The Decades-Long Travesty That Made Millions of Americans Mistrust Their Schools
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Re: The Decades-Long Travesty That Made Millions of Americans Mistrust Their Schools
#2Huh, wow, yeah I never heard of this but that makes complete sense.
I spent a bit of time helping by at an elementary and though it took a bit to click, it was painfully obvious that a lot of the worst behaved kids were doing so as way to hide the fact that they could not read.
And yeah, the idea of trying to get kids to read by just making them read does seem like bullshit vs teaching it as a skill.
Re: The Decades-Long Travesty That Made Millions of Americans Mistrust Their Schools
#3Well, that was anticlimactic... I was expecting an article on teachers unions being ruled illegal and the significant minority of totally incompetent teachers the union enabled for all these years being fired.....
Re: The Decades-Long Travesty That Made Millions of Americans Mistrust Their Schools
#4Well, that was anticlimactic... I was expecting an article on teachers unions being ruled illegal and the significant minority of totally incompetent teachers the union enabled for all these years being fired.....
At school my favourite and most effective teachers were those that my older sisters had disliked enough to warn me about. And, with my kids, it repeats; one will like and learn from a teacher that the other kid struggles with etc.
So perhaps it’s about teachers being good and effective for one child but not for another, and few are objectively bad for everyone?
Re: The Decades-Long Travesty That Made Millions of Americans Mistrust Their Schools
#5I wish educational systems were less eager to jump into the latest fads, and more conservative in their approach (and I say that as a progressive).
In my country we didn't have this particular fad as far as I know, but we are harming kids with the trend of making everything digital. With nonsense such as classrooms of 3-year-old kids where they solve a puzzle by dragging images of the pieces on a big screen, rather than handling the physical pieces themselves.
Re: The Decades-Long Travesty That Made Millions of Americans Mistrust Their Schools
#6For context, my introduction to elementary school and formal reading instruction began about 1970 in the U.S.
My recollection was that we were introduced to the alphabet and the phonetic sounds for each of the 26 letters with an image of a thing that began with that letter. As an example, I remember "m" was for "mice" ... and a picture of a pair of mice neatly represented the two humps of the letter "m".
Combined was a very simple reading curriculum of the "See Dick run" variety but concerning a frog family (one of the frogs name was "Tad").
Likely the above was Kindergarten.
By I believe 1st grade (and perhaps a grade or two following) we had something more akin to an independent reading curriculum that consisted of assignments from a kind of vertical-file-like organizer that used a color-coding to indicate difficulty and proficiency levels.
You would pull out the first (U.S. letter sized) card from the SRA Reading Labs organizer that was for the "Aqua" reading level. You would read a simple story and then answer a kind of quiz after — like, "Who did Sally meet in the park?"
There was an achievement-like appeal to me when I completed the "Aqua" level of stories and then moves up to the "Blue" level.
I have no idea the degree to which this system was effective. I'm just reporting on one way teaching reading was done during what I think in hind sight was kind of a progressive era of education in the U.S. (but still seemed to have one foot in a kind of old-school (ha, ha) tradition of education).
Re: The Decades-Long Travesty That Made Millions of Americans Mistrust Their Schools
#7I wish educational systems were less eager to jump into the latest fads, and more conservative in their approach (and I say that as a progressive). In my country we didn't have this particular fad as far as I know, but we are harming kids with the trend of making everything digital. With nonsense such as classrooms of 3-year-old kids where they solve a puzzle by dragging images of the pieces on a big screen, rather t…
Yeah, there’s nothing progressive about not teaching kids to read. The “just throw them in the pool and expect them to swim” approach is particularly harmful to kids with ADD type difficulties.
Replace conservative with evidence based. This sounds like one of those “sounds right to me” ideas pushed by someone with charisma who was positioned properly in the educational world to be listened to.
In any field there occasionally seem to be these ideas that emerge fully formed with a hallelujah chorus. These days it’s usually accompanied by a book, a book tour, podcast interviews, and a TED talk. Everyone who is anyone agrees that this idea is the smartest thing ever and probably right. The person behind it is very often from New York. When this happens, get skeptical.
Re: The Decades-Long Travesty That Made Millions of Americans Mistrust Their Schools
#8I wish educational systems were less eager to jump into the latest fads, and more conservative in their approach (and I say that as a progressive). In my country we didn't have this particular fad as far as I know, but we are harming kids with the trend of making everything digital. With nonsense such as classrooms of 3-year-old kids where they solve a puzzle by dragging images of the pieces on a big screen, rather t…
Yeah, well sadly there are publishers that have an incentive to sell. As I look back on my education I see more and more clearly a corporation was lurking in the back of the classroom looking for profits.
I suppose it need not be destructive so long as the product being sold actually does do well in aiding teachers to educate students.
Re: The Decades-Long Travesty That Made Millions of Americans Mistrust Their Schools
#9If you want kids to read, you need to give them a reason to want to read. For myself, I was given a trunk of about 200 superhero comic books around age 5. Nobody had time to read them to me, so I had to learn how to read them myself. And I still remember the day I realized Peter Parker had books on his shelves I'd seen with my mother's books - so I tried to read Herman Hesse about age 8 because it was a book Peter Parker had on his shelf.
Re: The Decades-Long Travesty That Made Millions of Americans Mistrust Their Schools
#10I teach for a living. I'm currently at a community college, but I spent most of the last decade teaching high school. I even did a little 4th grade. (Yes, it is unusual for any teacher to teach that range of grades.)
Educational administrators are idiots. They can not do basic tasks. Give them a list of industry certifications like the one I will link below, and ask them to figure out which classes currently offered in their school or school district might be appropriate to prepare the kids for those certifications, and they can not do it. They yell at the teachers to figure it out instead of providing clear instructions to the teachers.
A big chunk of their funding depends on getting their students certified, and they can not make a plan to achieve that.
After we know what certifications go with what classes, I suggest they pay the certification fees to get their teachers certified. They yell back that they do not get paid to have the teachers certified. I know that, but do they really expect teachers to prepare students for certifications the teachers do not have?
They say it is the teacher's responsibility to keep their certifications up to date. That only applies to their state occupational license to teach, not to industry certifications. School administrators do not understand the difference.
I already had the industry certifications because I subscribe to the TEA newsletters, and anticipate next year's goals.
I ask for funding for my kids to take the certification exams. The administratoras yell back that either the students need to pay for it or I need to pay for it. School administrators do not care that the extra funding they would get from getting students certified would more than pay for the vouchers. I finally get an administrator with a brain to fund the vouchers.
I get about half my students certified. The administrators say that is worthless. They threaten to fire me because if one single student does not get certified, my whole school year is a failure. I am literally the only teacher in the school who got kids certified (that I know of.)
The list of certifications is a PDF linked to from this web page: https://tea.texas.gov/academics/college-career-and-military-...
Here is a direct link to the PDF: https://tea.texas.gov/academics/college-career-and-military-...