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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

#171

Post by nugget »

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…

Grades traditionally measure mastery of material on an externally imposed timeline under some amount of externally imposed pressure. I support moving to simply measuring master of material in most cases, but it's important to recognize that you lose some signal from those other areas. In real life, sometimes it's better to maximize for mastery regardless of timeline (within reason) while other times it's better to maximize for the best job you can do within a certain fixed amount of time.

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

#172

Post by zepto »

mindvirus wrote: post #137
zepto wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ill…

You're tearing down a straw man friend, I didn't say anything about tutoring or homeschooling. It'd mean the same thing it already means for 90%+ people - compulsory publicly funded education from 5-17 years old.

> You're tearing down a straw man friend, I didn't say anything about tutoring or homeschooling.

No straw man involved. I don’t think you’ve thought through the implications of ‘getting rid of private school’.

The point is that to ban private schools you’d also have to ban homeschooling.

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

#173

Post by Bostonian »

Bostonian wrote: post #158
dnndev wrote: post #155

Public school is broken and we all know it - in general. We need competent administrators, more teachers and smaller classes. Parents need more time to teach their children what is not and should not be taught at school. Kudos to parents who can afford and decide to be more hands on with children’s education. It is heartbreaking when all a child has is public school.

"We need more teachers and smaller classes." That would cost more, and reading the blog makes me want to send less money to the public schools.

For some reason my comment was downvoted. Does the system portrayed sound like one that is using resources efficiently to do important things? In some respects the school may doing harm, teaching students that they can be late and miss assignments without consequences. In the private sector they would be fired.

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

#174

Post by WalterBright »

dehrmann wrote: post #146
bushbaba wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

> You can ban the sat and grades and still measure for academic rigor It's harder to normalize performance across schools without a standardized test. > those who placed in a state math competition are likely to have higher academic abilities That sounds like a state-run math SAT that would have the same problems. > And allow the wealthy to better position their kids at the detriment of the middle class. The upper mi…

> The most important thing you can to to prepare for the SAT is do lots of practice tests.

Oh phooey. I never prepared for the SATs, and nobody I knew did, either. (Back in the 70s.)

Wanna know how to do well on the SATs? Pay attention in school to readin, ritin, and rithmetic.

As for SAT prep books, I see them all the time in the thrift store for a couple bucks. The notion that only the wealthy have access to them is nonsense.

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

#175

Post by kpozin »

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…

Seems like the simplest solution is to specify that the lowest _n_ assignment or quiz grades will be dropped from the overall grade calculation. I recall taking a few classes in high school and college with such a policy.

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

#176

Post by akomtu »

dnndev wrote: post #155

Public school is broken and we all know it - in general. We need competent administrators, more teachers and smaller classes. Parents need more time to teach their children what is not and should not be taught at school. Kudos to parents who can afford and decide to be more hands on with children’s education. It is heartbreaking when all a child has is public school.

"critical thinking" is what I think parents should teach to their kids. By that I mean giving cases of deception, gaslighting, etc. and asking the kid to discern the lie and the intent of the lie. I don't think schools teach this skill these days.

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

#177

Post by zepto »

rsj_hn wrote: post #123
zepto wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 sport…

> The usual definition is explaining things in different ways.

By that definition, what you say is true, but I haven’t heard anyone keep the definition that narrow for decades.

Other styles for example, can include things like not changing subjects every hour, but rather continuing until the student is ready to change.

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

#179

Post by Negitivefrags »

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?

I went to a tiny mixed age school and basically each kid worked on workbooks at their own pace.

The older kids helped out the younger ones and the teacher walked around the class and talked to each kid to help them along with thier work if they got stuck.

There wasn’t any lecture style teaching with the teacher explaining concepts to the whole class at once.

We all worked on one subject at a time, but we were all at different points in it.

When my family moved and I left that school I was multiple years ahead of where I was supposed to be in several subjects and normal school was very boring after that.

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

#180

Post by WalterBright »

6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #90
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…

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.

> In 7th grade, in the fall you are taught X, so if you miss it the only solution is to take it next time

In my experience in elementary school, 3rd grade material is repeated ad nauseum in 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th and 8th grade. Plenty of time to get it. (Being an Air Force brat, I attended 3 different elementary schools, even one in Germany run by the military. All the same.)

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