Posted on 11/27/2006 7:04:44 AM PST by meandog
Schools With Good Teachers Are Best-Suited to Shape Young Minds
There's nothing like having the right person with the right experience, skills and tools to accomplish a specific task. Certain jobs are best left to the pros, such as, formal education.
There are few homeowners who can tackle every aspect of home repair. A few of us might know carpentry, plumbing and, let’s say, cementing. Others may know about electrical work, tiling and roofing. But hardly anyone can do it all.
Same goes for cars. Not many people have the skills and knowledge to perform all repairs on the family car. Even if they do, they probably don’t own the proper tools. Heck, some people have their hands full just knowing how to drive.
So, why would some parents assume they know enough about every academic subject to home-school their children? You would think that they might leave this -- the shaping of their children’s minds, careers, and futures -- to trained professionals. That is, to those who have worked steadily at their profession for 10, 20, 30 years! Teachers!
Experienced Pros
There’s nothing like having the right person with the right experience, skills and tools to accomplish a specific task. Whether it is window-washing, bricklaying or designing a space station. Certain jobs are best left to the pros. Formal education is one of those jobs.
Of course there are circumstances that might make it necessary for parents to teach their children at home. For example, if the child is severely handicapped and cannot be transported safely to a school, or is bedridden with a serious disease, or lives in such a remote area that attending a public school is near impossible.
Well-Meaning Amateurs
The number of parents who could easily send their children to public school but opt for home-schooling instead is on the increase. Several organizations have popped up on the Web to serve these wannabe teachers. These organizations are even running ads on prime time television. After viewing one advertisement, I searched a home school Web site. This site contains some statements that REALLY irritate me!
“It’s not as difficult as it looks.”
The “it” is meant to be “teaching.” Let’s face it, teaching children is difficult even for experienced professionals. Wannabes have no idea.
“What about socialization? Forget about it!”
Forget about interacting with others? Are they nuts? Socialization is an important component of getting along in life. You cannot teach it. Children should have the opportunity to interact with others their own age. Without allowing their children to mingle, trade ideas and thoughts with others, these parents are creating social misfits.
If this Web site encouraged home-schooled children to join after-school clubs at the local school, or participate in sports or other community activities, then I might feel different. Maine state laws, for example, require local school districts to allow home-schooled students to participate in their athletic programs. For this Web site to declare, “forget about it,” is bad advice.
When I worked for Wal-Mart more than 20 years ago, Sam Walton once told me: “I can teach Wal-Mart associates how to use a computer, calculator, and how to operate like retailers. But I can’t teach them how to be a teammate when they have never been part of any team.”
“Visit our online bookstore.”
Buying a history, science or math book does not mean an adult can automatically instruct others about the book’s content.
Gullible Parents
Another Web site asks for donations and posts newspaper articles pertaining to problems occurring in public schools.
It’s obvious to me that these organizations are in it for the money. They are involved in the education of children mostly in the hope of profiting at the hands of well-meaning but gullible parents.
This includes parents who home-school their children for reasons that may be linked to religious convictions. One Web site that I visited stated that the best way to combat our nation’s “ungodly” public schools was to remove students from them and teach them at home or at a Christian school.
I’m certainly not opposed to religious schools, or to anyone standing up for what they believe in. I admire anyone who has the strength to stand up against the majority. But in this case, pulling children out of a school is not the best way to fight the laws that govern our education system. No battle has ever been won by retreating!
No Training
Don’t most parents have a tough enough job teaching their children social, disciplinary and behavioral skills? They would be wise to help their children and themselves by leaving the responsibility of teaching math, science, art, writing, history, geography and other subjects to those who are knowledgeable, trained and motivated to do the best job possible.
(Dave Arnold, a member of the Illinois Education Association, is head custodian at Brownstown Elementary School in Southern Illinois.)
Why mock him? He obviously got a quality education from professional teachers, suiting him for an exciting and intellectual career in sanitation management.
Yeah, well Walter Williams is a nincompoop! We put our butts on the line every day to teach your snotty-nose little monsters to be good citizens, pay taxes, and to lead some sort of productive lives. I have suffered a broken finger and many bloody noses breaking up the fights of the offspring you and your ilk produce. I have counseled many a pregnant teen about staying in school, confiscated many little bags of a certain South American agricultural product, and actually removed weapons (including a 7-inch knife) from a student...and, guess what, I've done it with no help from you ungrateful parents, thank you very much!
In fact, most of the time all we get from you parents is threats and mountains of criticism (just like what you see on this thread).
I've also helped many students into college which I am proud very of doing...American teaching is the hardest, most underpaid, profession in the world. If you don't believe me, try it--I'm willing to bet a meager teacher's paycheck against your week's windfall profit salary that you'll find it's not for whimps (especially the homeschooled parental ones!).
In most countries teachers are revered along the same lines as "priest," or "soldier," or "doctor," but, here, they are ridiculed and compared to "janitors" because a school custodian thought enough about education quality to write the article. Well, I could care less about your kids homeschool them all the way through college if you want only, when they cannot read, don't blame us!
thank you!
