Never learned the concept of parody, did you? Obviously, you wouldn’t have a clue if I were to say that “No one ever taught you concept of agreement” but since you won’t have a clue what I’m referring to (it’s taught in composition classes, tp which you obviously didn’t pay too much attention), I won’t go there.
Have an Atlanta elementary student read to you the 400 page cheating scandal report just released by Ga. Gov. Nathan Deal-I believe it was released today-after reading, please give all of us stoopid people your reason for defending such blatant corruption that spanned ten years- you must be government teachers or union minions?
Can I bid on your straw business? I could get rich selling the quantity needed to create your enormous strawmen.
A National Recommended Reading List.
100 books for kindergarten, 200 for 1st grade, 300 for 2nd grade, etc. Byt 12th grade that would be 9100 books. So classified by age and subject any kid that wants to learn something shouldn’t have to hunt for the best books.
Get college credit for SOME courses by just getting at least an 80% score on a test for the subject. Specify what books contain all of the relevant information for the course.
Now I bet we will have teachers and publishing companies screaming about that.
Here are a couple of suggestions:
Teach Yourself Electricity and Electronics by Stan Gibilisco
The Electricity
The Electricity
The Art of Electronics by Horowitz & Hill
The Art
Solve Elec: draw and analyze electrical circuits
http://www.physicsbox.com/indexsolveelec2en.html
Logisim: Digital logic circuit simulator
http://ozark.hendrix.edu/~burch/logisim/
The Tyranny of Words by Stuart Chase
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,759006,00.html
All Day September by Roger Kuykendall
http://www.feedbooks.com/book/2295/all-day-september
THE YEAR WHEN STARDUST FELL by Raymond F. Jones
Eight Keys to Eden by Clifton Mark
http://www.xenodochy.org/ex/abstract/eightkeys.html
The Fourth R : George O. Smith
psik
To all the people railing on teachers, and teacher’s unions, in this thread, I have a question for you. Why, in this age of free access to most of society’s information, libraries, free online lessons, free books, relatively easy mobility, and open statistic data regarding school effectiveness, is it any teacher/school’s fault that a kid doesn’t know what he is supposed to know?
I don’t say that to excuse ineffective teachers or schools, but this isn’t like it was 30 years ago when moving required more than perusal of Craigs List. Or when looking up a fact required an expensive encyclopedia set. Or when the average person had no idea how good or bad the school they attended was. Or even when you couldn’t google damn near anything, and gain and understanding of nearly any topic. Teachers are no longer the gatekeepers to information anymore (assuming they once were). There is nothing preventing a student from mastering any subject if they have the drive and desire to do so.
More importantly, why is is okay that parents abdicate the responsibility for their own kid’s educational success to teachers? I know you guys think you are fighting the good fight, but if you spend half the time you devote to trying to destroy unions on convincing parents to give a shit (even just one shit), you would get much, much better outcomes. Particularly since parents have a far greater affect on a student’s education than teachers do.
ENOUGH!
Everyone will refrain from any more snide comments about other posters.
[ /Moderating ]
I’m not quite sure how this fits into the rest of the thread.
Why don’t you take the time to lay out a coherent idea and apply it to the discussion in this thread rather than simply throwing out a short list of books?
What makes you think that Dem Pols think Public schools are particularly great places to get an education? Maybe they support them because they promise to give everyone–even the poorest–some kind of education.
Whatever, guy. I get paid for my writing, so I must be doing something right.
Well, here’s the thing.
If they were concerned about that, they wouldn’t take their money and then block any effort at reform.
They would work to make them better, and really, they don’t. But their kids don’t have to go there. Their kids go to private schools. Would you fly an airline that none of the executives of that company would put their family members on?
And again, I suspect the purpose of public education is to keep a certain percentage of the population dependent on government for life, not to actually prepare them for life.
