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North Carolina teacher's resignation letter

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Re: North Carolina teacher's resignation letter

#91

Post by jimbokun »

capnrefsmmat wrote: post #85
fiatmoney wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Teachers performance in the US has been terrible for many years." Terrible at what, exactly?

Standard teaching methods for science and math don't work by many measures. That's not the fault of poor teachers; even well-rated teachers do poorly at improving student understanding. This is largely the fault of our notion that teachers are explanation delivery devices and students explanation receptacles, where the only improvements can be found in better explanations and better student engagement. The notion is…

"Students need to actively test their understanding by making predictions and failing, and no courses I've ever experienced attempt to do this."

Shouldn't a good teacher prod students in this direction?

Re: North Carolina teacher's resignation letter

#92

Post by joncalhoun »

Does anyone have any demographics for the HN community's age? I am curious how many people here have attended schools with standardized tests.

If you did attend a high school with standardized tests - do you feel it negatively affected your education? How? Do you have specific examples or courses?

For clarity - I am not claiming that standardized tests do/don't help. I just want to hear form recent HS grads.

Re: North Carolina teacher's resignation letter

#93

Post by yummyfajitas »

sirmarksalot wrote: post #87
curt wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"partly because of low pay" Teachers are actually some of the highest paid people in society. When you don't include benefits teachers make about $40/hr while engineers make $42/hr. If you do include benefits, a teachers compensation far exceeds that of an engineer due to their pensions. Source, BLS via Forbes.

I looked that up on the BLS website, and while you're not using the same units as them, your numbers don't seem to match up. According to BLS, the median pay is $53,230 per year, which would be closer to $26.50 an hour, assuming a 40-hour work week. http://www.bls.gov/ooh/education-training-and-library/high-s... Maybe the Forbes article you're referring to about is only counting classroom hours, which is a pretty abs…

The correct figure is 38.5 hours/week for 9 months/year.

http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2008/03/art4full.pdf

That's about $33.5/hour for wages alone. It also ignores the value of gold plated health care + pensions, etc.

Re: North Carolina teacher's resignation letter

#94

Post by keithpeter »

DanielStraight wrote: post #34
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…

Consider the last few real-world problems I've solved (or attempted to solve) with math: If you have a widget (roughly shaped like a cone with the tip chopped off) held at angle a and the widget is tapered at angle b and the tip of the widget has a diameter d , how far is it in x and y from the center of the tip of the widget to the theoretical tip were the taper continued to a point? If two 14" pizzas feed five peop…

UK perspective: have a look at Functional Skills Mathematics tests at what we call Level 1 and Level 2.

http://www.edexcel.com/quals/func-skills/about/Pages/Onscree...

Functional Skills Maths and English tests were introduced nationally in the UK after concerns from employer's organisations and other stakeholders. Preparing students to take these is mostly a vocabulary exercise I have to say. I would be interested in any reactions people have to these tests. They are aimed at mature adults who work in factories, administration, medical services with non-degree qualification levels. We use them with non-academic teenagers as well as stepping stones to the 16+ standard exam called the GCSE.

There is a lot to the idea that learning needs to be situated in a context... but then assessment gets expensive!

Re: North Carolina teacher's resignation letter

#95

Post by johnrgrace »

drivingmenuts wrote: post #60
yummyfajitas wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 scienc…

What you teach is INCREDIBLY political. My mother had to have a multiple meetings with her principle because as a 2nd grade teacher, with a biology degree, when one of her students asked about bird beaks when watching birds eat from a feeder she mentioned evolution. The school wants to keep evolution safely inside the 10th grade biology course where you can send in a note to skip it.

Without tenure, for have a factual enriching conversation with her students she would have been fired. She's going to retire soon, and is worried about teaching because "her generation" only went into it because they didn't fight to get what at the time were men's jobs. Today a 4.0 college grad with a biology degree would never teach 2nd grade.

