Is this teacher fucked up?

[pancakes3]

1. She’s not verbalizing this to her students. She’s venting to a friend.
2. She’s still going above and beyond what the other teachers are doing.
3. Her gripes aren’t entirely unfounded. Be it sociological, cultural, or plain coincidence, her experiences have show her that Asians are better than Blacks and Hispanics.

And I’ll +1 that some people are just plain stupid. People are also lazy. When the two combine, you get a truly unteachable student. Algebra I is a heady course. It’s more than just solving for X. You’ve got to be able to keep the order of operations straight. You’ve got to teach how to FOIL. Even worse, you’ve got to teach how to undo FOIL and factor polynomials. Then you’ve got to teach that graphing is a visual representation of algebraic equations, which is a lesson that most kids never get. It’s not too much to assume that many kids don’t understand what this means the first pass around, or the second. It’s not entirely intuitive. For those that it is, it’s still a slow process acclimating the mind to it.

For someone that this isn’t intuitive AND doesn’t put in work to acclimate their mind to it, you’ve got the makings of a crappy math student.

There are many shades of this. Even among well educated people, some people can be very comfortable with differential equations but can’t intuitively figure out probability questions.

[Left_Hand_of_Dorkness]

Today, after weeks on fractions, we retook the test we took last week. I’d marked the answers students had missed; I’d worked with the other teachers to divide them into small remediation groups based on what kinds of problems they’d missed; I’d reviewed ways to model fractions; and I gave them their tests back to correct.

One question said, “Bob and Carol both had same-sized packs of crackers. Bob ate 3/4 of his pack. Carol ate 3/6 of her pack. Who ate more?”

Most kids who’d missed that the first time were able to get it correct on the retest. One kid, though, was struggling; so I noted on his test that I’d given him assistance and started talking wit him. “How can you model these fractions?” I asked, and he chose the Pizza Model (i.e., draw circles cut into slices=the denominator, shading in slices=the numerator). He correctly drew 3/4 and 3/6. “Great,” I said. Which is bigger?

He pointed to 3/6. I, having trouble understanding, said, “Why?” He explained that 3/6 showed more slices. So we compared the sizes of the slices, and he saw that the 1/6 slices were smaller than the 1/4 slices. Then I had him count the shaded slices, seeing that there were the same number of shaded slices in 3/6 and 3/4. “So who had more?” I asked, and he said,

“Neither, they had the same.”

So I went back to the semiconcrete stage: “If you were really hungry, would you rather have these slices [3/4] or these slices [3/6]?” He pointed to the 3/4 slices. “Why?” I asked, and he said,

“Because it’s bigger.”

Progress!

“Great, so that one’s bigger. Which is it?” He answered correctly: 3/4. “So if that one’s bigger, and that one’s 3/4, who ate more?”

“Carol,” he said.

You’ll forgive me, I trust, if I banged my head against the desk at this point. Even after pointing out that Carol ate 3/6 and Bob ate 3/4, and he told me 3/4 was bigger than 3/6, he insisted that Carol ate more, and couldn’t explain why.

Of course that’s my job, so I continued working with him and will continue working with him. But yeah, teachers need the opportunity to vent.

[Left_Hand_of_Dorkness]

@Saint_Cad

In another thread I argued the point that teaching is not respected because non-teachers have no clue what we do. Here’s an example:
No teacher anywhere ever taught (a/b) + (c/d) = (a+c)/(b+d). The closest is with common denominators (a/z) + (b/z) = (a+b)/z but NEVER (a+b)/(2z). I criticize a lot of elementary math instruction but I am positive elementary teachers don’t fuck this up (PEMDAS on the other hand …)

What’s PEMDAS? [edit: duh, Parentheses Exponents etc. … not part of my curriculum so I forgot the mnemonic]

Sad story for you: several years ago a friend of mine, a math grad student, was working over the summer in a math boot camp for elementary teachers who were terrible. I went to his house for dinner one night and asked him how his day was.

“Well,” he said, “I was working with these teachers today, and I had one teacher who didn’t believe me that 1/2 + 1/2 doesn’t equal 2/4. ‘Add the top and add the bottom,’ she said.”

I laughed and said, “You know, you take half a pizza plus half–”

“That’s exactly what I said, and she said, ‘That’s a whole pizza, but that’s different.’ She said she’d always taught add the top and add the bottom, and she always would, and she wasn’t going to change.”

So, unfortunately, there’s at least one elementary school teacher out there who really is that bad.

[suranyi]

@shijinn

this is not, cannot be, true. that’s just fucked up.

I was just reading that one reason many people don’t really understand what teachers do is that they don’t understand themselves how they learned what they know. Whatevery they know how to do today – read a sentence, multiply two numbers – they don’t remember ever not knowing how to do, so they don’t remember the long, hard struggle it was to get to that point.

