Posted on 11/17/2014 6:07:03 PM PST by BruceDeitrickPrice
Lots of public school teachers in my family. But times have changed since then. Discipline nonexistent, apparently, and no christian influence, and . . .I’m hoping that the KhanAcademy approach - whether by Khan or by a Christian organization - will ultimately free us from the need for brick-and-mortar schools. Just for efficiency and educational effectiveness. Bureaucracy is not the answer.
New elementary school teachers are hired right out of college and paid over $40,000 a year in small towns on the CO Rockies. Strange, that so many graduates believe that they must start in urban neighborhoods.
Please direct me to the study that came up with this fact. It is one of those statistics tossed around, but I have never seen its basis. It is possible that the bottom 20% refers to the stated preference of entering freshmsn, not of actual graduates, especially secondary school teachers who major in a subject.
This system has been in place now for about twenty three years - to begin with, it was very biased to the left, but over time with governments from both left and right in power, the bias is less - and with care, you can keep away from most of what is there.
In the two years before these two years (Grades 9 and 10), while we have curriculum guidelines from the state, as a private school, we don't have to follow them. All we really use it for is broad topic outlines - so in Grade 9, we study European and Australian history from 1750-1918 (and the First World War in some detail), and in Grade 10, mid twentieth century history. We also do units on Ancient History (Sumer, Egypt, Crete, Greece, Rome) in Grade 9 and Medieval history (primarily English, but with some Europe and the Crusades) in Grade 10, but that's outside the curriculum guidelines. It means our students do quite a bit more work than the curriculum requires - but certainly not more than they can handle with effort and diligence.
We also intergrate to some extent with other subjects - all boys have to take at least one year of Latin, and those who continue it beyond that point have it interacting with their Roman history studies, for example. We'd probably do more of that if the History teachers (including me) remembered more of our own Latin - but I only did it as a schoolboy myself and it's been a long time since I was a schoolboy now.
You are indeed fortunate if you have managed to draw a good group of students who are eager to learn. That is a fantasy of which I can only dream...
That may be the case, but I certainly did not graduate in that condition. Those who graduate in that condition generally don’t make it in teaching as they are not capable of handling the classroom application of what little they know of their subjects.
It was a University of Wisconsin finding. I’ll have to do some digging. It was ten years ago. It was applicable to their state and I think Illinois and Minnesota.
50 to 70 years ago, Fedgov had NOTHING at all to do with local education. Then they started to “fix” education and everything turned to $h!t, just like everything else Fedgov touches.
My sister is a career math teacher to middle school black kids in Baltimore. The stories she tells just make me boiling mad.
Like many of you, we stayed in line in elementary, junior high, and high school because we knew our teachers would bop us hard if we acted up then Dad would whack us when we got home.
There is zero discipline in today’s schools and the kids can say or do anything they want to the teachers without any prospect of discipline.
Why anybody would go into that profession today is beyond me.
I took the “New Math” in 7th grade in 1964. That was going to “fix” math education.
Thank you for such a thorough response. I’ve heard somewhere in the distant past that Australia tends to run about 40 years behind the USA in terms of social norms. Whoever said that may have been totally uninformed for all I know, but I do tend to think of Australia as less advanced in a good way when it comes to leftist thought and practice.
I trust you are not unaware that public schools in the USA in certain places are obsessed with psychology at early ages as opposed to the more straightforward matters that should attend to an educated population. What I mean is, we have areas where it is impossible to fire teachers who think it is more important to know how to put a condom on a cucumber than it is to know who George Washington is, and what he stands for.
And all that are left are the worthless teachers. The bureaucrats still get paid.
No-—we adopted the Prussian system of forced mass indoctrination by the late 1800s (quite late—hardly ancient)-—to destroy individualism and Free Will on purpose. (Fichte/Wundt psychology for elite control).
The “schools” prior were voluntary and true education (which only comes from the self)-—didn’t last for more than a few years. Four years was more than average. Those people were a lot more intelligent (common sense) and intellectually and emotionally superior than most people today. Literacy was quite high in the colonies and virtue prized-—more books were sold in America than all other English speaking places during colonial era and Founding.
The schooling is doing exactly what it was designed to do....destroy Virtue and autonomy in the children and create “group thinkers” and mass consumers with no morality—no family support, etc.-—slaves of the state.
The whole history is below-—which has been written about by many others, like Iserbyt and Eakman. It is worth listening to...by all parents and grandparents. The system is designed to destroy the minds (free will) and Virtue of children (and it does).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1KZvOWrT9h4
That was probably true once - it isn't anymore.
Whoever said that may have been totally uninformed for all I know, but I do tend to think of Australia as less advanced in a good way when it comes to leftist thought and practice.
