Posted on 02/26/2020 9:35:22 AM PST by Kaslin
See #32. Teachers unions have no affect on curriculum.
No, they are not. The faults in education lie solely with county, state, and Federal curriculum and pedagogy designers. They are influenced strongly by education departments at the universities. If you want to help finding a solution, shift your fire.
Zinn and Ayers might possibly have inflicted more damage on this country than any other two people who were not elected.
No, it is the people who establish the curriculum and the rules for presenting that material. Change your aim to the administrators at county, state, and Federal levels. Those administrators are listening to the education departments of universities.
My grandpa WAS in politics. A high-ranking Democrat party official who was a pretty significant player at the local level.
Privately he agreed with your grandpa.
He eventually left the party and voted for Reagan in 1980.
“Schools were bad back in the 1890s, when I walked uphill....”
> There is a MAJOR disconnect between the administrators of public education and the real world. <
I couldn’t agree more. Here’s an old saying that I just made up: Engineers try something new because it works. Schools try something new because it’s different.
Example: Awhile back some idiot professor at some university somewhere decided that students need a full day to think problems over. So we were told to not correct any mistakes when they were made. We had to wait a day.
Can you imagine how insane that was! If a student in my physics class said, say, E=mc cubed, I was just supposed to write that equation on the board as if it were correct, then correct it on the following day.
That would have lead to intense confusion in the class. So I refused to do it. Luckily I wasn’t fired before the school board decided to drop the whole idea.
I saw that method summed up nicely here on Free Republic: They are trying to create knowledge by pooling ignorance.
The universities share a big part of the blame. University of Minnesota college of education has the dogma that if a student there has the view that a kid in any kind of inner city etc whatever can achieve academically, the student will NOT get a degree from the University of Minnesota.
Can you say institutionalized liberal racism? This is the kind of crap that gets a rant from Thomas Sowell.
My daughter is deaf in her left ear due to a nerve damage she got when she came down with Meningitis when she was seven month old. She had the kind that affects the lining of the brain. She was a very sick child, but she had a good doctor. When she went to school we always requested that she be allowed to sit close to the teacher and that the teacher talk to her from the right. Later on when she went to high school the kids didn’t like it that she was always sitting up front close to the teacher’s desk. So she ended up hating school. She does have trouble now hearing with her right ear and requires a hearing aid, especially when she is on her phone.
Take a look at this: Georgia Principles of Computer Science
Find the computer science in there. It is a lot of social sciences and plenty of gibberish as well. That is the standards document for teaching the second computer course in high school.
The leading to confusion I think is intentional. Make the students feel stupid.
Deliberate confusion I also see in common core math. To get to the right answer one must also go through the right gyrations. The meaningless gyrations turn out to be more important.
Are people on the school boards idiots?
> Are people on the school boards idiots? <
That’s a good question. At a minimum, they are easily swayed by liberal arguments. Do it for the children!
Anyway, I taught for many years with a certain lady. She taught a trades course. She was very practical, and very realistic.
Well, she got elected to the school board after she retired. I was initially happy to hear that. But now she is a reliable vote with the liberal majority there. She votes for the dumbest of things.
I’ve thought about calling her to try to change her mind. But that would probably just cause both of our blood pressures to spike.
I guess they have the “script” so people who aren’t qualified to teach physics can teach physics.
I find that very hard to believe. Unions get their hands into everything. I know this first hand by being in a trade Union at one time.
> I guess they have the “script” so people who aren’t qualified to teach physics can teach physics. <
I’m still scratching my head on why they felt a script was so necessary. In my state anyway, you’ve got to pass a certification test to teach physics. So you’ve really have to know a lot of physics.
If I had to guess, I’d guess it’s another way to micromanage. The beaurocrats just can’t help themselves. They know everything. The folks in the trenches know nothing.
People who are employed in Public Sector (taxpayer funded) jobs should NOT be allowed or permitted to belong to any Labor Union at all. There is nothing that can be said that will change my thinking on this matter.
I don’t know about the trade unions. But before becoming a teacher, I worked for a number of years in a union steel mill. The union constantly whined about work conditions, pay, etc. But they never once tried to interfere with how the steel was actually being made.
I saw the same thing with teachers unions. Sometimes at a union meeting a teacher would complain about the curriculum. Sometimes they would complain that the curriculum was not liberal enough! The union president would always shut down those complaints, fast.
It’s none of our business, he’d say.
This is what I have seen.
Unions have strong connections to the university Ed departments. Teachers either striking or threatening to strike, the unions will get Ed students to demonstrate & do walkouts at universities\colleges in support. Someone in state legislature sponsor a bill to allow say retired engineers or scientists to teach STEM in jr high\high school. Ed unions immediately put pressure on the legislature & university\college Ed Department Educrats help by appearing in from of committees with “oh-so-learned” lectures on why is a bad idea. Also they do PSAs on the radio & TV on why its a bad idea.
Teachers unions may not care one whit about the curriculum but they’re ready to fight tooth and nail to protect the teaching union rice bowl whenever the educrat establishment status quo is threatened. They both share the same space.
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