not on the test

[ken k]

Any teachers out there might find this amusing yet sad at the same time....

www.notonthetest.com

kenk

[bearphonium]

All too true. I know that locally, teaching has become more about behavior management than education, and that as funding becomes more scarce, and class size gets larger, behavior management gets more difficult.

I also believe that the early exposure to video entertainment changes the way the brain is wired, and that what worked for an education model in the last century is not going to work now for that reason (among others; I'll stick to this one for now.) Historically, the mission of school was to train farm kids to become industrial working adults. There is as big a change in what the workforce will be doing in 15 years now as there was then, and a substantially changed cultural environment as well.

Will that be on the test?

Ally"who is really glad she isn't a teacher" House

[iiipopes]

My son is currently in MAP testing. I bluntly told him the test measures the quality of the teaching (if it measures anything at all) and nothing about what or how he is learning. So he is not uptight about it. Of course, he is doing well anyway, probably because he's one of the few not uptight about it.

He does homework. Under our supervision. He does Scouts, which he crosses over from Webelos to Boy Scouts next February. He is a member of the youth choir at church, which in the English tradition sing the 9:00 service, hymns, service music, anthem and all, every Sunday, just like the adult choir does at 11:00.

Did I say he does well in school?!

His K teacher was alright. His 1st & 3rd teachers were very good. His 2nd teacher was lousy, and tried to keep everyone within the 1/2 standard deviation with no room for expression in their work, and his current 4th teacher is too young and inexperienced to know anything different from the learn by rote to meet the test. So as you can imagine, my wife and I are very active with helping him with the broader perspective of his homework; we're registered leaders in his Pack; and, well, I quit my gig as lead guitar at another service so I could be in the congregation full time with him at his 9:00 choir.

I can assure you that his teachers and supervisors do not have any problem with our position on discipline, as we know all boys need it, and, at least in front of our son, we support their actions. If we disagree with anything, we take it up in private discussion so as to not have anything interpreted as anything but a united front about what we all reasonably expect of him.

Tom Chapin is right on the mark.

Now, we're not so Machivellian as the classic, "If you require discipline at school, you're going to get it again at home," because that can be too much depending on the context.

But I agree, especially after helping to lead and manage a Cub Scout Pack: the quality of parenting runs the entire range from completely unstructured and permissive, to way over structured, and it is difficult to find good, loving, positive reinforcement, progressive, correcting as necessary, parenting.

[Rick Denney]

The point of education isn't to make farm kids industrial workers. That may have been one objective. But the objective that is little understood but truly justified in our system is to take kids who know only about their family (substitute "tribe" if you wish) and teach them about the rest of the world, so that they can be responsible voters in a democracy.

That requires history (including what we used to call "civics"), mathematics, geography, science, language, and very little else. I include music in with language, because it teaches the same basic skills from a different (and useful) direction. But some music educators undermine the academic credentials of teaching music by turning it into a sport where the focus is on contesting.

Much of the teaching has not been driven by this simple purpose, but rather by two purposes: Using education to right perceived or real social wrongs, and creating a specialty professional class for teachers. The teacher unions have been focused on the second of these objectives, by insisting that the act of teaching is more important than the subject being taught. The results of that shift in objective has been disastrous for the purpose of students learning simple facts that are the building blocks of interpretation.

The first objective has been more insidious. That has driven those forces that prevent substandard students from being declared such, and that has prevented (quite purposefully in many cases) the achievement of excellence by students who posses the potential. The objective has been to prevent anyone escaping school in a better state than anyone else, especially if they are not in a favored sub-group. This philosophy has been driven by those who studied education rather than the subjects they teach, and have given us amateur philosophy and social engineering instead of professional English, geography, math, and history. I was seeing that as a student when I was in high school over 30 years ago, and it has gotten much worse since then.

Video games are an easy target, but I see them as a symptom rather than a disease. Parents do not get off free in the problems of education. In fact, they are at the root of many of the problems, and certainly stood by while the teacher unions created an implacable but ineffective Education Establishment. All too often, their objective was that the schools would keep their kids our of their hair while they worked, and otherwise take care of their discipline duties for them. And then when the schools (mainly the teachers) attempt to do this, the parents complain that the students are angels and run screaming to the principals, who as a lot seem to me spineless and unprincipled. So, the teachers that do try to maintain order in their classrooms are undermined at every turn and find something else to do with their time, leaving the classrooms to those who buy into the behavioral teachings of the Education Establishment.

I've seen truly terrible teaching. But I've seen just as much terrible parenting. The good parents seem to find the good teachers, either by supplementing the work of bad teachers or by actively evaluating the teachers and steering their kids into the classrooms of those they prefer (as my parents did). In some cases, good parents have to take bigger steps, such as moving to a place that has better schools or teaching their kids at home.

