I have to say, I heard something today that made me so angry…
A student in class today was talking, it was a literature class, and we got onto the subject of banning books and censorship…then schooling (as most everyone in the class is an education major)…
While my argument is irrelevant to the comment that made me angry, as I claimed that I would be very upset if my child’s school banned all books that could be offensive, because most books that are seen as offensive are viewed in the wrong context or only questionable to mainstream groups (such as christians…example below)
The boy claimed that in a scholastic setting it would not matter if books that were influential (big-picture wise) because in any class, you can not expect children to learn the lessons from these books because…and here it comes…in a classroom setting, you have to teach to the slowest student and ignore the rest…!!! He went on to say that if you teach any other way, you will simply have to lower your expectations repeatedly…
Wow…thats not at all what I expected to come out of his mouth…
and then I brought up an experience that I had…a math teacher named Tony who failed me the first half of the year in high school…and he never let up on me…and pushed and pushed and I got an A in his class the last 9 weeks…I retook the class in summer school with a different teacher, but ended up taking 2 more classes with Tony because he compelled me to learn a lot about math by involving things that were interesting to me…not by lowering his expectation each class…
I just want to say that if my child had been in a classroom where the teacher encouraged children by appealing to the slowest and hoping the others do it on their own, I would have him moved to another teacher as soon as possible, and definately have a talk with PTA, school board, or any other higher-up I could get ahold of, to let them know how dissapointing that kind of teaching is…
Matthew
Exactly what I thought…I mean, ever since day one when I decided on scholastic education for a career, I have been told to have the highest expectations of any student, mostly because if student does bad in class, there are usually underlying reasons, and that if you don’t encourage all students, it just means you’re contributing to the problem…
I think of the ramifications on both ends and shudder…
1.) Slower child is passed because expectations are lowered, and
2.) Lowered expectations cause above-average student to slow down and become bored, leading to failure…
And then I become almost angry again (hours later) because he uses this type of logic to justify the belief that children should not be assigned to read, have access to, or discuss literary works by Twain, for example, because he thinks it is something that a teacher can not put into correct context anyways…only a parent should teach there children about life lessons involving complex issues (statement from him in class)…and well, it upsets me because if he truly feels this way, what is he going to do when he is teaching and his kids are going to public school? or even private school?
That would make me angry too. I always thought that one of the things that made teachers’ jobs difficult was the challenge of teaching kids with divergent levels of aptitude.
We pulled two of our kids out of the same public school on the same day about 9 years ago. Our daughter was in 2nd grade and was struggling to learn to read. Her teacher said that we had to work with her more at home, but when we asked him to let up on the massive spelling packets that went home each week to give us the time at home to work on reading he said NO. Our son who was in 4th grade was way ahead of the rest of his class and getting bored and checking out. His teacher was excited about designing an individualized curriculum for him that woudl hold his interest until the principal told her that she couldn’t. He had to read the same books as the rest of the class (that he’d already read!) We figured that the school was too rigid to meet the needs of either one of them and home schooled them for the rest of the year until we moved to another town.
By the way, I come from a family of teachers and I know they have really hard jobs, especially with the range of levels of ability children in one grade can have (like an old-time one room school house, I always think).
In our case it seemed as if the administration was forcing teachers to hold to some middle ground and yeah - both of our kids were falling through the cracks.
When I was in third grade, my teacher let me have a desk by myself out in the hall. I still had to do the normal homework, but I could do it ahead of time, and I was free to read whatever I wanted as long as I didn’t fall behind.
I must say, I’m very jealous…but I would consider the same thing if I knew I could trust the student and was in the lower grade level like that.
Something about teaching high school kids and allowing them that freedom bothers me, just because the school I went to and the people I know…and the way they would behave…
I was allowed a lot of lee-way (sic) in english throughout high school…mostly because I cared about it a lot and always was done ahead of time…the same with government my senior year…I remember I would do all my work by tuesday and read newsweek and time the rest of the week, and the newspapers…my teacher never seemed to mind, and I enjoyed the class and kept high marks…
a desk in the hall would have been nice, but I say that letting me work on my own thing in my own little corner, where I could contribute or not (depending on how far ahead I was) was very much appreciated
Well, when I was in High School, we had “open campus”. You had to satisfy the requirements of your grade level via the courses you took, but you could leave periods open (no courses) and leave campus. You could also leave campus after eating during your lunch period, and come back in time for next class.
(I wasn’t aware of any classes where you didn’t have to show up as long as you did the reading etc, like some grad school coursework, but I wasn’t aware of any prohibition on it. Probably be hard for the teacher to defend as “really working”)
That’d be me! I went to a parochial school in a small town, so my entire high school class was about 32 kids, and not all of them the brightest. But since the school was so small, they didn’t have the resources or really the inclination to cater to both the slow kids and those who learned faster.
As a result, my high school days were incredibly easy. I never took home homework and I got good grades. But I was woefully unprepared for college, and failed my first semester.
So not everybody will do poorly in a classroom that caters to the lowest common denominator, but sadly it does have lasting effects on the future of those students who could have worked much, much harder and learned much more.
I learned a little more background on him…turns out he is working his way through college as a salesman…and he is known for being relativaly (sic) ruthless (double sic) in his work…I guess he prides himself on the fact that he can convince an older woman, who is physically unable to leave her house, to purchase an expensive lawn mower the week after her husband’s death…
wow…to me that is irrelavent with the schooling issue, but still a little below what I’d be willing to do for 7 an hour…
I just think this means I should be hoping that Mrs. Matthew gets a good job and I could be a stay at home dad/home educator…then I’d worry a little less about these kind of people teaching my children…
I’ve always been told that it was involving spelling errors or grammatical errors…
I could be putting it in there completely wrong…haha…but without spell check, I feel I should put at least something…I just am at work and don’t want to spend the time to look them up…damn I’m lazy
I thought [sic] meant you were repeating something exactly the way somebody else said it and that the errors were not your own.
Like if the guy had sent you an e-mail that said “I am a relativaly ruthless salesman” but you knew that “relativaly” is incorrect, you’d say, “he says he is a ‘relativaly [sic] ruthless salesman.’”
