Replies

Of course it could, because the real problem is the way she was taught in teacher college. These kinds of screwy-logic projects are the food of teacher training at the university level. The liberal profs just eat it up. College-level teacher training is almost completely untenable in a real-life setting.

First-year teaching is very much an on-the-job learning experience and mistakes are part of the trial by fire. Additionally, most young teachers don't have children of their own and lack experience with how their teaching affects the children, their parents and the district's community. All they see is a clever idea to portray a concept.

I made quite a number of cringe-worthy errors my first year. Fortunately, they didn't get out into the public. I had a friend a couple of years behind me tell me of a project he was going to do with his class. I was shocked and said he couldn't do it the way he envisioned. It involved getting input from BOTH parents of each student or get an F on the project. I said he would be surprised to learn that perhaps half of his students wouldn't have access to both parents and he would be issuing a grade based on the students' circumstances rather than learning effort. His noble goal was to try to open communication between the students and their parents, but the reality was the assignment was punitive and discriminatory.