Re: North Carolina teacher's resignation letter

#96

Post by xenofanes9 »

jimbokun wrote: post #86
tokenadult wrote: post #31

"I lost my job only due to my lack of seniority. I was devastated." He ("he" is correct; I was confused by the given name at first until looking the person up with a Google search) should blame the typical master contract with the teachers in the school district for that. That is a standard contract provision recommended by schoolteacher unions whether a state has a "union shop" or "right-to-work" rules. Usually, sch…

Reading this comment from this teacher's blog article "And if the choices have run out for my toddler when he’s ready for school, I will do it myself. Maybe I’ll do it for others, as well. Who knows." questions about a potential education system hack popped into my head. Maybe many others have already had this idea... What about uniting the home-schooling and frustrated-teachers movements? I'm sure there are onerous…

Charter schools. There are a wide range of approaches, but the charter school I attended provided an alternative for both teachers and parents looking for flexibility in their child's education.

Re: North Carolina teacher's resignation letter

#97

Post by elwin »

jimbokun wrote: post #86
tokenadult wrote: post #31

"I lost my job only due to my lack of seniority. I was devastated." He ("he" is correct; I was confused by the given name at first until looking the person up with a Google search) should blame the typical master contract with the teachers in the school district for that. That is a standard contract provision recommended by schoolteacher unions whether a state has a "union shop" or "right-to-work" rules. Usually, sch…

Reading this comment from this teacher's blog article "And if the choices have run out for my toddler when he’s ready for school, I will do it myself. Maybe I’ll do it for others, as well. Who knows." questions about a potential education system hack popped into my head. Maybe many others have already had this idea... What about uniting the home-schooling and frustrated-teachers movements? I'm sure there are onerous…

This kind of tutoring is already very common among homeschoolers, though without involving frustrated teachers. Homeschooling law varies by state and local district, but I've never heard of requirements for teaching to physically take place at the home.

Re: North Carolina teacher's resignation letter

#98

Post by danielweber »

I will not spend another day wondering how I can have classes that are full inclusion, and where 50% of my students have IEPs, yet I’m given no support.

I had to fire our public school (in North Carolina; this was in the first district he moved to in the state) because it took them 3 years to do an IEP. In another example, a family member moved out of state, and it took the school two years to call up and ask if she would still be attending.

I'm know in some places the teachers are the problem, but the teachers we met were working their hardest. The administration just didn't seem to give a shit.

Teacher responsibility is a great thing, but we also need administrator responsibility.

Re: North Carolina teacher's resignation letter

#99

Post by greedo »

justin_vanw wrote: post #36
kstenerud wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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."

Sure, I agree that in a general sense just pulling a number out of the air is crap. Testing isn't wrong, it's just not as correlated to the things we would actually like to measure as we would like it to be. This is an open problem in the world, and solving it (besides potentially making the inventor fabulously wealthy) would dramatically change the world. How do you decide if someone is qualified for a job, or will…

Actually, we do have a good way to determine how someone will perform. The US military has used the ASVAB test for decades, and studies have shown that performance correlates with test results.

http://official-asvab.com/validity_res.htm

Re: North Carolina teacher's resignation letter

#100

Post by joshuahedlund »

jimbokun wrote: post #86
tokenadult wrote: post #31

"I lost my job only due to my lack of seniority. I was devastated." He ("he" is correct; I was confused by the given name at first until looking the person up with a Google search) should blame the typical master contract with the teachers in the school district for that. That is a standard contract provision recommended by schoolteacher unions whether a state has a "union shop" or "right-to-work" rules. Usually, sch…

Reading this comment from this teacher's blog article "And if the choices have run out for my toddler when he’s ready for school, I will do it myself. Maybe I’ll do it for others, as well. Who knows." questions about a potential education system hack popped into my head. Maybe many others have already had this idea... What about uniting the home-schooling and frustrated-teachers movements? I'm sure there are onerous…

> Does anything like this already exist?

Google "homeschool co-ops"

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