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

[rich]

I've found the articles, many in the NY Review Of Books written by Diane
Ravitch about the state of the American education system to be very
informative

http://dianeravitch.com/articles/

rich




On Mon, Apr 8, 2013 at 10:31 AM, Bekah <bekah0176 at sbcglobal.net> wrote:

> I'm not sure raising salaries alone will do it.  Then we'd have smart
> people going into teaching with no ability to "teach."   I suppose you
> could weed them out at that point - hire them all and let observation and
> test scores tell the story -  test scores alone are stupid though.
>
> Getting the credential with high grades does not equate to being an
> effective teacher.   Being able to teach means being able to keep
> discipline and interest in a classroom of 35  13-year olds.  You don't need
> a whole lot of brain power to do that.    A good teacher needs a bit of
> charisma and energy and authority - s/he needs to know the subject,  to
> love the kids and the subject and get that love of it across.   S/he needs
> a good sensible scope and sequence - something which makes sense to the
> kids as well as to the material.   She needs to be able to go sideways
> beyond the text book - not just above it.  (I chose elementary because I
> wanted to teach ALL the subjects - not just one all day.  I love teaching
> math and reading and social studies and I enjoyed integrating them. I'd
> kind of thought 5th or 6th grade but I got put in Kindergarten and totally
> loved it.)
>
> There was a physics teacher who really totally knew his subject,  but had
> absolutely no teaching skills (college level so discipline was a given).
>  He just couldn't get down to where the students were and teach from there
> - he was usually completely over their heads. He wasn't organized - he
> added to rather than clarified the text.   This happens at the college
> level all the time.
>
> Teaching skills matter most at the lowest elementary levels where the
> responsibility for a child's learning rests primarily on the teacher and
> the available  resources.  Teaching skills matter most for the "slower"
> children.  The teacher needs to "work with" them - starting from where they
> are and taking the next baby step (and doing it over and over for day after
> day).
>
> By college level the students are expected to be far more responsible for
> their own learning - the teacher assigns reading and lectures on the
> material in his own way and speed,   the students understand and retain as
> best they can.  With grad work it's almost entirely on the student.
>
> Bekah
> babbling again -
>
> On Apr 8, 2013, at 3:49 AM, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > Well, if we want to attract the best prospective educators and hold on
> to them, we need to raise salaries. How can an educator in NYC afford to
> live in the city where she teaches?  So salaries were raised.
> >
> >
> > Under the current system of mayoral control in NYC salries have been
> raised, but not enough to attract and ratin the best people. Moreover, the
> loss of job security, collective bargaining power, benefits, and the
> assault on teachers has offset the gains in salaries.
> >
> > The US is an anti-intellectual culture, so the respect given to
> educators in  other nations is not a benefit here.
> >
> > I could never, not could most of the excellent educators I know, work an
> education for 25 years. My hat is off to those who have and those who can.
> >
> > As a professor I was paid less than entry level wall streeters. No, the
> salries are disgraceful. In this nation, where we pay athletes and movie
> stars, banksters and political crooks, millions and billions, where we
> waste billions on wars, we can pay our teachers better and we need to.
> >
> > Off the soapbox now,
> >
> > A
> >
> >
> > On Mon, Apr 8, 2013 at 4:30 AM, Matthew Cissell <macissell at yahoo.es>
> wrote:
> > "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.
> >
> > Also, what do you think of teaching via the "Phonics" method? Had a
> debate re this today.
> >
> > P.
> >
> >
> > On 7 April 2013 21:38, Bekah <bekah0176 at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> > Why are US schools behind much of the world?
> >
> > This is way more complicated than tax-slashers or "accountability
> experts"  or "higher standards"  folks want to think about.
> >
> > Bekah
> >
> > On Apr 7, 2013, at 1:17 AM, Prashant Kumar <
> siva.prashant.kumar at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > > 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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