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The Tough Decision to Leave the Classroom

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Re: The Tough Decision to Leave the Classroom

#71

Post by logicallee »

loteck wrote: post #60

Do we care more about student progress or our appearance? We care about both, and we have to. Proposed solutions will have to cater to this reality to have any hope of success. Why can’t we start a movement to walk away from these tests? Because a ton of scared people think the tests are the safety net of education. They are the last resort. If you got a bad education and can still past the test, it's a quantifiable…

>>Why can’t we start a movement to walk away from these tests?

>Because a ton of scared people think the tests are the safety net of education. They are the last resort. If you got a bad education and can still past the test, it's a quantifiable bare minimum.

Why does test-driven development enable the efficient creation of software that works, but the same isn't true of education? For example, asking a student to read some text and answer questions about whether they've understood it is a simple way to see if they're actually literate. An assert() if you will.

Test-driven education has resulted in an American literacy rate of 99% (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_literacy_r...

The SAT is a test that heavily influences University admissions in the United States. (Not all countries have college admissions exams.) The most selective universities in America are some of the ones who give it the greatest weight. It is hard to argue against a causal link given the level of scholarship and research that is produced in American higher education.

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/world-university-ranki...

I am not going to weigh in on what kind of tests should exist. But the idea that testing is a last resort, and you can 'get a bad education' and still pass the test, is like the idea of a function that doesn't work, but passes all the tests. Not to put words in your mouth, but in essence then you are essentially arguing that it is impossible to test an education.

If so, what makes you think a bad education exists? Perhaps all educations are perfect?

Granted this last example is a bit glib of me, since perhaps there are things that are infeasible to test in a normal test setting. But overall, I would say the type of things that make you say someone got a poor education, are also the kinds of things that can be tested for and are, in fact, tested for. You don't mean they can't make an omelette without getting it all over the floor.

Re: The Tough Decision to Leave the Classroom

#72

Post by seehafer »

hueving wrote: post #46
willvarfar wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For those of us not from the US, which [conservative groups] are you talking about? Republicans in general? Or some other group?

Anti-government conservatives. Republicans in general fall into this category.

Don't make the mistake of confusing rhetoric with action. Republicans haven't meaningfully shrunk the size of government since Eisenhower. Nixon grew the government substantially (EPA, HHS, Dept of Education), Reagan talked small-government and acted differently, HW stayed the course and W was a "compassionate conservative" who added what was biggest healthcare entitlement in the last twenty years (Medicare Part D).

Re: The Tough Decision to Leave the Classroom

#73

Post by ComSubVie »

logicallee wrote: post #71
loteck wrote: post #60

Do we care more about student progress or our appearance? We care about both, and we have to. Proposed solutions will have to cater to this reality to have any hope of success. Why can’t we start a movement to walk away from these tests? Because a ton of scared people think the tests are the safety net of education. They are the last resort. If you got a bad education and can still past the test, it's a quantifiable…

>> Why can’t we start a movement to walk away from these tests? >Because a ton of scared people think the tests are the safety net of education. They are the last resort. If you got a bad education and can still past the test, it's a quantifiable bare minimum. Why does test-driven development enable the efficient creation of software that works, but the same isn't true of education? For example, asking a student to r…

> Why does test-driven development enable the efficient creation of software that works, but the same isn't true of education?

What do you test - memorizing or understanding?

Does it test the required minimum, then passing it corresponds to the lowest positive grade (whatever that is in your school system).

Or do you also test "nice-to-have" knowledge? Then why do you test it?

Re: The Tough Decision to Leave the Classroom

#74

Post by brandonmenc »

jurassic wrote: post #29

No raises in six years as inflation marches steadily on is a 10% paycut. Criminal. It's a disgrace that our college-educated professional teachers are so under-valued they have to take on multiple side-jobs just to maintain their economic status quo.

> It's a disgrace that our college-educated professional teachers are so under-valued they have to take on multiple side-jobs just to maintain their economic status quo.

If you dig around the author's Google+ account, his wife appears not to work.

I'm not casting stones re: single worker households - particularly if they're living within their means - but an American household wanting to do more than just scrape by requires multiple incomes. That's been the case for decades.

Anecdotally, I have some teachers in my family, and as far as I can tell they really do get summers off. It wouldn't be a crime for any of them to get a summer job, imo.

I'm not commenting on teacher pay in general, just that working two jobs is not always a horrible injustice.

Re: The Tough Decision to Leave the Classroom

#75

Post by hueving »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #69
bildung wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because while great teachers exist, they are sitting on top of a pile of good, decent and bad teachers that largely can't be fired or forced to improve. But that is true for all countries, while the pervasive test culture is a phenomenon mostly observable in the US. The quality of teachers (or their education) can't be the major reason for the test dependency of the educational system in the US.

Pervasive test culture is far larger in Asia than in the US. Wealthy Asian nations perform very well, though admittedly most of that performance is likely due to unmentionable factors.

>admittedly most of that performance is likely due to unmentionable factors.

A culture of forcing children to study for hours every night at home and go to school 6 days a week?

