Posted on 08/03/2011 8:30:23 AM PDT by flowerplough
An unidentified educator claims that the difficulty of the tests not only puts teachers' jobs in jeopardy, but crushes students' spirits as well.
Is there ever a worthy explanation as to why a teacher would help her students cheat on a test?
According to a veteran Philadelphia teacher, yes, there is.
“I wanted them to succeed, because I believe their continued failure on these terrible tests crushes their spirit,” the unidentified teacher told the Notebook.org, a Philadelphia Public School site that serves as an independent voice for parents, educators and students. The teacher says she regularly provided assistance including definitions to unfamiliar words, comments on writing samples during tests, and says that she even discussed reading passages that they didn’t understand.
“They’d have a hard time, and I’d break it down for them,” she said she did it in response to receiving intense pressure from administrators to raise scores at her former school.
In a city made up of 43.2 percent Blacks and with the possibility of schools being shut down and teachers losing their jobs, she says cheating was “widespread” and “constant” amongst almost all of her students who were “poor and African-American.”
“Math teachers were sitting down in the seat next to the children, with a pencil, actually working out problems with them. I saw that many times,” she said.
In Pennsylvania the annual testing regimen is spread out over weeks involving six sections scheduled to take approximately eight hours to complete. The unidentified teacher came forward amid a publication of a 2009 report that identified dozens of schools across Pennsylvania and Philadelphia having statically suspicious test results on the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment (PSSA).
(Excerpt) Read more at bet.com ...
I’ve been a tutor, I still enjoy tutoring, and I teach.
I always thought that the best training for any teacher is to go one on one with students.
Do that for a year or two and then work on a whole class. A good tutor will have some experience on how to teach students as well as be able to build up some confidence working one and one.
It really bothers me when I see poor teachers making excuses. I have to eventually clean up their messes by trying to get the student up to par.
They are testing something that’s not commonly done these days. There’s a general store of knowledge that everyone who reads and has an understanding should know at a particular level.
Every class is different. One of the things I try to do early on in my class is to identify the deficiencies. Where the students are weak and where they need help.
I teach history. We go over the original documents, and I get the kids to read out the words, and anytime we encounter a word that is unfamiliar to any of the students, we stop, go over the word, and continue.
Is it slow? Yes, very slow, but until the students have the basics, they won’t be able to get to the strong stuff.
The other thing you have to teach students is suffixes and affixes. They have to have a lexicon, that if they don’t understand a word, how to connect it to other words. This is why I do as much Latin as I can spare. This helps students hook up words and ideas.
Kids are very, very lucky to be in your class!
So, then, it’s the students’ value system that is the problem here. Doing poorly in school means you are doing okay! And to think these mean teachers were trying to ruin their self-esteem by changing their answers so that they would actually do well on the test! It’s a wonder these poor children didn’t suffer irreversible damage at the hands of these vultures!
Man! How far we have fallen!
Yeah. And I teach in an inner city school in Los Angeles. My 7th graders, mostly, don't have that. What they know is how to identify tagging from various gangs, where is Rockwood territory, where is Diamond, where is MS-13... how to by-pass school firewalls so they can watch Teen Mom in the computer labs... how to convert "found" goods into cash... who won the Soccer World Cup every year for the last 15 years... famous skateboarders and their specialty moves... Anne of Green Gables doesn't strike many chords with them. They do like The Outsiders though.
I’m lucky to have them! I love this job.
Why not try TH Lawrence’s “Once and Future King”
Tell them it’s Professor X’s favourite book. :)
The hilarious result of a Republican President trying to force them to earn their pay.
This is life in the former great America.
I’ll have to read it myself first. Say, now I’ve got some summer reading! Thanks!
Personally I prefer Idylls of the King by Tennyson, but it’s a harder read.
If you do not possess a proper 12th grade English vocabulary, you are not prepared to go to college.
Instead of sitting down and teaching one student at a time, why didn't she put the material on the board and teach the whole class at once?? Epic fail.
Parents defend Atlanta school caught up in scandal
“We’ve been extremely pleased with the instruction my children have received,” said Quinnie Cook-Richardson, one of several parents at the troubled West Manor Elementary School who spoke at the meeting.
I'd be up there wanting to punch the teachers out for helping my kids cheat instead of teaching and these people think they did a great job. Hopeless......
I agree. I just wish they wouldn't throw it at my 7th graders.
“She also complained to me all her friends would call and she found she couldn’t get off the phone with them, (same as she did just before class).”
No one forced her to talk on the phone, it was her choice. She could have said I am sorry I can not talk right now I need to study. Her priorities were very oblivious and school was not at the top of her list.
Drat that spell check. lol
Oblivious should have been obvious.
I had the same problem with a sociology prof I had. He graded on a radical curve. People learned to play the curve. Well, I aced the midterm, because he used the exact same test questions on the midterm that he’d used for the earlier tests. I’d already seen them once, and we’d gone over the tests in class after, so I knew the correct answers to any I’d previously missed. So, for the midterm, he threw my score out as “deviant” (I’m surprised he didn’t accuse me of cheating) and curved the grades from the next highest grade, which was an 82%. That made 73% an A and 30% was passing. I protested, and he accused me of not being generous to those who were less academically gifted. He asked why should I care, that no job would hinge on my grade in his class. I pointed out that GPA mattered, and no employer would be able to tell that I had a 98% A and another student had a 73% A. He got really belligerent. So, I turned him in to the the dept. chair. To this day, I cannot abide sociology. I didn’t care for it before, he just put the final nail in the coffin.
Good for you. I spent a few years teaching in a teacher certification program. I had a reputation as a no-nonsense, hold-students-feet-to-the-fire instructor. I had more than one colleague ask why I was so tough on my students. I told them that the future of our country is our children. We were going to inflict the public school system with these students. They’re going to be holding the future of our country in their hands. So, yes, I could and would hold them to a higher standard. Fascinatingly enough, students loved me. I treated them, not like perpetual students, but like they were going to be teachers one day, and gave them the tools they needed to succeed in that capacity.
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