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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

#301

Post by diob »

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 should increase teacher pay / benefits to attract better talent.

At the same time, we should decrease how many hours parents have to work each week (40 to 30?) so that they can actually engage with their kids.

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

#302

Post by TedDoesntTalk »

tolbish wrote: post #191
TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do these 10 year old not care about school because there is something intrinsically wrong about them Each child, like each adult, has different motivations in life. Not all children are equally motivated for schoolwork. > The admission test is not racist per se, but if it results in, say, blacks not being admitted to an institution, it exist in a framework that materially enables racism No. You need to look at conf…

What kind of 10 year old is in high school and works a part time job?

It’s an example for teens, not 10-year olds. If you can’t imagine an age-appropriate example for 10-year olds, allow me to suggest an alcoholic, drug addict, homeless, or abusive parent that gets in the way of a 10 year old studying and getting to school on time.

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

#303

Post by Judgmentality »

DSingularity wrote: post #298
glitchc wrote: post #291

In North America, teachers are grossly underpaid and their ability to discipline poor performance has been entirely eviscerated. It’s not just SF, look at what’s happening in Vancouver: https://nationalpost.com/opinion/rex-murphy-cutting-honours-... The problem is the administration: The board that sets the standards and the parents and politicians who sit on those boards. The solution is this: Ban anyone without a m…

You say “until we are dominated by idiot majority” as if it hasn’t happened. Just look at the platforms of the peoples vote to represent Americans. Rarely are they platform that would actually matter to the people and most of the time it is identity politics, nationalism, gun rights, and religion. We can’t even have a nuanced conversation about anything in politics that doesn’t devolve into an ideological/tribal argu…

I fear I am feeding a political tangent here, but I think most of the problems you mentioned could be fixed in the US by recognizing (admittedly this would be a timely process) an official third electoral party. It's a lot easier for nuance to prevail when the system isn't designed to be binary.

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

#304

Post by kevinventullo »

treis wrote: post #71
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.

It's not mandating everyone be equal. It's allocating resources to those that need them most. Which is how I think we all do our jobs. You spend your time on the systems that perform poorly, not the ones that are working fine.

> You spend your time on the systems that perform poorly, not the ones that are working fine.

I beg to differ! If I have two products and one sells 100x more than the other, I don’t spend my time optimizing the unpopular one.

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

#305

Post by toomuchtodo »

Talanes wrote: post #190
lubujackson wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This kind of narrow thinking is what has caused schools in SF to suck for everyone. Because Lowell doesn't exist in a vacuum and the arguments that privileged people have a leg up doesn't really make a difference - it is similar logic to burning libraries because some folks can't read. So what happens when you dumb down the only decent public high school for students to aim for? The parents have three options: send y…

>So what happens when you dumb down the only decent public high school for students to aim for? Vast swaths of the country get by without having any choices in high schools. The idea that need a selection of different schools with different levels of prestige and focuses is such an urban entitlement.

Not having better options doesn’t mean they don’t exist. For some parents, their children are their greatest investment, and they won’t accept a lesser educational environment even if superior options aren’t available in some geographies.

If I need heart surgery, I’d rather be in NYC (Mount Sinai specifically) then BFE fly over country, and if I have the means I’m on the next flight. Same with education. Hard to find fault imho with those who want more than the lowest common denominator for their children.

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

#306

Post by YinLuck- »

glitchc wrote: post #291

In North America, teachers are grossly underpaid and their ability to discipline poor performance has been entirely eviscerated. It’s not just SF, look at what’s happening in Vancouver: https://nationalpost.com/opinion/rex-murphy-cutting-honours-... The problem is the administration: The board that sets the standards and the parents and politicians who sit on those boards. The solution is this: Ban anyone without a m…

Teachers are overpaid, not underpaid. What are you smoking?

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

#307

Post by giantg2 »

I once had a cheating scare.

I was in college, working on a take-home excel sheet for an accounting class. I was struggling with some of it, so I did my best and filled in the parts I knew and some I could guess at. I wasn't too worried about it because the rest of my grades in that class were good. The professor called me in for a meeting and accused me of cheating because the total column happened to be correct but only some of the inputs were incorrect. I was actually scared I might get expelled for cheating, when I was just following my prior teachers' advice (and basic logic) to guess when not sure.

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

#308

Post by um_ya »

crooked-v wrote: post #216
um_ya wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like the school voucher idea a lot. Give parents a voucher, as good as cash, for their child and let them choose the school. Private companies will compete for those vouchers, aligning focus on satisfying the parents and the children, rather than the government.

That sounds like a great way to indirectly punish parents who can't afford commutes for their children, since they get stuck with whichever schools the wealthier parents pull their children from.

The idea is that schools would compete for as many vouchers as they could, meaning they'd be willing to send buses out to your area, or find other ways to accommodate the parents with before school programs, ect.

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

#309

Post by throwaway34241 »

treis wrote: post #147
kyboren wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So instead, let's put them with the high-achievers and force those high-achievers to do the teacher's job of tutoring them at the expense of their own educational opportunity. I can see why schools likes it. But it's terrible policy and hurts the higher-achieving students, who will be the backbone of our increasingly winner-take-all knowledge- and services-based economy.

That's quite the straw man you've built there. Nobody is talking about forcing the high achievers to do the teacher's job. The question is how we allocate the fixed amount of educational resources we have. You want us to choose the high achievers so that these early winners can turn that lead into even greater success later. Unstated in your post is what happens to those low achieving students. But it's pretty easy t…

> The question is how we allocate the fixed amount of educational resources we have

> The other option is to help the low achieving students so that more of them can participate in that winner take all economy. I'm not sure how to argue that this latter option is preferable since it seems so obvious to me that it's the right choice to make.

Why do you think society is becoming more "winner take all"? Even if there's truth to society trending in that direction, I'm skeptical it can be solved in the education system if the causes don't lie in the education system. It's easy for me to imagine a world where schools eliminate their advanced programs, then the same students go on to become low-wage workers and the same (or fewer) go on to become scientists.

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

#310

Post by robryan »

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…

You weigh the grading such that you could still pass the course by doing well in the end assessments. Something like hand out 30% of the grade during the course and the rest at the end.
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