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Post by jarcenas on Mar 21, 2009 12:28:26 GMT -5
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Post by skyfire on Mar 21, 2009 17:22:53 GMT -5
I'd say that this is the relevant part of the article:
Just from this, we have the four key areas that need to be addressed here in the US:
[1]. A lack of discipline among the student body.
[2]. A shortage of trained, willing teachers.
[3]. Adults hover over their children too much.
[4]. Teachers don't always bother trying to tailor the lessons.
Sadly, these are largely cultural. We'd need to focus on changing the culture instead of merely the curriculum itself.
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Post by Vene on Mar 21, 2009 18:01:02 GMT -5
[1]. A lack of discipline among the student body. Maybe if we didn't live in a culture that demonizes "elitists" there would be more motivation to excel. You do realize that an individual who goes through 4 years of college to get a bachelors can expect to earn $30k (link) while being tens of thousands of dollars in debt, while a bus driver can make $20k (link) with just a CDL license and no higher education (which means no debt). I know there are dedicated teachers, but a lot of people are motivated by money, I know you are. A lot of bright individuals are motivated by money and go into other fields, ones that make more. Compare the salary of an entry level teacher to an accountant, who can easily make $5-10k more annually (link), with the opportunity to make much more money. Pay teachers more money, you'll get more dedicated, skilled, and motivated individuals. I know this is anecdotal, but my mother is a teacher, she complains far more about parents who don't parent their kids and make them do simple things like their homework than those who are overbearing. Don't get me wrong, she does complain about the latter. Kind of hard when there is such a fucking emphasis on standardized tests. You know, the stuff pushed by legislature such as No Child Left Behind. It's not that they don't bother trying to tailor lessons, it that they fucking can't or they will lose their fucking job and the school will lose money! Careful Sky, change is one of the tenets of liberalism. You don't want to be a Socialist pinko, do you?
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Post by antichrist on Mar 21, 2009 20:05:20 GMT -5
I'd say that this is the relevant part of the article: [1]. A lack of discipline among the student body. Whose responsibility is it to teach the kid manners? And teachers don't get promotions because it's cheaper to hire a newbie out of college than to pay one with experience. Try paying a teacher a living wage and making their job a little easier. Really? In what reality is this? How do you tailor your lessons to 40 kids? How do you change a culture?
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Post by skyfire on Mar 21, 2009 20:08:34 GMT -5
I know there are dedicated teachers, but a lot of people are motivated by money, I know you are. Actually, the local community college reportedly made a promise a few years ago and I intend to make them keep it. Hence my desire to be a professor.
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Post by ltfred on Mar 21, 2009 20:13:11 GMT -5
How do you change a culture? By changing the conditions that cause that culture. Through law, affirmative action, or mandated high teacher pay.
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Post by Tiger on Mar 21, 2009 20:24:20 GMT -5
Refuse to conform to societal norms and let those who try to force you to die off.
It's a time-honored Progressive (Progressivist?) strategy.
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Post by canadian mojo on Mar 21, 2009 20:52:17 GMT -5
Refuse to conform to societal norms and let those who try to force you to die off. The problem is the stupid ones breed more and start at a younger age.
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Post by the sandman on Mar 21, 2009 22:01:34 GMT -5
[1]. A lack of discipline among the student body. How would you propse addressing this? And where do you lay the root cause for it? I'm not denying your claim here (I happen to agree with it), I'm just curious as to your thinking. The fault of this lies with the system itself in the USA. Merit pay is largely ignored (and opposed by most teacher's unions, which is frankly oxymoronic), teacher compensation packages are very low considering the work involved, teachers are given lip-service respect but no real respect, and the entire US system of education is run by politicians rather than educators. It has always been a paradox that in the United States, a nation that holds financial success in such high regard, education is the one profession that largely ignores financial reward. It's apparently appropriate to pay bankers, lawyers, and congressmen handsome salaries, but the teachers that prepared those bankers, lawyers, and congressment for their careers are supposed to work for lucite "thank you" plaques and Hallmark cards. You want trained, willing teachers? Then offer a valid compensation package. (By the way, what the hell is an "unwilling" teacher, anyway?) Interesting opinion. Can you expand on it? Spoken like a true non-educator. You can't "tailor" a lesson to a class of 40. Or a class of 30. Or a class of 20. Or a class of 10. This is a criticism of teachers that is largely made of people who have not the slightest clue what goes into the teaching process. You don't tailor the lesson, you alter your teaching methedology and assessment rubrics to compensate for multiple learning styles. What good teachers really do is attempt to keep many different learning styles and speeds engaged simuntaneously on a lesson, a Herculean task roughly analagous to juggling an apple, a bowling ball, a washing machine, and a small African elephant. "Tailoring" a lesson is largely something you only do one-on-one with students, and one-on-one time is a luxury rarely allowed to us. Teaching is 30% training, 30% talent, 30% improvisation, and 10% juggling chain-saws in a blizzard with oven mitts on. Hell, most of what they teach you in college is utterly useless in the actual classroom (which goes a long way to explaining why almost 70% of teachers quit within 4 years), and no lesson plan taught by a decent teacher ever survived actual contact with a class without at least some seat-of-pants improvising. That fact terrifies most people. That's a fascinating statement. How are these things cultural? I don't necessarily disagree with the observation, but I would be interested in what you mean by it.
