Posted on 07/08/2022 8:35:40 AM PDT by DFG
Aguest at a private reception last week with Hillsdale College President Larry Arnn and Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee secretly recorded the event and then sent the recording to a local media outlet. News Channel 5 then ran a hit story about Arnn’s accurate remark that “teachers are trained in the dumbest parts of the dumbest colleges in the country.”
Selected 30-second clips from the two-hour recording that betrayed event-goers’ confidence were next quickly amplified in state media, including the state’s biggest leftist outlet, The Tennesseean. This pressure campaign on Thursday caused a Tennessee public school to drop its use of high-quality, time-tested curricula and training that the college provides any K-12 school for free.
In breathless tabloid fashion, News Channel 5’s story falsely states that Arnn “repeatedly mocks the intelligence of public school teachers and questions whether they really care about what is best for their students.” Then the “reporter” rushes to state Democratic Party officials to jointly manufacture outrage to air at Republicans’ desires to improve public schools.
But Arnn was not mocking the intelligence of all public school teachers. His disparaging remarks were aimed at the education bureaucracy that everyone but leftists knows is politically and morally corrupt. Here’s more context for one of the carefully excerpted Arnn quotes from the secret recording, which shows his focus is on doing what’s best for children and making an argument that teacher colleges don’t focus on that but should.
(Excerpt) Read more at thefederalist.com ...
“teachers are trained in the dumbest parts of the dumbest colleges in the country”
It has ever been thus.
Those who do, Do. Those who can’t, Teach.
Re: The very good teachers
On **average** teachers come from the bottom of the education feeders. For every very good teacher there is a very **dumb** teacher.
This has been common knowledge since I was in college. Back then, at least, there a serious and worthy curriculum. Now it’s pure indoctrination combined with lies, false reality and history in an environment of intellectual dishonesty.
....“teachers are trained in the dumbest parts of the dumbest colleges in the country.”.....
So are all those woke university administrators!!!!
However, some of them are trained in the dumbest parts of the smartest universities in the world—i.e., Harvard Graduate School of Education!! More woke, and not much smarter!!!!
One of them sent out a piece of mail 3 times and it was returned to our office 3 times. She COULD NOT address an envelope.
Another one ( also a Ph.D. ) called me every time I sent out e mails. She didn't understand what was written and I had to READ the thing back to her. No one else on the faculty did that.
I’ve been a teacher for 26 years, and I have to agree with the president of Hillsdale College.
My post-secondary education started at American University with a degree in political science, where I graduated in 1978 with the expectation of law school. I decided that polite courtroom warfare wasn’t my cup of tea, so I worked in a variety of jobs until deciding to return to college when I was 39 years old to do what I had really wanted to do ever since I was in the second grade.
The education classes at the University of Alaska Anchorage were easy beyond words. I took 24 credits a term in addition to 30 hours a week working and a 45-minute commute to the college from the valley. 4.0 GPA. Many of my colleagues over the years have been great people, and a few extraordinary teachers stand out, but the lemons in the baskets get to remain due to job protection embedded in tenure and union agreements. One third grade teacher asked me once to tell me that names of all seven continents. I worked with a horticulture teacher who never planted a single plant but was well loved by students because she handed out energy drinks and chips while showing Hollywood movies. The superintendent’s office was on the other side of the wall and must have heard what was going on, but never did anything about it. There was less rigor in my master’s degree classes than the classes I had in high school back in the early 1970s. The support staff, in my observation, tend toward mediocrity.
Students routinely tell me that they know American schools are failing them; they can see what schools look like with excellent teachers and stringent standards by watching anime and seeing what high school is like in Japan, superpowers and supernatural forces notwithstanding. There’s a popular anime called “Deathnote,” typical Japanese fare about a demon giving a teenager a book with the power to kill; all you have to do is write the name of a person in the book, and they die 10 seconds later. In an early episode, the demon asks the teenager why he’s not writing names in the book, and the boy says he needs to study for a chemistry test. Many anime series center around the need for study, respect for teachers, and overcoming the hardship of academic failure. The comparison is not lost on the American teenage viewer.
I’m going to be 67 on my next birthday, so this is my last year. My students tend to enjoy honest feedback and a focus on excellence. There are fewer of us every year.
Here’s some solutions to the current problem, based on my experience and observing places like Finland and South Korea, where there is robust student achievement.
- Colleges of education should be far more rigorous, on par with medical and law school. Weed out incompetence at the gate.
- Reduce barriers to professionals from other fields who want to teach, like engineering or medicine, so they can share workplace experience.
- Eliminate tenure. Poor teachers need to be quickly shown the door.