This is just silly. It’s because of the internet that people know how ridiculous teachers unions have become. We know that American education does not compare well to other countries, we know that education majors score in the bottom half in the GRE, we know that tenure is a benefit not offered to other professional workers, and we can find stories about teachers being paid for years to do nothing.
But the fact that teachers unions are acting more like Teamsters than professionals doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t attract better teachers and pay them a salary that is competitive with other career choices. It also doesn’t mean parents are off the hook for not making their kids behave and study.
In the end, your argument leads to the conclusion that we don’t need teachers at all. Which I would imagine is not where you want to be going.
One thing I haven’t seen brought up in this thread is the effect on student performance of the constant denigration these days of public schools and teachers. When I was in school 35-45 years ago, my parents (who were Republicans) never questioned the teachers’ ability or authority. This was true of most of my friends too - if a teacher reported something unfavorable to their parents, the parents never took the side of their kid. And make no mistake: there were slacker teachers then too.
But the kneejerk populism that’s crept into public discourse can’t be helping with the teachers’ very difficult task of getting kids to work hard. (It’s worth noting that all areas of the political spectrum bear some responsibility for this mindless populism: liberals in the 1960s didn’t trust Nixon and the Pentagon, and conservatives today don’t trust experts they consider elitist.)
One curious implication of George Bernard Shaw’s famous aphorism (“Those who can do, those who can’t teach”) is that… anyone can teach. Which is total bullshit. I’m an engineer, but I taught when I was in college, and I teach a few times a month in my current job, mostly introductory math and science to people moving into my office. While it’s true that anyone who knows a subject can get up in front of a class and talk about it, that ain’t teaching. And anyone who’s had to suffer through instruction from such a person knows it. Effective teaching requires preparation, organization and first-rate communication skills. I believe that to be a good teacher, you have to have a genuinely deep interest in the subject matter, and an equally strong interest in transmitting this knowledge to people. Add in the class control issues (which I’ve pretty much been spared, since I’ve mostly taught adults), and you will find that yes, teaching is a real job, and an important one. Other than family members, the people who have made the most positive impact on my life have all been teachers.
I acknowledge that there are more demanding skills and jobs (surgeon, rocket scientist, Navy Seal etc.) But unlike teaching, most people don’t think they could step up and do those jobs. If you don’t think teaching is a ‘real job’ you should try it and see.
An anecdote: I play guitar, and I once had a question about a maintenance procedure. Specifically, I was having a hard time pulling a piece of metal hardware that was fitted tightly into a circular hole on the guitar’s top. I assumed that the technicians had a way of doing this that avoided scratching the top’s finish, and I emailed the the manufacturer asking how I could do this. The technician’s reply was:
“It’s not hard, just pull it out.”
I would bet a thousand dollars that the author of that reply thinks that teaching is an easy job.
Every profession has really good practitioners and bad. They have everything in between. That is reality. Why do we need to broom all the teachers that somebody thinks are inadequate yet keep shitty lawyers and doctors in place.
How do you really judge whether a teacher is sub par?
This is a bunch of right wingers using their platform to scream about education in order to privatize it. They see money at the end of the rainbow that can be attained by saying education is bad and teachers are bad. Some people, are easily swayed. They will buy what is sold as long as you say it often enough. The right wing press says it over and over.
Point out some public education stars, kids from poor neighborhoods that go to ivy league schools, and it is because they are anomalies. The educational system harmed them. They rose over it. BS
Here is your Ivy League:
20 years ago we did not have computers that fit in a pocket but more powerful than the IBM 3033, a 1980 mainframe that cost $3,000,000.
Children today don’t have any more hours in a day than they did 50 years ago. But now they are bombarded with ridiculous amounts of garbage information. How are 6 year olds supposed to recognize stupid trash? We could have created a National Recommended Reading List decades ago.
I didn’t encounter this until last year.
The Tyranny of Words (1938) by Stuart Chase
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,759006,00.html
psik
I thought being able to read was relevant.