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Post by skyfire on Mar 21, 2009 23:17:06 GMT -5
How would you propse addressing this? And where do you lay the root cause for it? I'm not denying your claim here (I happen to agree with it), I'm just curious as to your thinking. There's a variety of factors at work on this one, but these appear to be the big ones: *Schools that don't set the proper tone or establish the proper environment. IE, at my high school it was painfully obvious that the principal just didn't give a damn about anything but his own career; his attitude seeped into a number of staffers and much of the student body. *Media encouraging delinquency and a general disrespect for authority instead of a desire to learn. *Parents who are either too busy or too unwilling to properly work with their children. *Boredom with the curriculum, often due to such things as being so far ahead of the curve or failing to see how it will relate to later life. For the unions, there's a "circle the wagons" mentality in some unions in regards to weeding out under-performing teachers; these unions take it as a personal affront when anyone suggests that any teachers within their ranks are unfit, and so they'll go to length to shield their members from any sort of elevated accountability standards. With the rest, I agree that those are all basic failings. This is a person who has lost the desire to actually teach and inspire but for whatever reason does not leave the profession, often because they simply don't realize that they're no longer cut out for the job. IE, the above-mentioned principal started out as a gym teacher and hit his peak competency as an administrative staffer. He got promoted to principal largely via seniority, and remained in place for several years despite routinely embarrassing the entire town. When a replacement for him was finally located, the ISD decided to place him in charge of IT / tech (which he knows nothing about) instead of pressuring him to retire. I used to know someone who worked IT for the school, and he would periodically tell stories of how incompetent said principal was when it came to tech. A lot of times you'll have parents who, as the article mentioned, try to plan out their kids' lives for them. From what I've seen, they come in three basic flavors: *In some instances, the parents fear that if their kids are not "perfect" they'll never succeed, never mind the fact that the child may not be interested in what the parents are putting them up to or may be smart / talented enough to succeed as it is. *In other instances, the parents regard the child as a would-be celebrity and spoil them so rotten that the child is unable to handle the concept of receiving punishment for misbehaviour or low grades for poor work, forcing the parents to act as agents or intermediaries to try and smooth things over. *Then you have the parents whose own childhoods sucked or who are facing old age with fear, and respond by living vicariously through their children. So long as the kids are succeeding at something, they feel good about themselves... and feeling good about themselves is often all they care about. In each of the three cases, the result is that the children often end up suffering from (sometimes debilitating) stress-related ailments & neuroses when their parents' expectations meet real life, and those in situations 1 and 3 may develop an aversion to education or extra-curricular activities because they've formed negative associations. Alternatively, the child may become a "rebel" simply because they're utterly tired of being told what to do and so will vent at society at large. Rare is the child who can go through such things unscathed. See above. A student who is willing and able to learn will learn regardless of circumstances. But a student who refuses to do so rarely gets convinced to turn around no matter how good the circumstances are.
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Post by ironbite on Mar 22, 2009 0:05:04 GMT -5
I know there are dedicated teachers, but a lot of people are motivated by money, I know you are. Actually, the local community college reportedly made a promise a few years ago and I intend to make them keep it. Hence my desire to be a professor. Got that in writing there pal? Ironbite-otherwise you haven't a leg to stand on.
