Posted on 02/23/2014 5:18:26 AM PST by Libloather
Even though I live in the Detroit media market, I forgot that one. A fine role model for children.
Unlike YOU, I have the facts on my side. What does that make YOU? You're the one who disparaged an entire profession of dedicated people based on NO FACTS AT ALL, just your own little self who is WRONG. Spell it, lily: W-R-O-N-G.
LOLOL
Public schools in places like New York have always been full of immigrants, many of whom had parents who were illiterate or did not speak English. Those kids still learned basic reading, writing, arithmetic, history, geography - without teachers sending homework home as kids usually had chores after school. (I never had homework in elementary school!) Schools taught the subjects, not a bunch of peripheral nonsense. Sadly, I think many of today’s teachers are not qualified to teach the basics.
One of the more popular "theories of education" these days is that teachers should play the role of "facilitators", while the children "teach" themselves and each other.
Under this theory, it's not necessary for the teachers to know the material, because they are there to facilitate.
You’re right. Hence the proliferation of the “Education” major in college as opposed to teachers majoring in their subjects. I experienced that in a technical grad course. A student asked the prof his opinion about two alternate database models and the response was “I’m not a DBA, I’m an educator.” Whaaat? Granted, at grad level students do teach themselves and one another, but the joker “facilitating” the class ought to have SOME knowledge of the subject. Especially when the university is charging $1K a unit, $3K per class.
I gradu8d hi sch mañana
A local city councilor recently took offense at an article published in our local news and fishwrap, and wrote a "Letter to the Editor" taking the paper to task.
The paper published it as an op-ed, with a note from the editor explaining that it was published as written, completely unedited, and that the editor had verified its contents with the author. This was a good thing, because frankly, the letter was unreadable. It read like a child's short story....which is fine at age 7, but not so much as an adult, and furthermore, a representative of the people.
The City Councilor was thoroughly taken to task by the public, and the media, and ultimately lost her job in the next election. Rightfully so. She was corrupt, as well as illiterate. Good riddance.
That's not the punchline, though. The issue became a real tempest in a teapot.....since the City Councilor was (gasp) Black. Obviously, the paper was racist for publishing her (unspun, unedited, un-improved upon) thoughts. Obviously the paper wanted to make black people look bad. Sez me, this person was doing a pretty good job of that herself, and the paper merely provided an outlet.
Remember "Obama phone lady". The media who simply replayed her interview were tagged as "racist".
You’ve written a superb post, and I appreciate that you stand up for us beleaguered teachers against a hostile public.
I am sick and tired of people thinking they’re experts on education and that the fault of failing students lies strictly with the teachers. Critics who have never set foot in a classroom yet remember their own classrooms as full of kids eager to learn from brilliant teachers and think it’s the same now as it was then. Well, times have certainly changed and I’d invite any of them into a typical high school classroom to show us how to do it.
So few have any idea what it’s like to work in a school where black kids not only freely roam the halls all day but, when in class, are hostile to the education process and do everything they can to interrupt, disrupt, run around the room, yell and defy the teacher.
I know because I’ve been in those classrooms and when I tried to get help, am told by administrators that I cannot send students out for defiance, that children should be in class and if I send them out, I am denying these students the “right” to an education.
I felt as if I had fallen through the looking glass.
The local media are no better. Low test scores are prominently displayed with full blame assigned to “uneducated,” “boring,” or “racist” teachers. The paper is always happy to interview the kids who are happy to claim, “I didn’t learn nothing from that teacher!”
We teachers are never asked, of course, and the kids’ attendance or discipline records never scrutinized, it’s always the teachers’ fault.
No WONDER they claim they "learned nothing from that teacher"! They were the spanner in the spokes of the lesson, day after day and yet have the nerve to blame someone else for their failure, thanks to the expert tutelage of Al Sharpton and his fellow masters of projection. It's always someone else's fault that they did not learn as they should.
Remind you of someone who claims it's always someone else's fault, anyone but him?
Probably a letter writing campaign from the classroom
Why do children have homework?
There is no reason why pre high school a child should have homework.
It may be that in earlier grades, homework is needed not because of the coursework but rather to develop the abilities to independently do their homework later in high school.
What it does is overload the child until they hate school work.
There is no other reason that to give a third grader two hours of home work that requires adult assistance.
Kids in the US go into school with the same level of enthusiasm and a higher skill level the kids anywhere in the world. By the time fourth grade comes around they have had all of that beaten out of them.
Yes teachers do remind me a great deal of Obama.
It is always the kids fault, or the parents, or society, or that they don't have the greatest gadgets.
Never is it that they have not the foggiest idea how to teach.
I mean sitting at a desk playing with your Ipod while telling the kids just to read the material should produce great results!
Kids in today's classrooms have absolutely no respect for authority, their parents, anyone. They have no problem cursing out their teachers, threatening to assault them, actually assaulting them, skipping class, etc. because they know that the libs in charge will offer them night school, summer school, weekend school, online school--anything--to nudge them over the line into the "pass" column, whether they know a darn thing about the subject or not. They don't have to do very much work at all. In NYC, they can even take "credit recovery" classes which only repeat the parts of the class that they failed. In other words, they get a mishmash quilt of this component and that component instead of having to repeat the whole class so that they get a cohesive idea of what the subject is actually about. And that passes for a class that they passed in their record.
So unless YOU have taught in public schools, you have absolutely no business asserting that teachers don't know how to teach. You say that based on what you think, not what you know from personal experience.
"Sitting at a desk playing with your Ipod while telling the kids just to read the material" is not what occurs in a classroom
Yes, it is. I know because I have been asked by parents to evaluate classes and that was exactly what the "teacher" did. In fact that was the most benign thing I have seen a bad teacher do.
So I do know what I am talking about and while there are good teachers out there they are hamstrung by teaching methods that are, at best, questionable. At worse they are criminal.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
