Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021 • Hacker News Board

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

#591

Post by Aerroon » Sun, Jun 20, 2021, 9:38 AM UTC

hellbannedguy wrote: post #167

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…

If I could have skipped high school, and went straight to a community college, my life might have been different? I remember learning everything I should have in high school in 1 semester at a CC. Plus--I found high school painful, and their was so much wasted time. I was expected to work while going to high school, and remember thinking there's got to be a better way. In school all day felt like baby sitting, rather…

>I remember learning everything I should have in high school in 1 semester at a CC.

But maybe the reason you could do that is because you had already studied this before. When I look back on school work, they look trivial. Even things that I've forgotten look trivial.

Subjects like mathematics (in high school and earlier) are about experience. Sure, explaining hope to calculate the area of a triangle is very easy, but if your only experience with it is having it explained to you and using it once, then you'll probably forget how to do it or the relation it has to the area of a rectangle. We do the trivial stuff so much in school that you get an instinctual feeling for it. I never felt as comfortable with any of the math I learned in college than I did with earlier topics. I suspect it's because I never got to build up that feel for it.

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

#592

Post by mmarq » Sun, Jun 20, 2021, 9:51 AM UTC

hef19898 wrote: post #321

mmarq wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The CEO of BioNTech, when he was 10, wasn't considered good enough to attend a Gymnasium.

Coming from a family of turkish Gastarbeiters, I am not surprised. You still have that problem in Germany, and I think it only got worse during the pandemic. Edit: The Biontech founder comes from a turkish family, I don't. But I see that happening a lot, first during my school days. And now at my children's schools.

Maybe it didn’t get worse, but it still demonstrate what’s the result and maybe the objective of these strict selection criteria: that discriminated minorities end up being excluded. Let it be children with foreign origin in Germany (which doesn’t stop after a generation) or whatever minority is being excluded from this very important American school.

And given that people leave high school barely capable of reading newspaper articles (otherwise Breitbart or the Daily Mail would even be a thing), I don’t see what this selection is for.

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

#593

Post by LatteLazy » Sun, Jun 20, 2021, 9:54 AM UTC

spoonjim wrote: post #554

I’ve noticed that in the time since I was a kid, the focus of public school has shifted from about the 40th percentile student to the 5th percentile student. In my school, the entire focus of the operation was the decent student... the one who showed up, put in a decent effort, did at least three quarters of their homework. The school had tremendous resources for these kids to go to college, and the very best college…

I think this is the case everywhere. Here in the UK they wasted huge efforts trying to turn Es into Ds and no one gave a shit as long as you got a C.

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

#594

Post by LatteLazy » Sun, Jun 20, 2021, 9:56 AM UTC

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…

Parents complain when their kid is "left behind" just because they refuse to keep up. Parents don't complain when their kid is bored but gets As because you're still teaching year 1 material.

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

#595

Post by throwaway210222 » Sun, Jun 20, 2021, 9:58 AM UTC

mmarq wrote: post #592

hef19898 wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coming from a family of turkish Gastarbeiters, I am not surprised. You still have that problem in Germany, and I think it only got worse during the pandemic. Edit: The Biontech founder comes from a turkish family, I don't. But I see that happening a lot, first during my school days. And now at my children's schools.

Maybe it didn’t get worse, but it still demonstrate what’s the result and maybe the objective of these strict selection criteria: that discriminated minorities end up being excluded. Let it be children with foreign origin in Germany (which doesn’t stop after a generation) or whatever minority is being excluded from this very important American school. And given that people leave high school barely capable of reading…

> that discriminated minorities end up being excluded. Let it be children with foreign origin in Germany (which doesn’t stop after a generation)

Except of course for the founders of BoiNTech: Uğur Şahin, and Özlem Türeci.

Included to the point they got German government-funded PhDs and then other native Germans helped co-found their company.

Perhaps you hypothesis needs more data and less feelings?

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

#596

Post by refurb » Sun, Jun 20, 2021, 10:02 AM UTC

yaitsyaboi wrote: post #104

refurb wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re cheating that kid. They’re going to get pushed into the next grade and fall further behind until they graduate and can’t do basic math.

I don't think theres a school district in the country that will advance a kid with a 50% average to the next grade. Idk if there's some arcane No Child Left Behind provision about kids who have been stuck for 3 years, but in general a 50% is a no go. And it's not like you can get 50s all year and get a few 80s and average it out. It takes a lot of really sustained effort to come back from that. Most kids won't. But a…

So if you’ll just fail the student overall, won’t that hurt them as much as a failing test grade?

