201–210 of 320 posts
Just gotta do the Mississippi thing and hold kids back unless they meet standards. Don't leave them behind by pretending to leave no one behind.
If kids are held back when they fail standards, shouldn't they also be allowed to race ahead when they exceed them?
I'll throw in my own $1.50 , inflation and all. There's definitely loads of money in "education". But the actual teachers arent seeing it. No, its in "special interest programs", state/federal compliance, loads of tests, and ordained material from "preferred creators" (cough, pearson etm.) We can pay teachers better, sure. But there's lots of areas to "pay better". Small classes. 12-17 students. Budget for class reso…
I'm confused by your comment here. Literally the entire point of teaching those various methods is to show WHY the math works. If anything you should be arguing for rote methods. Some are better than others, but ultimately they're all trying give tools to depict the way any math literate adult thinks about arithmetic.
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It leads to K-shaped education where parents who recognize the deficiency of public education simply teach their kids math themselves or hire private tutors. Public education used to be a force for equality of knowledge in the country. Now it perversely does the opposite, all in the name of education!
At least in elementary school I don't see the deficiency in common core math compared to what I had 30 years ago. My kid has been exposed to a wide variety of topics sooner than I was, and she's way stronger in word problems on top of that. Do people have a specific complaint with elementary school common core math that we should be teaching but aren't, or vice versa? Or is it more problematic later?
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Student/teacher ratios have gone down, not up over the last few decades. This isn't a lack of funding. Teachers are put in an impossible position with students who come from homes where the parents don't do their proper jobs. It's never been easier to be a neglectful parent. Your child will be entertained non-stop by an iPad and a video game system. They won't get bored and bother you. You can send them to their room…
The single variable that actually matters when it comes to school - and nothing else matters until this one is fulfilled: The quality of the peers who make up the student body. Or put another way: The quality and involvement of the average parent. A school can absorb an extremely small minority of "problematic" students if the rest of the student body is stellar, but that's about it. There is not a single thing any p…
I think if anything parents are more involved now than they used to be.
The most obvious difference to me other than ipads/social media is we don't beat kids anymore and we give them way less autonomy.
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> The average starving PhD would be a much better and more knowledgeable teacher to high school students in the subject she took her PhD in i dont think this is true. there is an art to educating (especially the ~10-15 year old range) that does not just manifest itself because you are smart: how to engage students, how to keep them engaged, how to adjust the message to the audience's level and communicate it effectiv…
Yes to this! What makes a great teacher is the willingness to hold kids accountable for their behavior and their work. Sure, it helps to be a subject expert, but that won't matter if you can't manage your classroom. And parents play an equally important role. One of the best things you can do for your child's education/life is support the teacher when they call you up and say, "Your child is making poor decisions..."
I've known plenty of highly credentialed teachers that were very poor communicators and/or could not manage their classroom. I think the idea that this can be, or is, effectively taught as part of the "education major" is very suspect.
Indeed, the worst-performing school districts are precisely those where "classroom management" is a serious problem, versus better districts where the children come to school ready to be managed. It seems older styles of classroom management now out of vogue and untaught by universities were more effective.
Just gotta do the Mississippi thing and hold kids back unless they meet standards. Don't leave them behind by pretending to leave no one behind.
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Yes to this! What makes a great teacher is the willingness to hold kids accountable for their behavior and their work. Sure, it helps to be a subject expert, but that won't matter if you can't manage your classroom. And parents play an equally important role. One of the best things you can do for your child's education/life is support the teacher when they call you up and say, "Your child is making poor decisions..."
> Sure, it helps to be a subject expert, but that won't matter if you can't manage your classroom. I've known plenty of highly credentialed teachers that were very poor communicators and/or could not manage their classroom. I think the idea that this can be, or is, effectively taught as part of the "education major" is very suspect. Indeed, the worst-performing school districts are precisely those where "classroom ma…
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google sez: "Inflation-adjusted public school funding per student in the United States has increased significantly over the long term, with a roughly 34% increase in inflation-adjusted revenue per student over the last two decades alone. Looking at a broader historical view, inflation-adjusted spending per student has risen by over 200% since the 1960s."
This is always a common rebuttal but I used to work in education and believe me there was not a bunch of new money coming in. Quite the opposite. Maybe the data shows funding going up but that money is not making it to the students.
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Here in my state teachers in good districts start at $60,000 per year and see minimal increases due to length of service; after 20 years they might be making $75,000 per year. You ever done the math on living on $60k per year? Hard to do a lot besides support youself on that income. I note that surrounding states (even higher cost states) have lower salaries. Teachers get paid peanuts.
That's not so low when you account for the fact that school is not in session during summer, and teachers get these months off.
My mother retired after working her entire career as a teacher, and I earned close to double her final salary my first year working in tech. She has her masters degree and I did not graduate college. And if you count the stocks I got at the end of that first year, it was over triple.
She was a special ed. teacher teaching emotionally disabled grade schoolers (including a first grader that tried to kill his grandmother with a tv power cord). There is no way that I worked harder than she did.
I'm definitely in the camp that thinks cell phones have something to do with what's happened since 2012. If we start from the iPhone in 2007, it seems plausible to me that a 5-ish year lag is consistent with the time it took for smartphones to rise in popularity and their effects to filter into society. (I got my first smartphone around 2012, by which time pretty much everyone else I knew already had one.) That's at least a gesture toward explaining why there was a peak around 2012. What it doesn't explain is why the ascent to that peak was so much steeper in math than in reading.