There. That's my homily on education for the year.

Rick "a disinterested observer" Denney

[BopEuph]

The last two posts remind me of something an old roommate went through. She was a substitute teacher in Jacksonville before she was just recently hired full-time. She took an assignment about a year ago where she was the sub for a few weeks.

While there, she noticed one of her students was not doing so well, and had a major problem with reading (this was middle school). She called a conference with the student's mom to let her know the situation.

"Well, what are you going to do about it?" asked the MOTHER.

My roommate was a little more than surprised, and told her the problem would much more easily be solved if she would spend some time each day with her kid and help him out.

This parent was completely offended, and said, "that's not my job, YOU'RE the one paid to teach my kid!" and stormed out the room.

It's sad to think that this is most likely a common occurrence with the way we think about education. That, along WITH the continued poor efforts of the government getting involved with making laws on education while taking money away, shows that America will be truly a stupid place to live. It never made sense to me that a school not doing well will lose money. Does that seem like it will help the situation if teachers need to be fired and books can't be bought because they can't be afforded?

I can see it now, in The Holy Grail, with Camelot, only it's America:

"Knights, I bid you welcome to your new home. Let us ride to America!"

-Much singing and dancing-

"Eh, on second thought, let's not go to America. It is a stupid place."

Nick

[Biggs]

There. That's my homily on education for the year.

Dead on, in my eyes. Not exactly what I would have predicted you to say (just guesswork, as I can't claim to know you), but crystal clear and, again, accurate.

[TubaRay]

I could probably write a 20 page response to Rick's above post. Instead, I'll summarize my response: I COMPLETELY AGREE!

[bearphonium]

Well, The Resident Genius said it way more eloquently than I did, I must say. I see the aft end of parents who don't parent quite a bit, and have a hard time with someone who says "that's the school's job" when it comes to discipline.

My comment about the video games was simply that any exposure to visual stimulus in those formative years (this is TV, games, movies, what have you) changes the way the brain processes information, irrespective of content, and creates a need for more intense visual stimulus than a blackboard as an education tool. I have also seen pics of brain scans of kids who spend an hour playing the more violent video games and then are trying to perform any type of compex thinking task compared with those who played music for the same time period, and the difference in the amount of activity in the pre-frontal cortex is astounding. Check out some of Col. Dave Grossman's stuff on killology dot com with respect to school violence--he's done a tremendous amount of research on it.

[iiipopes]

Rick said in general terms what I was trying to express with my personal situation. Thanks.

Oh -- my paternal grandmother was a high school English teacher, and also had an MS in counseling, and my maternal great-grandfather taught a one-room school. They would both be appalled at what goes on today.

My cousin (another descendent of my great-grandfather) is a teacher and her husband is an assistant superintendent at my son's school. They get an ear full from me occasionally, as well as the school board. I'm not shy about addressing them about larger issues, such as the federal access to boy scouts act and telling them if they deny recruiting efforts (which they did last year, telling the district Scout executive basically that he was persona non gratia) I showed them how the Dept of Education can pull their federal funding. The president of the school board was not pleased. The superintendent turned as red as a beet. We got our name lists and recruitment scheduling coordinated through my cousin's husband after that.

The purpose of relating this post: if it has to do with your child, keep it to your teacher and principal first. If it is something that is a systemic issue, your tax dollars pay their salaries and build the buildings and supply the class rooms. Show up and tell them you don't like how they're spending your money, and since this is a school, be prepared with a good presentation and solid authority and references for your position. They will deal with it, because most school boards are ordinary people who actually are trying to do a good job, but a lot of times get snowed by the administrators as to exactly what is going on and what the true state of affairs is.

[MaryAnn]

The last two posts remind me of something an old roommate went through. She was a substitute teacher in Jacksonville before she was just recently hired full-time. She took an assignment about a year ago where she was the sub for a few weeks.

While there, she noticed one of her students was not doing so well, and had a major problem with reading (this was middle school). She called a conference with the student's mom to let her know the situation.

"Well, what are you going to do about it?" asked the MOTHER.

My roommate was a little more than surprised, and told her the problem would much more easily be solved if she would spend some time each day with her kid and help him out.

This parent was completely offended, and said, "that's not my job, YOU'RE the one paid to teach my kid!" and stormed out the room.

Nick

I bet that the mother was herself illiterate and did not want to let on that she was completely unable to help the kid. Might have been dyslexic or a number of other things, and the familial pattern (which is "inherited" like other behavior patterns are "inherited") was to act the way she did.

MA

[SplatterTone]

This is excellent.
http://tinyurl.com/3q9phw