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

[alice wellintown]

Yeah, she is great on lots of issues that now confront the educator and
education.


On Mon, Apr 8, 2013 at 10:55 AM, rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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