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Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021

adamcadre.ac

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Re: Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021

#111

Post by P0l83q4p1Hw3Ul »

rcpt wrote: post #102
P0l83q4p1Hw3Ul wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not clear to me how funding plays a leading role in policies such as "let everyone pass".

Well, if you're an HJTA fanboy then you can justify any sickening anti education policy you want by pointing to "let everyone pass"

To be clear I've never heard of HJTA.

Letting schools continue to suck with the excuse that they just need more funding is the sickening anti-education policy.

Yes, an organization that is shitty due to bad policies won't improve, and might become worse, when given more funding.

Re: Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021

#112

Post by astrange »

unishark wrote: post #80
astrange wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

California can't fund any of its public schools properly because of Prop 13. None of the wealthy homeowners care about this, because they're all too old to have kids in school.

Prop 13 protects people who got in early. Median house prices in SF have been over a million for close to a decade. I'd think they have plenty enough suckers by now paying five-figures in property taxes.

The problem more applies to poorer places like EPA than SF. AFAIK the main problem with SF public schools is nobody wants to use them because they'll assign you to one across the city.

Re: Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021

#113

Post by mmarq »

fallingknife wrote: post #25

> Another initiative headed for mandate status is a school policy that no assignment can receive a grade of less than 50% > And my direct supervisor repeatedly demanded that I pace my classes for the benefit of the single student in each section who was struggling the most I don't understand school. Why do they do things like this? Who actually thinks this is a good idea? I've never met anyone who does. How have we g…

The point of school is not to produce geniuses, but to take a mass of illiterates and turn them into semi-literate persons, also giving them time to mature as human beings before they are allowed into university or work. If an 18 year old person can read, write, use basic math operations, know a few facts about the country they live in and speak in a way that doesn't require their fellow countrymen to use subtitles, we can call it a success. If they can say what time is it in a foreign language, they will end up in the school hall of fame.

As a plus, school may introduce people to topics that may interest them and then allow them to find their way in life: from playing an instrument, to gymnastics, to computer programming.

Grades are a fixation of the school system and of all those involved, but they don't measure knowledge accurately. Some companies may not hire you if you have low marks or studied in a less than prestigious school/university, but that has not necessarily anything to do with knowledge and is likely to have something to do with class segregation. So there's a point in making them up.

Vandalism being tolerated is instead a very serious issue the school should address.

Re: Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021

#114

Post by professoretc »

analog31 wrote: post #69
fallingknife wrote: post #25

> Another initiative headed for mandate status is a school policy that no assignment can receive a grade of less than 50% > And my direct supervisor repeatedly demanded that I pace my classes for the benefit of the single student in each section who was struggling the most I don't understand school. Why do they do things like this? Who actually thinks this is a good idea? I've never met anyone who does. How have we g…

Playing devils advocate for a moment, as grading works right now, a kid can quickly dig themselves into a hole that they have no realistic way to get out of, e.g., by utterly bombing on an exam or missing a few assignments early in the semester. The motivation for that kid to progress any further is zero, yet they are imprisoned in the classroom for the duration of the semester. This hits very close to home for me, a…

> a kid can quickly dig themselves into a hole that they have no

> realistic way to get out of, e.g., by utterly bombing on an exam

> or missing a few assignments early in the semester.

You've pretty much hit the nail on the head. The authors of _Grading For Equity_ spoke at my school and the reasoning they gave for eliminating 0-grading (i.e., not using 0 as the lowest possible grade) was because it's basically impossible to recover from. Ideally, a student who masters the material by the end of class should get the same grade as one who masters it at the beginning; being fast or slow shouldn't factor into your grade, but with 0-grading, like you say, an early test or assignment can tank your final grade, even if your knowledge eventually catches up to what it should be.

Re: Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021

#115

Post by arkh »

> Colleagues from programs where these moves happened earlier have pointed out what the results have been: kids wind up with stellar grade point averages and glowing recommendations, get into top colleges, and… drop out after about three weeks, saying that they feel like they’re years behind everyone else and don’t know what’s going on, because they are and they don’t.

There must a good way to describe this "school to life in debt" pipeline. Doing everything to get young people to go to college where they'll have to get a loan which the state will gladly guarantee, the college will take the money and debt collectors will be happy to setup decades long plans to get some interest back.

Re: Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021

#116

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o »

jimbokun wrote: post #97
6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing is going to work while everything is paced by year. In 7th grade, in the fall you are taught X, so if you miss it the only solution is to take it next time: next fall with the next year’s 7th graders. In an ideal infinitely funded world, if you took 20% longer to learn X, you’d just go slower, not be left behind.