...and post #502 goes double for you ##@*%$ guys!
I really don't get it. Half your posts are extolling all the great things about public schools, the other half make it sound like a war zone. I sure as hell won't ever send a kid of mine into a mess like you described in 502.
Hey meandog, I'm with you on this!
The fact that a lot of teachers are dolts doesn't mean every teacher is a dolt.
I'm a high school sub teacher about 6-10 times per year teaching science and math. I have a couple of teacher friends who are smart and conservative also. I'm glad to hear that another FReeper is a teacher. If we had more conservatives teaching in schools, many of the problems there would wither.
The fact remains that most professional teachers are not bright, which explains why most of them are die-hard goofy libs.
Use your power to set them straight. With puppy dog innocence I will drop a thought bomb on the teachers during lunch whenever I can, such as simply asking "What do you think the terrorists would do if we left Iraq, would they come here instead?" Then whatever lib-crap they spew, I come back with "Are you SUUUURE?, and would you bet your life on that?"
In other countries teachers actually teach and turn out students who beat the pants off our students in international competitions. The American education establishment turns out kids who are barely literate and then has the temerity to demand respect ... for what ?
Your attitude on this entire thread exemplifies what many of us have experienced from the public education establishment in this country - no accountability, protect the institution even as it fails, and blame parents first and lack of funding second.
BTW, most homeschooled parents aren't in the "windfall profit salary" category - we just care about what our kids are being taught. We don't want our children in the learning atmosphere that you keep raging about. We want the best for our kids.....and most public schools/teachers fall very short of what's best.
Though not war zones, I'm not trying to pass them all off as academic Edens either...the point is, they could be a lot better but only WITH THE HELP OF CARING PARENTS. Get involved with you local school to make it better!
I did try it. My company had a program where they paid an engineer to work at an elementary school in a school in the bad part of town.
I ended up hating it. It was funny because the teachers think of engineering as not a people friendly job, and that is what I hated the most about teaching. In engineering, I was part of a team of other engineers. I like working with a team.
In teaching you are one person in there. If you like being in charge, you'll like teaching.
A couple of other observations. Engineers definitely work harder than teachers. Most of my fellow engineers worked many late nights and on weekends. We also did not have much time off (3 weeks sick/vacation days off for the entire year, and only a few holidays off). Engineering is academically also very hard. Each project is different. You are constantly having to teach yourself new things. It is constantly evolving, and it is very difficult to stay on top of things. Also, the products that my company (a defense company produced) could not fail. If they failed, people's lives were at stake.
Another observation was that the good teachers really made the difference in the classroom. Some of the teachers were just great, and some of the teachers were just lousy. I had one teacher that would eat in front of her kids and yell at them all of the time. When I was in the classroom, she sat around and did nothing. The other teachers helped out with discipline or explaining things to kids that didn't get what I was doing. (I helped in the computer lab.) Kids wanted to do well with the good teachers, and they loved them.
I also think that the first few years of teaching are the hardest because you have to come up with lessons plans. However, these days with the internet that is much easier.
Bad parents and bad kids definitely make teaching harder. No two ways about it.
When my kids have been in the public school, I actually liked my kids teachers. I did not like the policies of the administrators from principals up to the superintendent. I also did not like the bad kids and bad parents. The problems with the administration and the bad kids are the main reason two of my kids are no longer in public school.
I don't think anyone here does think all teachers are dolts. We've all come across those teachers who we wish would be teaching all our kids' classes. Meandog has a hair up his butt and sees a declining enrollment as homeschooling and charter schools increase in numbers as a threat to his way of life (which of course it is).
However, he spews all kinds of garbage such as homeschoolers turn out illiterates and social misfits, and then declines to back up any of his statements with references. I've variously asked him on this thread to provide sources, his level of educational competence and so on and have had absolutely zero response. If you assign a kid a term paper and they don't list sources, do you give them a good grade ?
The custodian is probably the best educated and literate person at that institution. They wouldn't dare let the teachers write the article. It would expose their incompetence.
I'm not going to invest large chunks of my life in trying to prop up a failed paradigm. Even if I wanted to do so, it wouldn't be wise.
Having seen public health care (as practiced in Canada and the UK) and public housing (as practiced here in the US), I really don't care to participate in public education, thanks. It's just a bad idea.
I don't think it will ever go away entirely; but it's possible that at some point in the future it'll be the educational choice of last resort, for those who are out of options. The sooner we get there as a nation, the better off we'll be.
Mind you, this isn't the fault of the professionals in the system; this is the fault of the system itself. It just doesn't work very well.
You're cherry picking your own ideal group for comparison. The "parental involvement" indicates the parents are having to compensate for what the schools can't accomplish alone. Try comparing public school students without parental involvement to home schooled students so you don't have a mixed paradigm.
She is really enjoying her classes, the material and the teachers, too.
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