NP - "What's the question about your question that you dread being asked?

[Matthew Cissell]

"The salaries suck. Raise them and we will see the best and brightest in education." Salaries suck? compared to what? I know people that work in public education and they are not in the poor house, of course neither are they very wealthy. However, it is true that teaching is a profession whose pay has not matched the growth of other professional occupations in the 20th c.

Alice, paying someone that is incompetent or unmotivated more will not change their behaviour. Have you looked at pay scales in the Scandanavian countries? They don't make more than bankers. THe big difference is that the society respects teaching and teaching is seen as something of great value so being a teacher is valued in terms of symbolic capital. There the joke about those "who don't know how teach", doesn't work. Norway and the rest get the best of the graduating class as teachers not because they offer lots of money but because teaching is viewed very differently there. When people in the U.S (and elsewhere) start to value education in itself and not as some means to a lucrative job then you will ahve the socail change that will help educators

As for phonics, it has its place. I use it in my ESL work. That said, to rely on phonics alone is an error. Vygotsky is an interesting addition to the study of language acquisition, check him out. Had he lived longer he would have likely had more influence than Piaget, but that is a speculative comment.

ciao
 mc otis


________________________________
 From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org> 
Sent: Sunday, April 7, 2013 4:03 PM
Subject: Re: NP - "What's the question about your question that you dread being asked?
 

As Dewey sez, "there is no educational value in the abstract," and, by this he means that what works with 5 year old native speakers of English in England may not work with 5 year old native speakers in the United States. We can even say that what works with rich children in the Bronx, NY, USA won't work with poor children in the Bronx, NY, USA. So, if in Finland or Denmark or Norway, often the oranges compared with our apple, children start school at age 7, and this is quite successful, applying this idea to poor children in the Bronx, or even to wealthy children in the Bronx who live in a house and in a neighborhood where English is not the first langauge, would be malpractice. Phonics, as the debates and studies, often with whole language advocates, may be quite appropriate given a particular learning population. Pragmatism, as Dewey stressed in his writings on Education, is that something that doesn't suck in US education. But the workers, that
 is, the pedagogues, are being stripped of their freedom to use what they know works with the pupils they know learn best when the methods they have created for these particular students are used. That said, there are too many weak and poorly prepared teachers in the USA. The salaries suck. Raise them and we will see the best and brightest in education.  



On Sun, Apr 7, 2013 at 8:55 AM, Prashant Kumar <siva.prashant.kumar at gmail.com> wrote:

Interested in your answer. Is it just that the metrics used to measure "accountability", "progress", etc. are coarse averages? I mean, for all your failing schools you're still the intellectual and scientific centre of the world, so you know, something doesn't suck. 
>
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>Also, what do you think of teaching via the "Phonics" method? Had a debate re this today.
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>P.
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>On 7 April 2013 21:38, Bekah <bekah0176 at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
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>Why are US schools behind much of the world?
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>>This is way more complicated than tax-slashers or "accountability experts"  or "higher standards"  folks want to think about.
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>>Bekah
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>>On Apr 7, 2013, at 1:17 AM, Prashant Kumar <siva.prashant.kumar at gmail.com> wrote:
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>>> What question about your field do you dread being asked? Maybe it's a sore point: your field should have an answer (people think you do) but there isn't one yet. Perhaps it's simple to pose but hard to answer. Or it's a question that belies a deep misunderstanding: the best answer is to question the question.
>>>
>>> http://www.edge.org/conversation/whats-the-question-about-your-field-that-you-dread-being-asked
>>>
>>> Various responses there; any p-listers willing to chime in?
>>>
>>> Prashant
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>>
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