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North Carolina teacher's resignation letter

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Re: North Carolina teacher's resignation letter

#51

Post by callmevlad »

clarky07 wrote: post #46
Xcelerate wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author of the letter is male. I disagree that math is best served by these particular standardized tests. Testing can be useful (particularly something like the AMC or AIME), but when you're given meaningless problems like calculating how many watermelons Jack can carry to the store, there's better ways of assessing a deep understanding of mathematics. Also, tests are frequently too long. This forces a student in…

2 things. 1. Where does it say the author is a male? I didn't see that, and the name "Kris" is used as a female name just as often as a male name[1] 2. I'm not sure the parent is saying that this is the best way to test math, rather that it is better for math than any of the other subjects. i.e. 2+2 is always 4 but writing essays is a whole different ballgame. [1] http://www.nameplayground.com/Kris EDIT: I think stan…

http://krislnielsen.blogspot.com/ The author is male.

Re: North Carolina teacher's resignation letter

#52

Post by yequalsx »

There seem to be quite a few people who want to do away with tenure and seniority rules as a means of fixing a broken system. Is there any evidence that doing this would fix the system or make it better?

Academic freedom, tenure, and seniority (to a lesser extent) have a lot of positives. Getting rid of these should only be done if the reasons are compelling and valid. What is required is not a collection of anecdotes of how tenure protects bad teachers - there are equally many anecdotes showing that tenure protects students and educational integrity - but rather statistics, facts, and well reasoned arguments.

There are large portions of the United States where parents without any training or knowledge on teaching have very strong opinions on what should or should not be said in the classroom. Getting rid of tenure and academic freedom will, in some areas, lead to ignorant people making important educational decisions. Will the physics department stop talking about the Big Bang? Does the geology department stop talking about processes taking millions of years to work? Does the history department only talk about the good parts of Manifest Destiny?

Instead of tenure maybe 5 year, renewable contracts would work. I don't know. I do think it is in society's best interest if teachers treat society as the client and not the students as the client. Doing the latter leads to dilution of standards. Doing the former without fear of being fired, at least in me, leads to grading on knowledge and not fluff.

Re: North Carolina teacher's resignation letter

#53

Post by yummyfajitas »

jbooth wrote: post #41
justin_vanw wrote: post #25

It's fine to grumble about testing, but the debate is not about the tests. Teachers performance in the US has been terrible for many years. Partly this is because of bad management, partly because of low pay, and partly because of teacher unions preventing any action against the worst teachers and insistance on tenure tracks. The reason testing is good isn't because it is somehow super accurate. It is good because it…

Software developer performance in the US has been terrible for many years as well. Maybe we should institute some standardized tests? And if you're gonna complain about how measuring KLOC doesn't make any sense, well, it's not enough to just point out problems. You've gotta point out solutions. Be a team player.

Software developer performance in the US has been terrible for many years as well.

The cost of software has been going up while the output has not been improving? Um, what?

Maybe we should institute some standardized tests?

Big companies already do this. They typically have very rigid processes for evaluating consultants/outsourcers and pretty much just follow the numbers. For higher end work it's trickier, but for standard stuff (build X screens in Y CRUD app) it works well.

The only real difficulty in measuring the output of individual developers is heterogeneity. Last year I built a search engine, this year I'm building a realtime data framework (and other stuff). That's not a problem for teaching, since the output of teaching is homogeneous (and is defined by the syllabus).

Re: North Carolina teacher's resignation letter

#54

Post by zem »

> I refuse to watch my students being treated like prisoners. There are other ways. It’s a shame that we don’t have the vision to seek out those alternatives.

if i could fix just one thing about the educational system, this would be it. it's the laziest option, so it ends up being implemented pretty much everywhere (this is not a us-specific problem; i grew up in dubai, and every time i visit my old school the place looks more like a prison), and all it does is alienate and disinvest students at precisely the time they need to be engaged and nurtured.