How does a teacher instruct a class where every single student is learning something different at a given time, based on their progress up to that point?

Sorry, I tried to be clear that that scenario is an unrealistic ideal. Ideal in the sense of a spherical frictionless student in a vacuum with infinite funding as well as ideal in the sense of good. In that case one solution would be more teachers than students.

Unless/until we figure out a feasible way to make progress not the same pace for everyone, progress will have to be the same pace for everyone.

Colleges have a decent middle ground where if you fail this quarter, there are decent odds your class will be offered again before next year, especially for the earlier classes that really need stricter sequencing. But that’s only really feasible when you have that many students (not to mention tuition $$$).

Re: Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021

#117

Post by rsj_hn »

api wrote: post #60
nerdponx wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get it either. People have learning and thinking differences, we know that and have known it for years. Accommodating those differences is important. Living out a real-life version of Harrison Bergeron is not the only way to do it.

Yeah but a real life version of Harrison Bergeron may be the cheapest lowest effort easiest to bureaucratize way to do it. Actually understanding and then adjusting to differences in learning style, cultural background, etc. is really hard work and is really hard to scale. It’s an art form not something that can be mass produced or reduced to a simple set of rules.

The problem is that "learning style" is not a thing. There are good students and bad students, and there are students who can understand the material but lack the ability to sit still. So it's not like if you change "teaching styles" you will be able to get the slower student the same information as the faster student. The only way to do that is to do a disservice to the faster student.

What you can do, is create tracks so that everyone is challenged but not put in a hopeless in a situation, and the disruptive students you need to either expel so their parents handle them or put them into some kind of separate environment where they don't prevent others from learning.

That's going to result in large inequalities in outcomes because there are large inequalities in how fast students mature and what their learning capabilities are. Neither of these things -- student intelligence or student maturity -- is something that the teachers can influence.

Re: Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021

#118

Post by somethingor »

mmarq wrote: post #113
fallingknife wrote: post #25

> Another initiative headed for mandate status is a school policy that no assignment can receive a grade of less than 50% > And my direct supervisor repeatedly demanded that I pace my classes for the benefit of the single student in each section who was struggling the most I don't understand school. Why do they do things like this? Who actually thinks this is a good idea? I've never met anyone who does. How have we g…

The point of school is not to produce geniuses, but to take a mass of illiterates and turn them into semi-literate persons, also giving them time to mature as human beings before they are allowed into university or work. If an 18 year old person can read, write, use basic math operations, know a few facts about the country they live in and speak in a way that doesn't require their fellow countrymen to use subtitles,…

> can read, write, use basic math operations, know a few facts about the country they live in and speak in a way that doesn't require his fellow countrymen to use subtitles

This seems achievable by the 8th grade.

Re: Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021

#119

Post by zepto »

rsj_hn wrote: post #117
api wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but a real life version of Harrison Bergeron may be the cheapest lowest effort easiest to bureaucratize way to do it. Actually understanding and then adjusting to differences in learning style, cultural background, etc. is really hard work and is really hard to scale. It’s an art form not something that can be mass produced or reduced to a simple set of rules.

The problem is that "learning style" is not a thing. There are good students and bad students, and there are students who can understand the material but lack the ability to sit still. So it's not like if you change "teaching styles" you will be able to get the slower student the same information as the faster student. The only way to do that is to do a disservice to the faster student. What you can do, is create tra…

> there are students who can understand the material but lack the ability to sit still

These students would benefit from a different teaching style, no?

Re: Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021

#120

Post by zepto »

antihero wrote: post #74
brianwawok wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No child left behind. It’s been ruled that it’s better that all students get to 20-80% knowledge then some get 100% and some get 0%. Which is why many people choose to go to private schools if you want to not be limited by this.

Surely this can be solved by streaming? Here in the UK we had bottom sets for the kids that were struggling, and top sets for kids who excelled. This meant that the learning pace could be tailored for each group. Still probably didn't stretch the top set kids as much as private schools could, which is why I am in favour of abolishing all private and grammar schools and making the resources available to those schools…

> and making the resources available to those schools available

How would you do this? It seems like it’s impossible to tax the group of people who would have sent their kids to private school had it been possible.

Equally it seems impossible to force the people who would have chosen teaching careers at private schools to work at comprehensive schools.

That, and the fact that one of the ‘resources’ that private schools have is flexibility to make decisions outside of the comprehensive school system.

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