Truth about Teaching

[Bravus]

This article mentions politics, but it's not *about* politics. And it's too important to banish to the wateland of the Politics forum. That's my view, but I'm happy to be overruled by the moderator of this forum.

http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in-dialogue/2010/08/overcoming_despair_as_we_fight.html

A lot of what it boils down to is that we actually know a lot about what constitutes and causes good teaching, and most of the current 'reforms' are its opposite.

[Woody]

Politics is definately in the eye of the beholder. :)

[Bravus]

As I said, I'm happy if the mod decides to move it. Both the Bush and Obama administrations cop a serve in the article, but that's because they've both bought in to the same nonsense about improving education.

So my hope is that we can discuss education without getting party-political about it. With good will that ought to be possible.

It's of interest to me partly because I'm interested in the US situation and partly because, in typical fashion, Australia's politicians are slavishly copying what has already been shown not to work in America. We now have 'Teach for Australia' ramping up here.

The point is, as I said above, we have lots of excellent, evidence-based knowledge of what works in education. It's training teachers well, supporting them appropriately and keeping them in the profession for a long time. And it's measuring student learning broadly. All the current trends focus on narrow measures of student learning and on stop-gap measures that bring poorly-trained teachers into classrooms for short periods.

[Dottie]

I don't know much about education in "political" terms, so I'm definitely not going to say anything about that.

But I know a very qualified teacher who is in his fifties, who has given up teaching in the classroom. He is a math teacher, and will be teaching by computer this year in the public school system. The reason? He was given the task of teaching high school students catch-up math. They haven't studied since they have been in school. The county wants them to graduate with others who have studied. It will give the a better grade, and enable the schools to have more money to pass more students who don't know how to read or add. His students got up and walked around, talked aloud to each other, yelled across the room, etc., etc. He was not allowed to discipline them in any way.

Before being assigned that class, he had been one of the teachers who all the bright students wanted to get, because they knew they would learn in his class. He could teach the more difficult classes with more success than many of the others; because of his ability, he was assigned the make-up class.

If students don't want to learn, there's not much any teacher can do about it. If parents don't care about their children, they won't be able to see the value of an education.

(Just me, spouting off. My boy doesn't want to learn. The older ones have either graduated college, or finished a technical school. The teacher tells me I'm supposed to use flash cards to help him with his math. I tell her, if he would let me teach him, he for sure wouldn't be in a government school!}

[Outta Here]

Okay...this might be a strange question, but where are all these people whom the current education system has failed? I thought that the colleges were more competitive now than ever, and that they are having a difficult time meeting the needs of all the incoming students.

The university my daughter will be attending in the fall has found it necessary to use their "overflow" housing because of the high enrollment--despite the recent increases in tuition. The academic scholarships are limited in respect to the high numbers of well-qualified entering freshmen.

[Dottie]

Maybe many of those freshmen and other students are accepted, either not being able to do the work, having to take catch-up classes, or the classes they take are TTB (Throw the daddy cow) classes.

[SivartM]

I'm not sure if this is totally relevant, but in my college algebra class last semester, my (funny, good, but apparently somewhat embittered) teacher occasionally would talk about the school (it's a community college) and how they had a plan to, in the next few years, replace math and science teachers with computer labs where people would have to learn by themselves. She, and everyone in my class, agreed that college-level math and science are way too difficult for most people to learn on their own, and that we benefited from having a real, live teacher to explain it to us.

But I think teachers are going the way of telegraphs and Myspace.

[Bravus]

We also have excellent evidence on this question, which boils down to 'computers don't teach people, people teach people'. Of course, the evidence tends not to be what these decisions are based on, and by the time we realise it was a stupid idea we'll have damaged the learning of a whole generation...

H.G. Wells said it about a century ago: "We are in a race between education and catastrophe". With these education policies, if I were putting money on it'd be on catastrophe...

[Outta Here]

Maybe many of those freshmen and other students are accepted, either not being able to do the work, having to take catch-up classes, or the classes they take are TTB (Throw the daddy cow) classes.

As the entrance requirements are fairly rigorous, the likelihood of these freshman not being able to do the work is minimal. The academic scholarships are not as "easy" to receive as they have been in the past--the standards have been raised because the pool of candidates meeting the previous standards is too large.

[Outta Here]

Here is an article from our local newspaper reporting on the overcrowding of our private and state universities:

Quote:

Freshmen crowd campus residence halls

The numbers won't be official for a couple of months, but colleges across the region are expecting record numbers of freshmen this fall.

And while administrators are thrilled, there's just one problem: They don't have room for everyone.