(np) merit pay

[alice wellintown]

About all this I feel like Fat Charlie the Archangel,  who sloped into
the room among,  or is it amongst, who knows?  school children and
William Butler Yeats and said, "I have no opinion about this / And I
have no opinion about that  . . .I read Charles Dickens, Hard Times,
Chapter 2, Murdering the Innocents . .  and I put on Zappa and wonder
how I ever ended up working in this gasoline alley.  Maybe I read too
much of the night and went south in the winter.

So, Mr. M'Choakumchild began in his best manner. He and some one
hundred and forty other schoolmasters, had been lately turned at the
same time, in the same factory, on the same principles, like so many
pianoforte legs. He had been put through an immense variety of paces,
and had answered volumes of headbreaking questions. Orthography,
etymology, syntax, and prosody, biography, astronomy, geography, and
general cosmography, the sciences of compound proportion, algebra,
land-surveying and leveling, vocal music, and drawing from models,
were all at the ends of his ten chilled fingers. He had worked his
stony way into Her Majesty's most Honourable Privy Council's Schedule
B, and had taken the bloom off the higher branches of mathematics and
physical science, French, German, Latin, and Greek. He knew all about
all the Water Sheds of all the world (whatever they are), and all the
histories of all the peoples, and all the names of all the rivers and
mountains, and all the productions, manners, and customs of all the
countries, and all their boundaries and bearings on the two and thirty
points of the compass. Ah, rather overdone, Mr. M'Choakumchild. If he
had only leamt a little less, how infinitely better he might have
taught much more!

When getting my nose in a book
Cured most things short of school,
It was worth ruining my eyes
To know I could still keep cool,
And deal out the old right hook
To dirty dogs twice my size.

Later, with inch-thick specs,
Evil was just my lark:
Me and my coat and fangs
Had ripping times in the dark.
The women I clubbed with sex!
I broke them up like meringues.

Don't read much now: the dude
Who lets the girl down before
The hero arrives, the chap
Who's yellow and keeps the store
Seem far too familiar. Get stewed:
Books are a load of crap.




On Thu, Apr 15, 2010 at 9:30 PM, Michael Bailey
<michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com> wrote:
> right, that's why paying the kids is a better idea
>
> i'm surprised it hasn't been tried
>
> if you think about it, school IS work for kids, and in our hightech
> blah blah society
> it's for everyone's benefit that they are there and their success does
> affect other sectors
>
>
> On Thu, Apr 15, 2010 at 2:05 PM, Bekah <bekah0176 at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
>> Another issue -  when teachers are paid on the basis of how well their kids
>> do on tests,  the teaching is pretty much "to the test"  ONLY!   No art, PE,
>>  music,  etc.  and those are the things which keep some kids in school.
>> Also,  when teachers are paid by test score the pressure in the classroom
>> goes way up -  the kids are more scared than eager learners.   Pressure
>> during test weeks (and the week before) is bad now - if my pay were based on
>> it I'm not sure I could keep my issues out of the classroom.   There are
>> teachers now who do way too much yelling and pushing and pushing and
>> yelling.   (It doesn't work - it only scares the kids.)
>>
>>  I see more stress symptoms in the kids,  like nail biting,  aggressive
>> behavior,  etc,   than in years past.    I'm a good teacher with lots and
>> lots of experience (I could retire any time).   I agree with the increased
>>  standards but that alone does not ensure that kids achieve.   In California
>> it's now about higher standards with less money - no aids, larger class
>> sizes,  furloughs,  longer but fewer days.  (And what do you do with longer
>> days?  The kids are tired already -  it's about the energy savings - $$$ -
>>  of fewer days.)
>>
>> Bekah
>> whose class planted sunflowers yesterday - although it's not in the
>> "standards"  (lol)
>>
>>
>>
>> On Apr 15, 2010, at 6:46 AM, Keith wrote:
>>
>>> The folks in California setting up the statistics to analyze the
>>> significance of test scores and teacher merit should also be paid based on
>>> their merit. They wouldn't get a dime. As Bekah points out they don't
>>> understand the basics when it comes to controlling all the relevant
>>> variables.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>