I'd say the opposite in at least some ways - in Australia, a lot of your Democrats would be considered 'conservatives', and quite a few of our 'conservatives' would be well and truly in the Democrat party in the US. Tony Abbott, our current Prime Minister is a genuine Conservative - so was our last Prime Minister from his party, John Howard - but while he didn't win office and only served as opposition leader, the man between them as leader of the party, Malcolm Turnbull is not a conservative but a centrist - this is not intended as a slam on him, by the way - speaking as a conservative, I'm glad he isn't leading the party - but he's a good man in many ways. I'm just mentioning him because I think he illustrates the point, I'm trying to make.
In Australia, we've had openly socialist Prime Ministers - out of the last five Labor Prime Ministers, at least three of them wore that badge with open pride - Whitlam, Hawke, and Gillard. The political struggle at least in an electoral sense in this country is one between the left wing Labor party, and a coalition that includes the right and the centre - and while the right is currently dominant in that coalition, they don't have a lock on that.
Where I think we might have an edge over the US - and I say this with some hesitation on a forum like Freerepublic - is on two issues. First of all, I think most of our political leaders - even the left wing ones - are still genuine patriots. I may disagree with their ideas - I do - but I have little doubt that they are trying to do what they believe is best for this country. I'm not sure I see the same in large sections of the US left anymore. I also think there's somewhat less of an anti-religious movement in Australia - and that's very relevant when it comes to our education system - private schools here receive government funding under something that is a little bit like a pseudo-voucher system - less funding than government schools but its significant. Attempts to block such funding on constitutional grounds (Australia's constitution largely copied America's First Amendment when it came to religion) have consistently failed because our High Court has ruled a bit differently from your Supreme Court. What this has lead to is the fact that because it makes private schools cheaper than they are in the US, people have more ability to choose private education than they do in the US - a third of all Australian children attend private schools. This does seem to put some positive pressure on the government schools as well. I'm hoping the Charter School movement in the US will lead America towards the same type of situation - I firmly believe greater school choice is not only good for the kids who get to go to the new schools, but leads to improvement in the others as well.
And on this - while we certainly have some leftwing people who oppose it, we've also found a lot of allies on the left - people who have worked out that the best way to alleviate things like poverty is to improve education.
>> Teachers cite lack of planning time, workload, and lack of influence over school policy among other reasons for their decision to leave…
They work less than 10 months of the year and essentially teach the same plan every year thereafter... yeah, sounds awful...
Good golly. Teachers are paid for 10 months of work. Funny that.
**why don’t principals and administrators take better care of their teachers?**
If you are talking about schools in large urban areas....where most of the lowest performing districts are...the reason why admins don’t support their staff is that they are in their position through affirmative action....and they need to cover their own backs for their inherent inadequacies.
Good golly, they’re insured for 12 months. Pensioned for 12 months. Unionized for 12 months.
If your DI was held to the same standard as the classroom professional of today. He would NOT have been allowed to raise his voice, he would always have to speak to,his charges with respect and consideration of their emotional needs. He would not be allowed to give ANY disciplinary action that was physical in nature, he would have to file over 15 pages of incident reports for EVERY incident that each charge was not performing optimally, that would include a detailed plan for how to encouragenthencharge to increase performance. He would have been required to contact the parents of the individual charge to discuss the need to improve performance. He would have been required to write endless reports describing how he was modifying the environment of the training group, to promote a better learning experience. He would have had at least two unannounced visits from the administration to review his interaction with his charges to determine why their level of performance was so low. He would have been given verbal, and written notice that having a 30% rate of below average results were possible means for his dismissal as not achieving the desired results in educating his charges. Your DI would be expected to meet all training goals, while having to provide all training materials from his own resources. Your DI would have to provide his charges with ammunition, manuals, targets, cleaning supplies, printed instructional,materials, instructional,display materials, toilet paper and tissues, and many other misc property, all from his own pocket. He would be told repeatedly that any of his charges that fail, only do so because he is not doing his job properly. The charges will be tested several times during training, and ANY ones that fail, even if they just sit and refuse to take the test, will be used to demonstrate why your DI is not qualified to perform his duties.
With these limitations, how many DI would be leaving each year.
Now tell me why you think your comparison is valid. My wife has been teaching in public schools for over 25 years. We spend over $2000 a year providing basic pencil and paper supplies for her students, this does not include many hundreds of dollars each month for other materials. Yet she is constantly plagued with underperforming students that can’t or won’t do assignments. And the administration holds her responsible for their failure. She was involved in three interview sessions with administrators and parents, recently. The student had reported that she looked at him with anger in her eyes. But he failed to recount that he had cussed at her and threatened her with physical harm. After a full week of investigation, she was warned that she was not properly in control of her classroom. The student was assigned to write a paper detailing what he had done that was wrong. His parent responded that he could not be forced to do that. How would your DI have handled that?
Last year while doing her student teaching in college, my
daughter was repeatedly told by the teachers she was working with, “you are a great teacher - do NOT work in a
public school...common core, our local state teach-to-the-test mentality, and union politics are terrible....”
I am pleased and proud to say that my daughter graduated with her teaching degree and is currently teaching in a wonderful PRIVATE school. She loves her job! She loves the
kids; she says the administration is very supportive. She
plans to never teach in a public school.
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