Posted on 07/15/2015 4:11:04 AM PDT by Timber Rattler
One thing about teaching that is easy for parents, policy-makers and others to forget is that working with students for hours every weekday to help them learn is very, very hard work. Even in the best of schools and even with supportive administrators, teachers have unrelenting jobs. In recent years, a growing number of teachers have found that reforms which force them to test students more than ever, collect more data than ever and attend more meetings than ever, are making the job literally impossible.
That’s what happened to Scott Ervin, who has worked as a teacher, principal and discipline specialist over the last 15 years. Ervin loved working with at-risk students, and for years requested that the most difficult be placed in his class. But in this post, Ervin explains why he is quitting his job as a third-grade teacher at Fairborn Primary School in Ohio.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
The Compost said it was Ohio...not the federal bs...
“political correctness”
As long as PC is political, you can’t expect it to be correct.
It was wrecked the minute we made education mandatory and government sponsored. At that moment it ceased to be education and turned into propaganda/indoctrination. It was only a matter of time until the bad teaching drove out the good. See Gresham’s law.
The solution: remove all laws governing education and watch the free market fill in the gaps. Central planning always fails.
When I was a kid I don’t thinking was too difficult. But it was a small close community and if you were a goof off EVERYONE knew, you awaited the fury of dad, and the teachers were allowed to take down the paddle.
Now... The kids are in charge and they know it. I recently watched a youtube video where a black thug got ‘all up in’ a teachers face for using the wrong color ink on the white board. This poor emasculated teacher put down the pen and got the new color.
Who would tolerate that?
When my husband added up all the days spent on standardized testing this year it equaled a month. They lost a month of instructional days to testing to give the government data.
Obviously he is concerned about the direction of public education, but he hasn’t commented too much on the additional paperwork, he just stays late after athletic practice or events to get it done. Maybe because as a coach he is already used to not seeing his family at all most nights that staying late for paperwork has always been part of his routine. All the meetings at his school are done before 8:00 when the school day starts so no running from place to place.
The anti bullying legislation, however, along with common core content are his biggest concerns. Those will have a tremendous impact on kids.
Not one word concerning Common Core State Standards, which replace the universally hated NCLB. I believe every single issue he related as impacting his decision to leave the teaching field can be traced to Common Core. He places some blame on State Legislators, and rightly so, although in many cases it was the education establishment and the Governor who in most cases were responsible for the ease with which the Common Core and the dangling money associated were embraced.
He is talking about the 7 hours between 8 AM and 3 PM. He fails to mention the preparation hour the teachers get each day, along the break for lunch. He also fails to mention the abundant downtime for fall break, spring break, Christmas and summer vacation (assuming they are on a traditional calendar). Teaching can wear you down, but it pales beside many thankless private sector jobs.
In fairness, much of his rant is about the bureaucracy and the pointless evaluations and measurements imposed by government bodies. Normal people hate bureaucracy.
An aside: My socialist neighbor teaches middle school art. He complains about his 9 1/2 hour work days. He leaves home at 6:30 AM and arrives back at home at 4:00 PM. He gets to school at about 7:00 AM to turn on the kiln for clay projects. After flipping the kiln switch he reads the newspaper and drinks coffee until 8:00 AM. So his "workday" includes his commute time and an hour of leisure time drinking coffee. He didn't like the idea of an automatic switch on the kiln.
I am tired of whining teachers. Let them compete like everyone else and education will improve exponentially.
I don’t know what too much testing is.
I taught school for eight years in 50’s,60’s - math and science. And, I loved everything about it except pay. As you may remember pay scales then were designed for married women whose pay supplemented their husband’s.
I would test each Friday on the material taught during the week, then a unit test, mid-term and final. Then, once a year had a standardized test from the state (no Fed Dept. of Educ. in those days.)
Did I test too much? How much more testing goes on now?
...and then there’s the notion of whether teaching should even really be “a profession” - per se.
He's not a teacher, he's a crybaby. I can't imagine he could possibly be effective as a teacher with such a self absorbed attitude. I wonder what his union thinks. He's probably a hero, to them.
State and federal money is allocated according to test scores. Pressure is placed on teachers to teach for the test. It’s all about the money.
I've got two kids in school now and it's ridiculous. It seems like there is some sort of test every other day, and that's all the teachers do anymore, teach the tests. No time in the day for anything else.
I had a student threaten to kill me over far less when I was teaching. He was livid I wouldn't give him special privilege because of the status of his mom in the community. Using the wrong color marker in front of gang members? With school administrations the way they are now, one would get zero support and end up dead in the gutter. Use the marker they tell you or get out of education. NO SUPPORT.
Government schooling is a single-payer, compulsory-use, compulsory-funded, and socialist entitlement. It's destiny was always assured. It was bound to move from local to state control and then onward to federal control.
Government compulsory schooling was a progressive brain fart of the 1800s.
Progressives have always controlled teacher training and curriculum development.
Progressives always have pushed for increasing separation from God.
Progressives have always been pushing at the edges of society's morals and ethics.
Government schooling limped along due to the borrowed ethical foundation of our earlier pioneer founders. Today, that influence has been gone for two or more generations.
Soon....Our health care will resemble government schooling. In two to three generations, those that were trained in the old system of health care will be dead. Then many foolish conservatives will say, “Socialist health care was good in the 2030s.”, and will recommend all the silly reforms they now propose for socialist-entitlement schooling. It will not occur to them that the problem is socialism and that it must be abolished.
Abolish compulsory government schooling. Now! It is the only rational solution.
Standardized tests are given much more often than once a year. This year the days given for standardized testing added up to a month’s worth of instructional days given up for state testing. This doesn’t include the unit and chapter tests that are part of the curriculum.
Khan Academy is free
The system is morally and ethically corrupt. The system, by its very existence, is teaching all the children (who witness the outrages) moral and ethical lessons that will **hurt** them as they attempt to navigate their earthy lives. They are also being taught deadly spiritual lessons.
Teachers who agree to work in such a system are willingly agreeing to prop up a institution that is **hurting** children.
I don't respect that.
Either fix the schools immediately! It is evident, however, that it hasn't been fixed and can't be fixed. The teachers. then, should refuse to cooperate. They should quit. That is what other true professionals do. They don't agree to hurt children by assisting with malpractice.
Other Americans manage to find work that doesn't hurt children. Teachers could, too!
Please read my posts #16 and #19.
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