Re: The Tough Decision to Leave the Classroom

#76

Post by ahomescu1 »

anigbrowl wrote: post #50
pizza wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But really, with the way standardized tests are done now, can you even tell what kids have learned with a test? By which I mean, when kids can't memorize all the stuff that they have learned by heart, and then when they can't produce an exact replica of a procedure or something without some kind of reference, we equate it to their not having learned it in the first place. Programmers create docs for the purpose of re…

Well, some things people should remember - how to calculate the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle, or who the parties were in WW2, or what makes a metaphor different from a simile. But you can also give problems, like 'here are the dimensions of some real-world problem, and here's a formula used to solve such problems, apply one to the other'; or 'here's the text of a poem by so-and-so, explain what you think the…

> Well, some things people should remember - how to calculate the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle, or who the parties were in WW2, or what makes a metaphor different from a simile.

This line of thinking is IMHO a lot of what's wrong with modern education: none of that stuff matters if you don't understand what's behind it (how you get to the formula of calculating the hypothenuse and why people fought WW2). To use the WW2 example, the answer to "who" is "Germany&allies vs Russia&allies" (an oversimplification), but it's far more important to know why they were fighting (a fight between different political ideologies, including Nazism and Communism). Education focuses too much on (possibly useless) facts, and far too little on the logic behind them, or why they matter.

Re: The Tough Decision to Leave the Classroom

#77

Post by antimagic »

logicallee wrote: post #71
loteck wrote: post #60

Do we care more about student progress or our appearance? We care about both, and we have to. Proposed solutions will have to cater to this reality to have any hope of success. Why can’t we start a movement to walk away from these tests? Because a ton of scared people think the tests are the safety net of education. They are the last resort. If you got a bad education and can still past the test, it's a quantifiable…

>> Why can’t we start a movement to walk away from these tests? >Because a ton of scared people think the tests are the safety net of education. They are the last resort. If you got a bad education and can still past the test, it's a quantifiable bare minimum. Why does test-driven development enable the efficient creation of software that works, but the same isn't true of education? For example, asking a student to r…

Actually, test-driven development is a pretty decent analogy. Including the shortcomings of TDD, such as the fact that you pass the unit tests doesn't mean you have a working product, which in education translates as students passing tests but not being able to use the subject in real life.

You can reduce the delta between passing tests by writing more, better tests, but again you quickly run into a problem - you spend so much time on testing that you start to lose the time to actually learn / write the actual project code.

So that's some ways in which the analogy is good. But there are some glaring errors in the analogy. In education, a student can have perfectly mastered the material, but is just really bad at passing tests, getting stressed out by it. In TDD, you can make your test environment match the target environment very closely. For most student exams this isn't true - most applications of higher learning are not done in a race against the clock, and you always have access to the Internet to help you out when you're stuck. By their nature, tests can't validate your capacity to work in a team with any fidelity. So, some of the very important skills that are needed in the application of knowledge are very difficult to test, making tests less valuable as a means of judging a student's acquisition of skills. There's a reason why PhDs require a thesis and a thesis defence, rather than sitting an exam before they are awarded.

Re: The Tough Decision to Leave the Classroom

#78

Post by ComSubVie »

> I stepped into the classroom around the time of a major worldwide recession. As the individuals and institutions responsible for this recession escaped accountability for their actions, school districts like ours went into survival mode. > Six years later, we’re still there. We have no plan for the future. > Earlier this year, the school board held its annual budget meeting. I left my second job early to attend and asked board members one simple question: “Is there any cause for optimism?” Each school board member, searching for a silver lining, effectively answered “no” by the time their reasoning caught up with them.

I think that's quite the same everywhere. Here in Austria school budget gets cut every year, local media are always bashing the teachers so the social standing of teachers isn't very good, therefore it is hard to get good/motivated teachers and you're struck with unmotivated teachers (and even motivated teachers don't hold their motivation for a lot of years).

Most important would be for the community to recognize that education is the most important thing we have for future generations and start investing (financially, socially, ...) into it. However I have no idea how that could be reached.

Re: The Tough Decision to Leave the Classroom

#79

Post by gwillen »

hueving wrote: post #75
yummyfajitas wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pervasive test culture is far larger in Asia than in the US. Wealthy Asian nations perform very well, though admittedly most of that performance is likely due to unmentionable factors.

>admittedly most of that performance is likely due to unmentionable factors. A culture of forcing children to study for hours every night at home and go to school 6 days a week?

I was assuming 'cheating'.

Re: The Tough Decision to Leave the Classroom

#80

Post by mullingitover »

brandonmenc wrote: post #74
jurassic wrote: post #29

No raises in six years as inflation marches steadily on is a 10% paycut. Criminal. It's a disgrace that our college-educated professional teachers are so under-valued they have to take on multiple side-jobs just to maintain their economic status quo.

> It's a disgrace that our college-educated professional teachers are so under-valued they have to take on multiple side-jobs just to maintain their economic status quo. If you dig around the author's Google+ account, his wife appears not to work. I'm not casting stones re: single worker households - particularly if they're living within their means - but an American household wanting to do more than just scrape by r…

The two-income household is sort of the 'betray' option in prisoner's dilemma. If nobody did it, labor would be vastly more valuable, and nobody would need two incomes to support a family (generally). Kids get a full-time parent, nobody has to depend on day care, it's an awesome deal for families. However, as soon as the critical mass of people starts depending on the extra income stream, the value of the labor drops and eventually that extra worker in the household isn't optional, it's required in order not to live a life of borderline (or real) poverty.
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