Re: North Carolina teacher's resignation letter

#56

Post by factorizer »

cheez wrote: post #22
Osiris wrote: post #6

My mother is a school board member in a rural school district in Northern California. What I can from conversations with her is that it is often not the district's fault when there are issues, but the state's. The district is forced to come up with a budget months before the state approves their budget, so they don't even know if they are going to get the money they need. When money is low, they have gone to the comm…

TL;DR send your kids to a private school.

right. why fix the system, when you can be part of an elite?

Re: North Carolina teacher's resignation letter

#57

Post by callmevlad »

xaa wrote: post #9

TL;DR: The writer, a math teacher, is quitting (edit: his) job because of increased bureaucracy and standardized tests. Mostly, it seems, standardized tests. The problem is, math is the subject which is BEST served by standardized tests. There is really no fuzzy aspect to K-12 math: answers are right or wrong. And there are of course many benefits to standardized testing like teacher and school evaluation, providing…

The article you mentioned about Google's tough interview questions is from a community manager, not a programmer. If I was hiring a technical community manager, I would not subject them to the same interview process as engineers - that would probably eliminate the best community managers.

Re: North Carolina teacher's resignation letter

#58

Post by dubya »

fatbird wrote: post #21
xaa wrote: post #9

TL;DR: The writer, a math teacher, is quitting (edit: his) job because of increased bureaucracy and standardized tests. Mostly, it seems, standardized tests. The problem is, math is the subject which is BEST served by standardized tests. There is really no fuzzy aspect to K-12 math: answers are right or wrong. And there are of course many benefits to standardized testing like teacher and school evaluation, providing…

If math is best served by standardized tests, and a well-regarded and skilled math teacher is quitting because they're drowning his class in tests and test preparation rather than giving him the time to actually educate... What does that say for non-math areas like English or Art or History?

I read this as "if any area is well-served by standardized tests, it's math" rather than "standardized tests are the best thing to happen to math". Sort of like a honey badger is best served by a snake bite.

The AMS Notices has an interesting article about a mathematician using his sabbatical to teach high school math that overlaps a little bit with this post: http://www.ams.org/notices/201210/rtx121001408p.pdf

Re: North Carolina teacher's resignation letter

#59

Post by yummyfajitas »

kstenerud wrote: post #29
justin_vanw wrote: post #25

It's fine to grumble about testing, but the debate is not about the tests. Teachers performance in the US has been terrible for many years. Partly this is because of bad management, partly because of low pay, and partly because of teacher unions preventing any action against the worst teachers and insistance on tenure tracks. The reason testing is good isn't because it is somehow super accurate. It is good because it…

"Just not having any metric at all is far worse than the imperfect tests we have." Are you sure about that? How do you know that a bad metric is better than no metric? It sounds a lot more like "We should be doing something. This is something. Therefore we should do it."

This is a question about the philosophy of science.

How do you know clinical trials are better than observational methods? How do you know controlled experiments are better than post-hoc reasoning and logical deduction?

Standardized testing is just the application of the scientific method to education. If you don't believe in the scientific method then you shouldn't apply it here.

But if you are asking for an empirical method to compare the scientific method to "other ways of knowing", there isn't one.

Re: North Carolina teacher's resignation letter

#60

Post by drivingmenuts »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #53
jbooth wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software developer performance in the US has been terrible for many years as well. Maybe we should institute some standardized tests? And if you're gonna complain about how measuring KLOC doesn't make any sense, well, it's not enough to just point out problems. You've gotta point out solutions. Be a team player.

Software developer performance in the US has been terrible for many years as well. The cost of software has been going up while the output has not been improving? Um, what? Maybe we should institute some standardized tests? Big companies already do this. They typically have very rigid processes for evaluating consultants/outsourcers and pretty much just follow the numbers. For higher end work it's trickier, but for s…

> That's not a problem for teaching, since the output of teaching is homogeneous (and is defined by the syllabus).

The syllabus is typically defined politically, which is anything but homegeneous. In fact, pretty much everything surrounding the teacher is defined by politics, which makes it a huge problem.

Until we're mature enough to get rid of the politics surrounding the teaching of even core subjects, like science, we're screwed.

And I don't blame the teachers one bit for walking away.

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