teachers Options

[brooklyneast05]

should we be able to fire teachers who have failing classes? who seem to suck at teaching? should we pay them less? should teachers with passing classes get paid more?

[mipadi]

Teachers are an easy scapegoat, but there are so many reasons why a class as a whole may do badly that you can't always blame the teacher directly. My parents were both teachers, and I've found that people have a very idealized view of teaching; they view it as an "easy" job with short days and long summer breaks. But depending on the school, it's harder than it seems. My dad worked hard, but he also worked in an impoverished school district with students whose parents didn't care that much about education. In such a setting, it's hard to succeed. Parent involvement in the educational process is, in fact, a very important part of education that is often overlooked.

At the same time, if a teacher is consistently doing a bad job, then that should probably be taken into account.

[brooklyneast05]

i'm one of those people who think the respect given to the teaching profession is overblown as a whole. i think in general they mostly suck and a good number are more like baby sitters than teachers. i don't think most teachers really TEACH how to learn. (whether this is because they are sucky teachers or whether this is because how our education system is set up is debatable though) i do often subscribe to that whole view about how they get summers off, a ridiculous amount of holiday vacation, get off work earlier often, can't get fired for sucking at their job, etc.

i agree about the failing class thing though, there is a lot of reasons and i don't think that's a good enough indicator to decide how good a teacher is.

i've been arguing about this a lot lately it seems. i get a lot of my views from my mom, who is a teacher. my girlfriend is getting a teaching degree and we argue all the time over the importance of teachers. she says they are important. i say in general teachers aren't important unless they are good teachers. the good teachers i had were important to my life, and they taught me how to want to learn more and how to go about learning more. the rest were disposable and i probably learned more from the book than i did from them. they were just there to make sure we didn't shank each other.


i'm interested though in how people think our education system could be improved or how we could go about making our teachers better or more effective

[mipadi]

i'm one of those people who think the respect given to the teaching profession is overblown as a whole. i think in general they mostly suck and a good number are more like baby sitters than teachers. i don't think most teachers really TEACH how to learn. (whether this is because they are sucky teachers or whether this is because how our education system is set up is debatable though)

I think that's more a failing of the educational system as a whole, rather than the failing of some teachers. Teachers actually have surprisingly little control over their own curricula (especially since the whole No Child Left Behind debacle). They're more or less told exactly what to teach; sure, they can plan which day to do it, but the material as a whole is dictated by "more important people". And I don't think the educational system is set up to encourage real intellectual growth or inquiry; it's more or less set up to indoctrinate students to be good consumers who can work at boring, mundane, uncreative jobs for hours on end every day. More importantly, public schooling is a necessity in industrialized nations where mom and dad are going to be at work all day -- it is, in fact, a glorified baby-sitting service. Then again, I've also been told I'm a cynic, so take that assessment with a grain of salt.

Of course, a lot of teachers just plain suck, too. I went to a fairly good university, and I must admit that I found most of the education students at my school to be dull, uninspired, and sometimes downright stupid individuals, too. I think there are a lot of people attracted to the profession not out of a desire to enrich, but because of long vacations, good benefits, and so forth.

[brooklyneast05]

yeah my girlfriends argument is always about how teachers are forced to teach what they teach. i agree that has a big part in it, i really do, but...i don't know. i always think about my good teachers, and i feel like they were good not because of what exactly they were teaching, but just how they taught it. i had this chemistry teacher who was so good and so completely in love with what he was doing that that alone made me decide to take extra science classes that i didn't even need to take. that to me is what it's all about.

i'm cynical too so i pretty much completely agree with the fact that our education system doesn't encourage real intellectual growth or inquiry. it's more like memorization of facts that aren't really that important. i can't count the number of terrible boring history classes i've had where we memorize this and that but we never make the real connections. if you can't connect events in history and see why exactly it is that they mattered, then it seems like a complete waste of time. who cares when some one invaded some country. that's not even half as important as why they did or what happened as a consequence of it. same shit with math. math always struck me as completely pointless. i was alright at it, i worked the problems, i got the answers, but then i was like so what? who cares about this answer, what does it mean, etc. no one ever told me why i was doing it or what the point was. i think math could have been something i was really interested in if i ever had a class that taught me more about the application of it than just how to work the problems. my physics classes were as close as i got to feeling like there was actually a point to working the problem.

i feel the same way about education students. some are good. i'm clearly biased, but i think my girlfriend is going to be a really good teacher. she seems in love with what she's studying and she studies even when she doesn't have to be studying because she just likes english and literature that much. most people i meet though are those boring people. i think most of them just view teaching as a fall back career. they couldn't really be an artist, or a historian, or a writer, or whatever else, so instead they just settled with teaching it and getting a lot of breaks and job security.

[mipadi]

The bigger issue that you seem to be touching on is passion. Your chemistry teacher was probably inspiring not only because he was a good teacher, but because he really enjoyed the subject as well. My ninth grade English teacher had the same zeal. Unfortunately, there aren't enough people who are both passionate and good at teaching to fill all positions. But, of course, I'm digressing a bit from the point of your initial post.

As for math, well, don't even get me started on that. The way we teach math in schools is abysmal. Math is so taught in such a utilitarian way that the "fun" and creativity of "real" math is completely driven from the curriculum. Furthermore, so many teachers are "afraid" of math and don't trust themselves to teach it. Math is only really cool once you get into college. But again, I digress.