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Post by ltfred on Mar 22, 2009 3:28:22 GMT -5
Merit pay is largely ignored I'm all in favour of giving good teachers more money than worse teachers. I'm also in favour of giving worse teachers more money than janitors, but that is neither here nor there. The problem I think the unions have with the issue is definining 'good' objectively and fairly, without disrupting class, grades or teaching. I'm yet to see a way of doing that, other than paying more for more experienced teachers, which is obviously grossly unfair. *Media encouraging delinquency and a general disrespect for authority instead of a desire to learn. Which media is this? The Daily Planet, or some other imaginary institution?
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Post by maanantai on Mar 22, 2009 4:39:19 GMT -5
This might be the one of the biggest differences here. But in system like this you get best/worst teachers and it is all about luck what kind of teacher you get if you're not one of those kids who learn everything right away.
On the other hand there aren't that many standardized testings. I remeber having those on ninth grade on math, Finnish, English, Swedish, physics, chemistry biology and geography. There might have been others too, but those were the ones I could remember.
Teachers really have more to say / free hands on how they teach, without test around every corner to stress them OR THE STUDENTS about making it through.
And no, it's not about money, nor there is bigger respect towards teacher as they are first target of angry parents who don't like that their precious little angel got detention as a result of not doing their homework or for bullying or something.
Something that the article does not mention is the lenght of the school days. From what I've understood kids in US have longer school days with no recess except for lunch hour. I can't imagine myself as a kid in systems like that. (Usually there is 15 minute recess after every 45 minute lesson or 30 to 45minutes for lunch) Like for example on first grade I had schooldays that lasted for 4 hours/lessons max. (Monday 10-14, Tuesday 8-11 and so on) And teachers were/are able to split their class in half, to get smaller groups. => One group comes earlier than other and the other leaves later than the other. Teachers get more time with individual students.
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Post by maanantai on Mar 22, 2009 5:19:04 GMT -5
Also to add to my earlier post we had wide spread of subjects though whole (mandatory) school (1st to 9th grade). Some of the subjects started later than others (Swedish or English on 3rd, History on 4th, Physics and Chemistry on 7th and so on) and some became optional from 8th grade ("Crafts" for example. No I didn't pick it, I hated sawing on 3rd and chose the textile orientated one and there I just couln't get my knitted socks even and I hated doing that skirt I never used. But I do know how to sew a button and how to make yule goat from straws ) I guess that my main point here is that school wasn't too stressing that way. Only bit of stress I had was on 9th grade when I had to choose where to go for next three years, to "high school" or vocational school. I chose vocational and basically it was good choise, I have papers that say that I'm Electrician, and I was and still am, qualified to apply for Polytechnics and Universities. All I have to do to get in is pass their entrance examination. (And actually I went to polytechnic for a while -I would have become Bachelor of Science- but had to quit when I got seriously depressed) And in my opinion: you can't put too much weight on that reading part on those PISA-testings , thou. We have extremely easy language to read since (almost) everything is written as it it pronounced and almost every normal kid learns to read during first grade unless they already read when they come to school. (I knew most of the alphabet by the time I went to school but I still remeber the feeling I had when I realised that I knew how to read EVERYTHING! And not just slowly repeat the letters from the texts trying to get the feeling of what the words were. This happened less than two months after the school started...)
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Post by headache on Mar 22, 2009 10:13:38 GMT -5
Not to mention all the waste of money in US school on their sports teams, their whatever-teams that has nothing to do with education and which in the Nordic countries are found outside schools, in form of private sports clubs that you actively have to become a member of and which do not drain any education budgets like they do here in the US.
Schools are also a lot more integrated in the local community, school are placed where people live. Schools does not become some sort of article of worshiping a they do in the US. Whenever you hear someone interviewed, we are always informed a to which college they went to a if it has anything to do with who they are a a person. It took me a while to understand why this is so, but then I figured it out. US schools rely in a large degree on donations by formers students in addition to their criminally exorbitant school fees (need money for the football team, you know!) and without an unnatural attachment to a learning institution and without indoctrinating some sort of blind obedience to your school, they would not be able to raise the money they need. I could frankly care less about the University I went to, it was just a fucking school, not some religious god and I haven't been to the school for at least 20 years and have no idea how and what they are currently doing, why should I? I just spent a few year studying there, it's not like I fucked the school and fathered a child I have to pay for the rest of my life.
And btw, US colleges sounds exactly like the high schools in the Nordic countries and in general I have found that US kids are several years behind kids in the Nordic countries when it comes to maturity. All this will of course have implications on the education and the results from it.
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