- Treat students with respect by requiring stringent competency tests to move through grades and graduate.
- Understand that teachers work for the families of the students. It’s unethical to use a classroom for advocacy.
- Every district website should have lesson plans, curriculum, readings, and other assignments posted daily.
- Salaries should be linked to student achievement.
It’s been an awful experience watching the education system deteriorate. Maybe my next step should be running for a school board in the community where I retire.
PhD Education < BS Mech Engineering
One thing that schools could do to immediately improve: make their teachers take the academic proficiency exams which high school seniors are required to take, and fire any teacher who does not get at least a “proficient” score in reading, writing, and math.
It’s sad that most people have no idea what teachers go through. Are there yucky ones, yes, but many bust their butts to teach ungrateful, rude, and violent kids. Four of my children are teachers and another is an assistant principal. All of my children teachers, including me, wanted to quit after this year. They are fantastic teachers. All conservative. We all graduated from good schools. Texas Tech, UNT, A&M Commerce, and me, Baylor. I double majored in math and English and graduated cum laude. At the beginning of my first year teaching, I didn’t know how I was going to tell my husband that I hated the job when we owed Baylor so much money. 🤷♀️ Here I am 23 years later…and the kids are way worse now. I’m going to be 62. Ready to get out. Maybe this year will be better.
Please don’t mistake me. I love my students, and I love teaching math. There is just too much to say about the whole bunch of malarkey that goes on I could take all day. I understand why people have your particular point of view. There are good teachers out here that do not indoctrinate and are not dumb. The liberal ones just scream too loud as liberals like to do.
“teachers are trained in the dumbest parts of the dumbest colleges in the country.”He forgot to add that public school teachers are also taught to be the most sanctimonious, overpaid, underworked members of the so-called professional class.
Here are my solutions to education:
1. Let students set teacher pay.
or,
2. Fire half the teachers and double the salaries of the rest.
Couple of things. You are the old school. There were far more bright women going into teaching back then. There are bright teachers now. But there are many who are not. And the schools don’t know or don’t care about the difference. Second is that you would have been retired 10 years ago in Wisconsin and definitely in Illinois. Clearly your deal is not as good as those up here. You would be a millionaire if you taught grade school for 30 years in Illinois.
My kids went to the best schools in Wisconsin and mostly Illinois. The teachers did not know math above algebra. Calculous gets taught be tuters not by teachers here. History was a joke. My kids came home and told me the history I lived through did not happen. And the books they were told to read were outrageous.
But they were all good well behaved kids in sports or violin. All got good grades and never had a behavior issue with 5 kids.
Please don’t mistake me. I love my students, and I love teaching math. There is just too much to say about the whole bunch of malarkey that goes on I could take all day. I understand why people have your particular point of view. There are good teachers out here that do not indoctrinate and are not dumb. The liberal ones just scream too loud as liberals like to do.
I do play bridge with teachers, my mother and mother in law were teachers one of my best friends is a teacher and I believe these people are all good at their job. But they tell stories of the people they work with. And I have stories of the people who taught my children.
>>>Here are my solutions to education:
1. Let students set teacher pay.
or,
2. Fire half the teachers and double the salaries of the rest.<<<
I’m pretty good with suggestion #1. Kids tend to be remarkably bad at making those kinds of decisions, and I’m willing to bet some student would say, “Hey, let’s give him a million bucks,” and a bunch of other kids would agree, without the slightest real understanding of what that kind of money looks like.
I’m also good with suggestion #2. I think I’d make the cut.
On an aside, I’m preparing for one of the cultists to ask me my preferred pronouns. My answer is going to be a series of questions. “How do I grade pronouns in student writing? Do we have to ask the person being written about for their preferred pronouns? Is it worse to misgender a person or to ignore the state Language Arts standards, which specifically tell us to teach students about the proper use of pronouns? Do we have to review the gender identities of all fictional characters before starting to write about them or discuss them?”
I could go on for quite a while in this vein. I probably shouldn’t smile while saying this.
Kids tend to be remarkably bad at making those kinds of decisions
Kids tend to be remarkably good at assessing teacher ability.
But that’s not the point: the point is that students are not the clients of the teachers, so the incentives are all wrong. To fix our schools, students must have consideration in the contract. As is now, they have none.
I’m the favorite teacher of students at my school, which I ascribe to never wavering from high standards. I agree with your comment.
Our alleged First Lady, “Dr.” Jill biden, has a doctorate in education from the dumb-dumb University of Delaware.
Her doctoral thesis is a pile of trash!!!!
Nevertheless, she wants us all to call her “Dr. Jill”! PHOOEY!!!!
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