[brooklyneast05]

feel free to digress all you want, in any of these topics, i'm just trying to get people to reply with something.


yeah passion is the word for i guess what i think is lacking in most teachers, but that's true that there just isn't enough to go around. i'm probably lucky to have even a handful of teachers who i feel like have had that. 90% of my teachers were forgettable.


yeah math doesn't seem creative or fun at all to me, and i blame that on my first 12 years of school. it was sorta just a bunch of rules and strict process and we did it over and over and over and over again. they sucked all the life out of it. they suck the life out of a ton of subjects and then wonder why students aren't interested.

[mipadi]

Well, passion seems to be that X-factor that makes a person go from ordinary to extraordinary. And if you think about it, passion for one's job is a problem in most areas; it's not endemic to teaching. How many times do you find a passionate Wal-Mart employee, or a passionate waitress? Maybe those are bad examples, but think of your favorite café: a passionate barista can make your café visit go from mundane to awesome.

The problem, of course, is that most professions aren't shaping the minds and lives of our cherished children. It also doesn't really matter if your waitress doesn't give a shit about her job, because it won't really affect your life in the long run, but a teacher who lacks passion -- or, more usually, a string of teachers who lack passion -- do affect a child's affinity for certain subjects.

I don't know. It's a tough problem. I think the solution is not relying on schools to enrich children so much. I was generally bored in school growing up, but my parents and a few select teachers really encouraged me to explore different interests.

[fire]

Is there a plan between both of you to imporve cB with more intellectually stimulating topics? If so I support this movement.

I believe if teachers arent performing they should be assessed, if a teacher is not helping or even worse hindering those they teach then it should be noted and taken care of. Right now in Australia there is government run website that asseses and compares each school academically. This can been seen as positive however this may in the future dictate federal funding to public schools in the future, and those not performing may receive less money due to performance.

yyeeeeeeeeah, this is not my area *steps out*

[Blyat]

Yes,
Economically the "Bad teachers" get paid less (especially if they are newcomers) And a lot of them (schoolboard) encourage the good teachers to retire early because the longer-working-years teachers start to get paid more.

Hopefully it makes sense
My teacher explained this to us, Because he is an amazing teacher and he gets offered the early retirement every year cause he also gets paid a lot more than the new teachers, and the ones who are also shit.

[Tomates]

Yes,
Economically the "Bad teachers" get paid less (especially if they are newcomers) And a lot of them (schoolboard) encourage the good teachers to retire early because the longer-working-years teachers start to get paid more.

Hopefully it makes sense
My teacher explained this to us, Because he is an amazing teacher and he gets offered the early retirement every year cause he also gets paid a lot more than the new teachers, and the ones who are also shit.

Also, to add on to her statement, there was a really good chemistry teacher who could only work for a year. Then after that year that job was fought between her and another soon-to-be teacher. The chemistry teacher who taught the year beforehand didn't get the job because she had a higher degree than the other teacher. That means the school would have to pay her more.

[fixtatik]

I really think it does have a lot to do with the quality of teachers. American educational practices have a tendency to lean teachers this way or that, but in general, teachers really do have a lot of control over how they teach.

A couple examples:

My AP biology teacher was horrific. Everything she "taught" us was irrelevant to the subject at hand. There was a time she spent the entire period trying to convince us that she saved a maternity ward filled with babies that all happened to have a very rare disease. The next time we met, she tried it again. After that, she claimed to have invented milk (no joke), and that she got a doctored fired from his job because he recommended her husband start eating organic foods instead of McDonald's. On top of her idiotic anecdotes, if any of us were having trouble with an assignment and asked for a little push in the right direction, she would shoo us off with a brush of her hand claiming, "It's not my job to tell you how to do it."

On the other hand, there were two math teachers (a father and son) who were excellent. They also told little stories while they taught, but they were short (under a minute long) and they related to the day's lesson. If someone needed help, they would drop everything until a student understood perfectly.

The rest were mid-line, decent teachers. They cared enough to help out, but no others were on the spectrum ends like the biology and math teachers.

Anyway, my point is that yes, I absolutely believe lousy teachers should be removed from their positions. My biology class taught each other outside of school so we wouldn't bomb the exam. She was the type of *insert repulsive word* who would complain about her toes hurting, then sit behind her desk picking at her fingernails for the rest of the period without giving us anything to do. She also stole my pen. It was a nice pen.

[kryogenix]

You should be able to fire anyone for any reason.

[heyo-captain-jac...]

I remember my Sophomore year I had a history teacher that just let us do pretty much whatever we wanted. All we had to do was listen to his lectures (literally five minutes of talking) and I still managed to learn more about history in his class than any other class.

[tokyo-rose]

As for math, well, don't even get me started on that. The way we teach math in schools is abysmal. Math is so taught in such a utilitarian way that the "fun" and creativity of "real" math is completely driven from the curriculum. Furthermore, so many teachers are "afraid" of math and don't trust themselves to teach it. Math is only really cool once you get into college. But again, I digress.

I agree. Statistics is the only kind of math that I actually enjoyed and didn't fail at learning and understanding. I still don't get trigonometry and precalculus, partly because I didn't see the point in those kinds of math and partly because I'm just bad at math.

Math education in the US is sad. I read on this blog that South Korean students are already doing precalculus in the sixth grade, whereas American students don't learn that until junior or senior year.