Posted on 09/13/2007 10:22:45 AM PDT by shrinkermd
Of all the useless classes foisted on California's high school students, few are as academically irrelevant as service class. Never heard of it? Maybe it's called "teacher's assistant class" at your neighborhood school, or perhaps it's listed as "independent study."
Students' duties in these electives are, by and large, similar: makingcopies, running errands, taking attendance, sometimes grading papers. Other electives are borderline irrelevant -- manicuring and cosmetology come to mind, particularly when they fail to prepare students to obtain licenses in those fields. But service classes are universally without instructional value.
So if they don't benefit students, why do schools offer them? Because they benefit adults.
Teachers are inundated with paperwork -- it's the No. 1 reason they abandon the profession -- and service classes provide unpaid aides. But students shouldn't be denied an hour of learning so that they might work, for free if for class credit, to lighten the load on those paid to teach. That's a particularly grim life lesson to give a teenager, and it's made worse by the shortage of substantive electives. Not all schools have sewing machines for fashion design classes or computers for programming, but there's always attendance to take.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
The editorial page of the LA Times is showing a greater scope of political views. It is hard to imagine this editorial appearing 12 months ago.
Sounds ok to me. What’s wrong with teaching work skills?
I like it. It’s not like it’s the only thing they’re doing.
Elective classes with meaning are important to the kids. As an example, I took drafting classes in High School, I also took Auto Class. Because of the teachers back then, I got into, and made a career of, Electro/Mechanical Packaging and Design. I also built over a dozen hot rods during my life time. The teachers back in the ‘50’s were a lot different. They demanded excellence in everything I did and didn’t pander to me or my parents.
As a teacher not lucky enough to have a proctor (as we call them), I think it is a good idea to have students fill that role. I am extremely busy as it is and can not get everything done that I really should. Yes, part of the reason is we need some extra help. But, I think it also helps teach work skills to students. Making copies is not the only part of the job.
do a google on her for so fun reading
do a google on her for so fun reading
It was not just filing and running copies. I was grading homework too and the teacher didn't give me an answer key. I had to make my own, show it to her to see if it was correct. So I was doing my German classes homework, and the first semester homework as well.
It actually helped me reinforce my German skills in High School. Unfortunately I've pretty much forgotten everything I learned since I didn't use the language at all after High School.
They had “office” class when I was in secondary school, lo, these many years ago. My mother wouldn’t let me take it, but my brother go to once. Maybe she wanted him to improve his typing ...
Typing, filing, and general administrative niceness aren’t useless. My kids do it to help out at church all the time. And although entry-level office work isn’t rocket science, I found (in my post-high-school years) that sitting in an air-conditioned office typing was a big improvement over being a waitress!
1. They send the stinky work home as homework (sentence writing, drill arithimetic, etc) for the parents to deal with every night for 3-4 hours and then blame the parents for not being sufficiently involved. All of the real learning is happening at home. In effect, most government school parents are homeschooling their kids and don't even realize it; and
2. The teachers have a staff of unpaid gofers to order around, created by sacrificing the students' academic progress. Not only that, in a lot of schools, they rope parents into being unpaid TA's.
The bottom line, teachers are offing more and more of their work to other people. The more unpleasant the work, the more likely it is being done by someone not a teacher. Were this producing better educated students, maybe this transfer of responsibility would be justified. But it seems to me the steady abdication of responsibility by the teachers has been accompanied by falling performance.
I wonder if they file in English or Spanish.
One of the few informed and perceptive comments on this thread.... We might be able to do something about the education disaster in this country if more people actually tried to understand what is going on in government schools today rather than reminiscing about the halcyon days when they went to school, trying to rationalize institutionalizing their own children to avoid responsibility and financial costs, and manufacturing specious excuses to justify their jobs in the government schools.
Imagine - a “conservative” website where a large percentage consistently defend a socialist model of education. If we like socialized education, why shouldn’t we be taking a second look at collective farms?
Students have service in my high school. It appears on their transcripts as such. I can check on whether or not they get credit. I don’t think that they do. The main reason for them to do it is that it looks good for prospective employers who sometimes recruit right from the schools or who will ask the department heads for recommendations for which applicants to meet. (It’s a trade school.)
Believe me, the capacity to do boring, repetitive work reasonably well is great preparation for many entry level jobs that don’t require a college education. Even as a college graduate, I could not get a decent job until I spent time at a secretarial school getting my typing speed over 40 wpm and studying shorthand (speedwriting).
Some years ago I was supervising 4 summer hires from the “Mayors Youth Leadership Training Program.” My boss did a lot of writing. He marked articles in several newspapers, The 4 students cut them out, I marked which file they should go in, the students sorted them out and filed them. A lot of clippings were one Latin America and the Middle East. None of these 4 “elite” inner city students knew where Nicaragua as located. They did by the end of the summer.
Personally, I don’t think that these kids should be doing this grunt work for the teachers. They’re the adults, it’s their job. They’re the ones getting paid to do that work, not the kids.
Anyone who becomes a teacher has to know that they’ll be grading papers and stuff. People in other professions have to take work home, too.
Schools need to scale back on the fluff and really teach, like they did 30, 40, 50, and more, years ago.
I concluded years ago, when we started homeschooling, that that is what most parents do when they help the kids with their hours of homework a night; that they’re homeschooling but just don’t realize it. So much for the parents who say they could never do it.
This may be the case in some schools, but we don’t use students as “gofers”...there are students who work in the office, answering phones, etc instead of taking a study hall, but teachers do not use student workers to grade work.
I teach 12th grade English. Believe me, I alone grade their papers. That being said, I’m afraid that many of the newer teachers have a very different philosophy. Many times, as I take loads of work home, I see newer teachers leave with nothing but their keys. I wonder to myself:
“What’s WRONG with this picture!”
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