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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

#121

Post by zepto »

mindvirus wrote: post #64

One of the most radical beliefs I have is we should get rid of private schools, because it lets the people most capable of forcing change to opt out of an increasingly broken system, and so it doesn't get fixed. Of course I say this as I seriously consider sending my kids to a private school because of articles like this.

> get rid of private schools

What does that actually mean? It seems like you’d have to ban homeschooling and severely curtail private tutoring too.

The idea of the state providing basic schooling so that even the poorest people start with at least some intellectual capital and can participate in society seems like and a good one.

The idea of the state limiting what education is available to everyone and making it illegal to try to organize education outside of its direct authority seems maximally dystopian.

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

#122

Post by bradlys »

jdhn wrote: post #30

Stuff like this is why I roll my eyes every time I hear that schools are underfunded and how we need to give them just a little more funding, and surely things will get better. If they're just going to pass students anyways, what's the point of increasing the funding?

I mean, my school where I went could only afford four days a week. We had so many budget cuts that the school decided the only way to go forward was to cut the fifth day. This lasted for years and I don’t know if they’ve ever returned to a normal schedule.

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

#123

Post by rsj_hn »

zepto wrote: post #119
rsj_hn wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If you define "teaching style" to mean things like being in the classroom, but that's not the usual definition. The usual definition is explaining things in different ways.

The students around them (who can sit still) would benefit from not being in the same classroom as students who are disruptive, obviously. The disruptive students might benefit from something like shorter classes and time spent outside doing sports or other physical activities that don't require sitting. But let's not pretend that they will learn the same material. They will learn less material, at least until they mature enough so that they have more self-control and are able to sit still, which might not happen before they leave high school, or it may only happen in their senior year, etc. Thus you put them into a different high school entirely or at least a different diploma track.

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

#124

Post by bushbaba »

rcpt wrote: post #98
ipaddr wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do we have grades at all? Every year you progress to the next year. At the end of high school everyone takes a SAT test and they go to colleges. If you school kept telling you you were doing okay when you weren't you will do poorly on the sat test or poorly in your first year and be forced to dropout. I think these policies push the unpleasantness to the future where it is too late to fix it.

Also in the name of equity the UCs are now ignoring the SAT

You can ban the sat and grades and still measure for academic rigor. For example those who placed in a state math competition are likely to have higher academic abilities. Or those who had an article published in the news…etc.

All this does is make grades no longer a measure used. And allow the wealthy to better position their kids at the detriment of the middle class.

California’s strive to force outcome hurts the middle class the most. I just don’t get it.

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

#125

Post by listless »

professoretc wrote: post #114
analog31 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 impo…

I support this. My kids have had a single zero on occasion for a missed assignment and it demolished their grade. No way to recover. This is not a good measurement of whether you grasp the concepts. It’s a good measurement of whether you made no mistakes in the process.

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

#126

Post by HDMI_Cable »

somethingor wrote: post #118
mmarq wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, by this metric, school should stop when kids are 12.

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

#127

Post by tomjen3 »

mindvirus wrote: post #64

One of the most radical beliefs I have is we should get rid of private schools, because it lets the people most capable of forcing change to opt out of an increasingly broken system, and so it doesn't get fixed. Of course I say this as I seriously consider sending my kids to a private school because of articles like this.

Alternatively we should ban public schools and force parents to send them to a private school, which if the money that would otherwise have gone to the public school gets sent along with them isn't very expensive (here in Denmark something like 80-90% of the money follows the student).

Then we would have a direct way for parents to improve the schools their kids attend.

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

#128

Post by bushbaba »

rcpt wrote: post #100
mindvirus wrote: post #64

One of the most radical beliefs I have is we should get rid of private schools, because it lets the people most capable of forcing change to opt out of an increasingly broken system, and so it doesn't get fixed. Of course I say this as I seriously consider sending my kids to a private school because of articles like this.

> lets the people most capable of forcing change to opt out of an increasingly broken system, and so it doesn't get fixed. I don't think voting homeowner retirees sitting on fat Prop 13 tax cuts are going to change their tune because their grandkids can't go to private school.

Majority of education budget goes to paying for pensions of retirees.

There’s no budget shortage. There’s a mis use of funds. If you throw more money into the system we’ll just see even crazier pension packages and administration staff overheads.

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

#129

Post by mmarq »

spangry wrote: post #79
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…

Because standards would hinder "equity" in educational outcomes. The SF Board of Education recently voted to end selective admissions for Lowell High School in favour of a lottery, citing lack of diversity and "pervasive systemic racism". The board positions are elected so these sorts of policies are presumably what the people of San Francisco want.

I don't know anything about this particular Lowell High School, but selective admissions at the high school level achieve excellency by filtering out "bad" students, which are usually students from disadvantaged backgrounds. If a public school is of very high quality, selecting 10 year olds at random is not much less fair than choosing them based on their grades or extracurricular activities or an essay. Unless we assume that high grades, extracurricular activities or essay tutoring are not correlated with family wealth.

If certain demographics are heavily underrepresented (and I don't know if it's the case here), either we must assume that they are less smart (and so produce less "high school material") or we must acknowledge that there is some form of discrimination. The latter being almost certainly true, lotteries and quotas don't look like the dumbest ideas.

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

#130

Post by ipaddr »

rcpt wrote: post #98
ipaddr wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do we have grades at all? Every year you progress to the next year. At the end of high school everyone takes a SAT test and they go to colleges. If you school kept telling you you were doing okay when you weren't you will do poorly on the sat test or poorly in your first year and be forced to dropout. I think these policies push the unpleasantness to the future where it is too late to fix it.

Also in the name of equity the UCs are now ignoring the SAT

Doesn't that mean they fail first year instead?
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