Are 90-minute classes the norm? I dont have my old timetablez, but it think 60 minute classes were our norm, with much shorter breaks between.
Teacher spends two days as a student (2014)
31–40 of 109 posts
Re: Teacher spends two days as a student (2014)
#32It's terribly disappointing to see even the Washington Post stoop to clickbait titles.
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Re: Teacher spends two days as a student (2014)
#33Why does she need to shadow a student to learn what it's like to be a student? Wasn't she a student once herself? These things are pretty obvious. I always just assumed teachers didn't care.
Yeah I agree, I mean, I realized all this stuff around 8 years old. Even after reading this I don't think any other teachers actually care or will ever care. This teacher is just getting old and forgetting how much being in school sucks. Thankfully I can just work on computers and make tons of money and love it. I now learn more every single week than I probably learned in a few months of school and, I graduated. Tha…
> School barely gave me basics in 13 years and I could of learned all of that in less than a year.
Oh the irony...
Re: Teacher spends two days as a student (2014)
#34Sitting for hours is bad ok... For a long time I was a smoker, I would often walk out of the building with others, and take a break. Talking about their or my problem of the minute. One of the other engineers who DIDNT smoke started coming out with us when we went. After a few weeks he noted out loud how his productivity had been UP since he started taking the journey with us. It seems counter intuitive that getting…
Since when is it counter-intuitive that exercise is good? I'd have thought the opposite.
Re: Teacher spends two days as a student (2014)
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
Never attribute to malice what can be explained through ignorance.
-- if you wish to promote a specific vision of gentle relations. However, if you're after information , then you should choose whatever is best for scientific economy. Maybe that takes you down a gentle path, and maybe it doesn't.
It's just a heuristic along the lines of Occam's Razor. Competent malice is less likely than incompetence, all else being equal. Normative motivations are irrelevant.
Re: Teacher spends two days as a student (2014)
#36As a teacher, I was hoping for a little more depth. The observations are reasonable, if a little obvious. I suppose it's good to remind teachers about things they already know, but are not regularly implementing.
I'm not sure it's the teachers' fault either. Not entirely anyway. They are beholden to school boards and parents (and ultimately all voters via funding). In fact - I suspect this was written for parents (etc) who are not involved in the day to day experience of school, but who demand certain things from schools without any concern for the real world effects (e.g. idiotic faith in standardized testing). Those folks m…
They are beholden to school boards and parents
Yes. I don't teach K - 12 but I have taught undergrads as a grad student and adjunct, and I wish more people realized this; I wrote "Ninety-five percent of people are fine — but it’s that last five percent" (https://jakeseliger.com/2017/04/24/ninety-five-percent-of-pe...) in part to explain the problems that a tiny minority can create. For example:
Teaching, especially at the K – 12 level, really suffers from this problem. A teacher who tries to be honest and interesting risks the ire of his or her angriest, more unhinged, or most ideological students (and, even worse, their parents). Almost no teacher gets in trouble for being boring, but a teacher can get in trouble or can get in trouble for being many values of “interesting.” Even I’ve had that problem, and I’m not sure I’m that interesting an instructor, and I teach college students.
Re: Teacher spends two days as a student (2014)
#37Those are some awesome takeaways. I think that by the time you're a teacher, you forget what it's like to be a student. One of my biggest complaints with class is that its entirely passive learning and I am a completely hands on person. Additionally, after reading pedagogy of the oppressed, it's very easy to get bitter with education in general.
The egg timer seemed like an amazing idea:
set an egg timer every time I get up to talk and all eyes are on me. When the timer goes off, I am done. End of story. I can go on and on. I love to hear myself talk. I often cannot shut up. This is not really conducive to my students’ learning, however much I might enjoy it.
Many teachers feel compelled to talk because they have a captive audience, so they prattle on about their personal lives or current events instead of engaging students in the topic they're supposed to be teaching.
Re: Teacher spends two days as a student (2014)
#38Add metal detectors, wands, and barbed wire to the mix and you'll really know what it's like for some inner city high school kids (like myself once upon a time). Kids today have more time away from school than I did, I had more time away from school than my parents did, this article wasn't much of an eye opener, sorry. Personally, high school is a waste, a transition period for students to truly find what they want o…
Yesterday there was a discussion here about antidepressants. I was tempted to jump in and comment that: sometimes depression isn't clinical, it can also be situational, that I had tried SSRIs and gotten nowhere, and the only thing that cured my depression was dropping out of college and finally getting a real life started.
School is a nightmare. Mix in bullying, antipathetic adults who behave like prison guards, teenage hormones. I don't know what the solution is, but American high school is a failed experiment.
Bravo to this principle for bothering to eat the dogfood.
(I was in cozy suburban schooling, incidentally; it felt like a prison. Now I live around your kind of schools, and I don't understand how anyone survives them.)
Re: Teacher spends two days as a student (2014)
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was a student of calculus once. But it was long ago and I no longer remember what it was like. Human memory is bad and we are prone to hyperbole when it comes to recalling struggles/good times. A reminder is not a bad idea from time to time. I suppose there are past experiences that you have forgotten what it was really like.
You might not remember a lot of the specifics. But I am sure you remember that you did a lot of sitting and a lot of listening (2 of the 3 surprising findings of the article).
I remember class being boring, but I didn't have these two hour long block classes that seem in vogue now. Well, I did in college and grad school, but you could skip class. Or during grad school it was common to just surf the web when you got truly bored.
After reading this I remembered sitting in some really boring high school classes boiling with almost rage at how boring it was. Sitting and looking at the clock. I wouldn't have remembered that without the help of the article.
I can easily see how a teacher would lose this prospective.
Re: Teacher spends two days as a student (2014)
#40This stuff seems to me to be inherent to institutionalized education. When you have an instituion with lots of kids to teach, what option is there but to have them all sit down all day and be passive. Also dealing with lots of kids and their misbehavior and having to get through a lesson plan at the same time would make adults feel like they have to be strict and direct "shh" towards the kids. When this organization is being run by the same organization that runs the DMV it's only natural to expect more extreme negative behaviors like sarcasm and snark and probably even more negative things that happen when there isn't a shadow teacher following.
In my mind home school seems like the the only real solution to these ills.