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?

[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.