She is now majoring in Psychology.... for now.

Personally, i think people realising that it isn't teachers jobs to educate your child totally would go a long way to helping the education system.
I overheard someone say their child couldn't read at age 5, i wanted to strangle them, why would you willfully slow your child? I realise that there may have been mitigating factors but they just seemed so offhand about it , and seemed to think "they will learn all that in school".

Yeah, if your child can't read, write and do simple sums when they start school, something is wrong, and it is not the school system.

But then, kids should not be being moved up to upper schools still not being able to read, write and do simple sums. These kids should not be mainstream schooled - they just go on to be the disruptive elements in secondary schools because, not unsurprisingly, they can't do any of the work as they can't read, write or do simple sums and so often they just act out, ruining school for everyone else and using up all the time of the teachers.

 SilverMK2 wrote:
Yeah, if your child can't read, write and do simple sums when they start school, something is wrong, and it is not the school system.

Really is that the norm? I learned how to read, write and do math once it started being taught to me in school.

I don't know about the norm - everyone in my family and my wife's family could read and write when they got to school at age 4. It isn't exactly a big ask

But the number of kids my wife teaches (she does a lot of intervention classes) who can hardly read and write at 15-16... And she isn't working in some horrific school either.

 hotsauceman1 wrote:
Tenure is kinda bad if you ask me when it's used is such a fashion. In my Hs we had a teacher teach the Bible because they could not fire him.

I'm about as atheist as they come... so you understand me when I tell you its fine that they can read/study the bible from a literature perspective. However, If they are "preaching" from the bible in the front of class... this is a different matter. And most states public education systems that I know of could build a case to push forward with due process and remove the teacher.


People say Tenure is bad... but to be honest... it's fairly valuable to have. Nepotism is overwhelming in the school boards these days...

IT wasnt a literature perspective i know that.
IT was in a GOVT class.

 hotsauceman1 wrote:
I agree, This wonderful book I read called "Unequal Childhoods" showed several families from varying social statuses and their approach to education.

Thanks for the story. I know you recognise that it is only anecdotal, but it seems to agree with a lot of other anecdotal evidence, and I believe there are studies confirming much of it as well. I know for instance that they've shown that the children of middle class parents will go to school with, on average, a 5,000 word vocabulary, while kids from lower class families will know 500 words.

I suspect there's probably some studies out there showing what portion of lower class kids make it to college compared to middle class kids.

 sebster wrote:

 hotsauceman1 wrote:
I agree, This wonderful book I read called "Unequal Childhoods" showed several families from varying social statuses and their approach to education.

Thanks for the story. I know you recognise that it is only anecdotal, but it seems to agree with a lot of other anecdotal evidence, and I believe there are studies confirming much of it as well. I know for instance that they've shown that the children of middle class parents will go to school with, on average, a 5,000 word vocabulary, while kids from lower class families will know 500 words.

I suspect there's probably some studies out there showing what portion of lower class kids make it to college compared to middle class kids.

What a coincidence we were just talking about that in my last sociology class.

As someone who has been in a sociology class(and his chosen proffesion)
Dont listen to the teachers every word, Its very liberal at first(Almost a liberals wet dream). Until you get down the line, it becomes more scientific.
My proff said that welfare is embarrassing and no one take advantage of it. I know Laugh at that because I know plenty of people that do.

 hotsauceman1 wrote:
As someone who has been in a sociology class(and his chosen proffesion)
Dont listen to the teachers every word, Its very liberal at first(Almost a liberals wet dream). Until you get down the line, it becomes more scientific.
My proff said that welfare is embarrassing and no one take advantage of it. I know Laugh at that because I know plenty of people that do.

I think that goes with any class, although I think a better saying would be "listen to what the prof has to say but don't necessarily believe everything you're told".

 Cheesecat wrote:
I think that goes with any class, although I think a better saying would be "listen to what the prof has to say but don't necessarily believe everything you're told".

Yeah, that's the art of critical thinking, isn't it? Don't just accept it, but don't just reject it either. Think about it, think about if it makes sense, and look for any decent studies that might hint that it is or isn't true.

This is why I stick to (actual) science and engineering - there isn't all that much you can misrepresent about stem cell differentiation or the mechanics of solid surfaces

 sebster wrote:

 hotsauceman1 wrote:
I agree, This wonderful book I read called "Unequal Childhoods" showed several families from varying social statuses and their approach to education.

Thanks for the story. I know you recognise that it is only anecdotal, but it seems to agree with a lot of other anecdotal evidence, and I believe there are studies confirming much of it as well. I know for instance that they've shown that the children of middle class parents will go to school with, on average, a 5,000 word vocabulary, while kids from lower class families will know 500 words.

I suspect there's probably some studies out there showing what portion of lower class kids make it to college compared to middle class kids.

IIRC, there was a societal view that the lower class families put more people into the military than other classes, but a study done showed that it was actually the middle and upper-middle class that carried the bulk of the military systems careerists. While not directly related to education, I thought it related to the thread and education levels...

Dont forget, In many inner city schools, good tachers are few and far between. they get paid less and are not respected as much as ones in others schools(even though many schools dont respect teachers much as it is)
I remember my family recommended i teach in the inner city.
I laughed at the idea because why would I want to make LESS money then most teachers?

Perhaps Teacher salary should be standardized so there isn't a disincentive to teach in poorer areas.

Also maybe some sort of incentive bonus should be given if students show improvement in certain areas. But it wouldn't be measured through a standardized test. It would be simple analysis of the normal work the students turn in.



If a teacher has a certain number of students that are flagged as struggling(certain grade or below) and later those same students showed improvement the Teacher would get a bonus. Or perhaps it would be what determines if pay raises are issued.

The only way to increase your salary is to improve your student's grades.

^and that's the whole point about standardized test. You've just come almost full circle. The next point is how do you make sure that the teacher simply isn't fudging the grades to get a higher income?