Posted on 12/20/2007 6:58:59 AM PST by wintertime
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American education will never be improved until we address one of the problems seen as too delicate to discuss. That problem is the overall quality of people teaching our children. Students who have chosen education as their major have the lowest SAT scores of any other major. Students who have graduated with an education degree earn lower scores than any other major on graduate school admissions tests such as the GRE, MCAT or LSAT. Schools of education, either graduate or undergraduate, represent the academic slums of most any university. As such, they are home to the least able students and professors with the lowest academic respect. Were we serious about efforts to improve public education, one of the first things we would do is eliminate schools of education.
The inability to think critically makes educationists fall easy prey to harebrained schemes, and what's worse, they don't have the intelligence to recognize that the harebrained scheme isn't working.
(snip)
(Excerpt) Read more at jewishworldreview.com ...
The big thing that would ever keep me from teaching, is I absolutely DESPISE grading papers. That’s the one thing I found most difficult with our homeschooling. Because we had to submit quarterly reports (report cards) to the school, I had to grade their papers. It also helped me keep tabs on what they had mastered. But I hated it.
All other things being equal, being an expert is obviously preferable. However, many very smart people are also somewhat anti-social, and teaching is first and foremost a social event.
I have no fondness for schools of education or current teacher training, but you do not need a lot of expertise in individual subject areas to be a good teacher. You DO need to be good at working with others, and particularly at working with children. That skill, plus an average intelligence and reasonable lesson preparation, will result in kids learning. Without it, you can be a genius and not teach squat-all.
Another strawman argument!
Walter Williams never said that ONLY very smart people should teach. How can anyone defend a position of your own creation?
If you are a teacher, I hope you are not using this highly manipulative, and highly flawed debating technique with your students. I personally would consider this to be emotionally abusive to do this to emotionally and intellectually immature student who are held captive in your class by force of law.
Williams DID suggest that schools of education be eliminated. This would mean that students would need to declare another major. That would make them at least at smart as the other students graduating from these majors!
Please read posts 124 and 125.
Thanks,
Wintertime
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This should read:
I personally consider it to be emotionally abusive for teachers to use strawman arguments with emotionally and intellectually immature students of any kind. This is especially true if they are captive government students who are held in that class by force of police threat. ( Real bullets in those guns on the hip.)
When my son was in 5th grade his math teacher’s idea of homework was to make the students fill sheets of paper with 1/4 inch squares. She made them MAKE their own graph paper!!! The reason- some in the class couldn’t afford to buy it and the school budget wouldn’t cover the teacher furnishing it. That was a contributing factor, among many, to our decision to homeschool.
Such a person will be able to handle the difficult kids in her class, probably better than a rocket scientist. But what about the smartest kids? What happens when a bright third grader asks a question because he’s understood how the math works and wants to know more, but the teacher - because it’s not on the lesson plan - can’t help him?
The whole system is broken and one big reason why is that we have this idiotic notion of sticking thirty kids in a classroom with nothing in common except their age. That’s really easy to manage. What’s hard is if you have ten classrooms all teaching math at slightly different levels, and assign the kids based on their abilities. But if you did that there might be some learning.
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I believe there are two reasons we don’t see more private religious schools:
1) Ministers don’t push for starting private schools in their own churches because there are too many government school workers sitting in their pews. They are afraid of offending them.
2) As a society we are mentally stuck on the Prussian-style brick and mortar school with the salaried teacher standing in front of a class of same aged students. Of course this model is very expensive. We have forgotten how our early American ancestors educated their children. What is needed are small “one-one-schools” all across this nation meeting in the homes of parents, friends, and neighbors.
It is long past time that we threw off the oppression and staged a MASSIVE school tax revolt to shut these government indoctrination camps DOWN!
That is why when kids get to JC they have to take remedial math. My 15 year old tested out of all the lower level math at our local JC and starts calculus (not pre-calculus) next semester.
Homeschooling is by far the best way to go. My wife was uncomfortable teaching higher math and science, that is why we went the JC route, which we apply to her HS.
There are so many problems with education these days it’s hard to point a finger at one thing and say, “If we could only fix this it would be great!” We all know what most of them are.
But, let me throw out something here. I don’t know much about the quality of the folks who go through college to specifically be a teacher. I didn’t. I wanted to do something else, in fact teaching was very low on my list of things I wanted to do. I got a degree in exercise physiology, because at the time I was very involved in health and fitness and at the time it was a very up and coming degree. Additionally, I loved anatomy and physiology, but I didn’t want to be a nurse.
Later, I had to have a job and education was something I could do with a little more *education* (on top of my bachelors) and I started teaching health, IPC and biology. I think the fact that I had a background in other things (I worked for a vet, I worked in a PT clinic, I worked at the YMCA, I had already raised 3 sons, etc. What I’m trying to say is, I had real life experience in things. I think that helped me be a better teacher.
I think the education establishment should do more to get regular people into the profession, even if they only teach a few years. There is a wealth of talent out there that they could tap.
Sorry this is so wordy, but I feel strongly about it.
susie
Some egotists do.
I encountered that kind of thinking back in the late 60's in Home Ec. It was sewing class and I was good at it. I figured out a better way to lay out the pattern than the diagram but the teacher told me that if I didn't do it the way that was shown on the pattern instructions, she'd fail me. Even at that age of 14 or so, I realized that they didn't want me to think for myself, they just wanted me to do what I was told. Maybe that's why I was always at odds with most of my teachers, now that I think about it.
The other problem with private schools, Christian included, and maybe more so for Christian, is that they often get the kids who get kicked out of public schools for being too unruly, or the parents figure that the Christian school will straighten out the mess of a kid they raised.
My kids know lots of kids who go to the local Christian school and it does have it’s share of problems, not the least of which is the teachers. One girl was warned of facing a brief suspension for cheating on her homework. ??????
I think that’s a great idea, along with getting rid of tenure.
I don’t know of any other profession which can guarantee you a job if you can just slide by the first few years.
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