If they can’t do the work you need to let them know at some point. Not sure delaying the news is that helpful!!

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

#597

Post by 0xy » Sun, Jun 20, 2021, 10:05 AM UTC

muyuu wrote: post #427

akomtu wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't do that. Even in countries with hardcore marxist regimes, kids of the elite (the "party members") go to special schools.

or they send them abroad - the classic oligarch/despot kid path

Like Kim Jong-un reportedly going to school in Switzerland under a fake name.

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

#598

Post by mhuffman » Sun, Jun 20, 2021, 10:06 AM UTC

rcpt wrote: post #440

makeitdouble wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the same report, the bullet point above your first quote: > The wage gap between teachers and non-teachers disappears when both groups are matched on an objective measure of cognitive ability rather than on years of education. That “objective measure” is based on human capital model of wages, and it seems to me pretty biased to apply to such a specialized profession. Being wonderful at making a group of 6 years…

heritage really isn't going to be a good source on this kind of thing fwiw

>heritage really isn't going to be a good source on this kind of thing fwiw

There is no good source on "this kind of thing"!

This is a type of "Wicked Problem"[1] and also a political darling of every political group.

And since every social scientist is just a person, with political, personal, and moral beliefs, any papers that they are willing to release typically reflect that. Further, any "peers" that review those papers will have similar beliefs because they know which places they would like that info published.

If you have pretty progressive beliefs, you will "know" that more money, in combination with identity awareness and additional help to those that match historically oppressed identities, is the answer.

If you have pretty conservative beliefs, you will "know" that it is the environment, "brainwashed" and "lazy" teachers and students (but not your kids, of course!) that are the blame. Vouchers and private schools (letting the market work) are the answer.

And there are people with beliefs everywhere on that spectrum. And not matter your beliefs, you can find research to back it up.

Education is just something that will forever be argued about and there is no clear-cut solution, even though nearly everyone thinks that there is, if only everyone else could just understand their point of view!.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem

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

#599

Post by Telemakhos » Sun, Jun 20, 2021, 10:13 AM UTC

SamoyedFurFluff wrote: post #482

throwaway894345 wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yet for some reason in the US this is a political hot button, which doesn’t make any sense to me. I share in your bafflement. Charitably, perhaps they reason that parents will pick schools that are worse on average than public schools, but I suspect it is more of a “equality demands poor schooling regardless of class” with a side of “the state gets to determine the values your child is taught”.

My understanding is that vouchers still put the most power in the parents about what school their children go to, when the parents themselves aren’t necessarily good judgements of what would make a good school. Additionally, tools that parents would use (how students are graded in standard tests) are opaque. There are even cases where private schools don’t have to disclose how well or poorly their students score, whi…

I taught for a few years, and I met many parents and students. The old adage is right: judge the tree by its fruit. Voucher-funded charter schools don't even have to cherry-pick students to surpass public schools: the biggest factor is that parents have to make a conscious decision to send a child to a charter school over the default public school. The worst-performing students belong to parents who will not put in the effort to choose a school instead of sending their kids to the default public school. There is a direct correlation between the parents' (or more likely parent's or grandmother's) lack of involvement in the child's education on the child's performance in school. The easiest filter to separate the bottom of the population from the average and top is to provide a choice of schools, because the lowest segments simply will not make any choice.

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

#600

Post by MomoXenosaga » Sun, Jun 20, 2021, 10:17 AM UTC

sqrt17 wrote: post #575

spoonjim wrote: post #554

I’ve noticed that in the time since I was a kid, the focus of public school has shifted from about the 40th percentile student to the 5th percentile student. In my school, the entire focus of the operation was the decent student... the one who showed up, put in a decent effort, did at least three quarters of their homework. The school had tremendous resources for these kids to go to college, and the very best college…

> to turn one of those kids into someone worthwhile The basic insight here is: kids with learning disabilities, or who have a home environment not conducive to learning, are worthwhile people. And school as the institution taking care of those kids should do more than just send them to another building to rot. It's a very straightforward thing to want your upper middle class privileged kid get all the support they ne…

In my country parents can choose which school they send their kids to.

You get "white schools". Parents always want the best for their children and this predictably leads to full segregation. I am actually surprised how egalitarian and inclusive the US is when it comes to education!