I also suggested getting college credit by passing tests without taking courses.
The title of the thread is FIXING EDUCATION not Fixing the Educational SYSTEM.
So couldn’t supplying all kids with a great list of books fix education for SOME of them. I taught myself trigonometry in grade school from my sisters high school book. Who needs teachers? 
psik
Doctors and lawyers don’t have tenure, and both the ABA and AMA have procedures in place to help remove the licenses of incompetent professionals.
And if you can’t judge whether a teacher is sub-par, then how can you possibly say that they are doing a good job now? What’s the alternative, just say that once someone is hired they can work forever because it is not possible to know whether they are doing an adequate job? The opposition to merit pay just stuns me. In my decades of working in a dozen companies in very dissimilar jobs I have always been judged on my performance.
I’m not right wing and I don’t want to privatize education, but something is wrong with out current system. In fact, I’d say everything is wrong in our current system. The idea that kids in areas with small tax bases not only have the burden of growing up in disadvantaged homes, they also have schools that are inferior to better off children is so un-American that it makes my blood boil. The fact that our teachers come from the lower strata of college students is unacceptable. Having teachers perceived as interchangeable line workers instead of professionals does not help anyone.
Gonzo -
Yes, every profession has it’s bad practioners. Although, personally, I think there are no bad employees, just bad hires. A guy who is worthless in place A might be great in place B. The problem with the Teacher’s unions is that they defend the bad practioners to the hilt, making it nearly impossible to fire them. (Seriously, a pedophile on the payroll for 14 years to do nothing? REally?)
I’m for privatization because it will foister competition. Competition breeds excellence. The bad teachers won’t last. And conversely, neither will bad students. if you are a trouble maker, they’ll get you out of there.
You have unionization of teachers in this country because we have relegated teaching to a disrespected, underpaid career that needs the defending a union can give. We’re unwilling to pay them anything NEAR what a good teacher deserves, so they’ve had to resort to the protection of unions instead of money and respect. Tenure for teachers is given in place of real salaries–we tell teachers, “Well, we can’t afford to pay you the crazy salaries you say you deserve, and maybe DO deserve, so how about we put you through a short probationary process, weed out the terrible, totally unskilled teachers, and assure the others that they have some modicum of job security–is that okay instead of money?” That’s the deal we’ve made. Live with it. You (or your parents) decided that you’d rather award tenure than pay salaries.
A teacher is as good as his students. Every year they get a new group in and sometimes they just are a poor group. That of course is proof the teacher is slipping and should be fired.
Judging teachers performance is difficult and surely inexact. The tests are poor ways to judge. Many schools are teaching kids to pass the test . The test is not a test of knowledge when that is done.
It would be difficult to keep from teaching for the test. Your funding is predicated on it.
Doctors and lawyers cover up poor performance in their fields. Police cover for each other.
And where, pray tell, will the “bad students” go? Drop out to face an increasingly complicated and information-intensive society with even fewer tools than they might have had if they stayed? Moved to another privatized school, and another, and another, in some revolving door of failure? Or just go off and discorporate themselves quietly, saving everybody all sorts of money and aggravation?
One of the problems with “merit pay” systems is that the teacher has no control over the base line of the incoming students, and virtually no control over the curriculum. Demonstrating an “increase in reading ability by 1 grade level for more than 95% of the class” or some other supposedly objective criterion is far, far different in a classroom full of English second language students, or socioeconomically disadvantaged inner city youth with apathetic or nonexistent parents, than it is in a white, middle class suburban school.
If privatized schools cherry pick their students, their teachers will appear meritorious. Conversely, those students not chosen (like your “bad students” above), and their teachers, will come off rather dramatically less so. And that cherry picking need not be imposed as a condition of enrollment, but imposed by the circumstances of location and transportation requirements. Even people holding a voucher for tuition may well have serious problems in simply getting to certain schools, making the cherry picking *de facto *but still quite real.