[Left_Hand_of_Dorkness]

@suranyi

I was just reading that one reason many people don’t really understand what teachers do is that they don’t understand themselves how they learned what they know. Whatevery they know how to do today – read a sentence, multiply two numbers – they don’t remember ever not knowing how to do, so they don’t remember the long, hard struggle it was to get to that point.

Yep: the hard part of teaching isn’t knowing the subject matter, it’s knowing how to break that subject matter into a series of tiny logically-ordered chunks, and then figuring out how to communicate those chunks with a mixture of explanation, modelling, and guided practice, and then how to assess every student’s understanding on a near-constnat basis to figure out if they’ve got it or if they’re missing something, and if they’re missing something, exactly which tiny chunk they need to work on next, and how to work on that chunk with them to correct their misunderstanding, rinse and repeat. Knowing the subject matter is the barest beginning.

[Blaster_Master]

It’s really hard to judge here. In my view, the way math is generally taught in this country is just awful. The whole problem arises because math is purely logical and that’s a problem for several reasons. First, we don’t really think in high logic, there’s a lot of stuff in math that doesn’t necessarily make intuitive until we’ve adjusted our intuition to that logic. Second, math, as much or moreso than any other field, builds upon itself, so if you are missing some earlier concepts, everything that builds on it fails to make sense. Worst, it’s taught as gross memorization, so many teachers just give kids a black box, a magical formula or algorithm where they plug in some numbers in one side and get “the answer” on the other side, but if they don’t understand why they’re plugging in the numbers they are, what that magical black box does, or what the answer means, how can they build on that concept?

I think I was very fortunate in having a majority of my math teachers being the kind who took the time explain what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, and actually deriving the equations or processes. This works great for stuff like the quadratic equation, which is apparently a mystery to a lot of people, but it works just as well for simple stuff like deriving the multiplication table, which my second grade teacher meticulously did with us.

So, for stuff like history, where you can have different degrees of understanding the concepts, like being able to give no reasons, a few reasons, or lots of reasons for various historical events, math is such that, you’re either completely right or completely wrong. This is all fine and good if you’re good at straight memorization, but that’s not going to help you actually understand what’s going on. And, in my opinion, if you’re not understanding, you’re not really educating.

But really it sounds to me like if all her kids are stupid, then the problem is with her teaching. She could even give the perfect lecture and create the perfect study guide for someone who learns like her, but if that’s not how her students learn, they will only pick up so much of it. That she may be blaming it on race, in my mind, is a completely different issue.

So, where’s the voting option that she’s just a bad teacher?

[StusBlues]

**

@Left_Hand_of_Dorkness

Today, after weeks on fractions, we retook the test we took last week. I’d marked the answers students had missed; I’d worked with the other teachers to divide them into small remediation groups based on what kinds of problems they’d missed; I’d reviewed ways to model fractions; and I gave them their tests back to correct.

One question said, “Bob and Carol both had same-sized packs of crackers. Bob ate 3/4 of his pack. Carol ate 3/6 of her pack. Who ate more?”

Most kids who’d missed that the first time were able to get it correct on the retest. One kid, though, was struggling; so I noted on his test that I’d given him assistance and started talking wit him. “How can you model these fractions?” I asked, and he chose the Pizza Model (i.e., draw circles cut into slices=the denominator, shading in slices=the numerator). He correctly drew 3/4 and 3/6. “Great,” I said. Which is bigger?

He pointed to 3/6. I, having trouble understanding, said, “Why?” He explained that 3/6 showed more slices. So we compared the sizes of the slices, and he saw that the 1/6 slices were smaller than the 1/4 slices. Then I had him count the shaded slices, seeing that there were the same number of shaded slices in 3/6 and 3/4. “So who had more?” I asked, and he said,

“Neither, they had the same.”

So I went back to the semiconcrete stage: “If you were really hungry, would you rather have these slices [3/4] or these slices [3/6]?” He pointed to the 3/4 slices. “Why?” I asked, and he said,

“Because it’s bigger.”

Progress!

“Great, so that one’s bigger. Which is it?” He answered correctly: 3/4. “So if that one’s bigger, and that one’s 3/4, who ate more?”

“Carol,” he said.

You’ll forgive me, I trust, if I banged my head against the desk at this point. Even after pointing out that Carol ate 3/6 and Bob ate 3/4, and he told me 3/4 was bigger than 3/6, he insisted that Carol ate more, and couldn’t explain why.

Of course that’s my job, so I continued working with him and will continue working with him. But yeah, teachers need the opportunity to vent.

I do feel for you, LHoD. I’ve been through it. I remember trying to explain leverage to a fellow student in eighth grade, i.e., how weight further out from a fulcrum exerts more force than the same weight closer to a fulcrum. As soon as I mentioned anything relating to addition or multiplication, he just threw down his pencil. When someone just doesn’t get something, there’s nothing tougher than trying to explain it.

When I was teaching college history, I had one student who was a graduating senior. How she had gotten that far I will never understand; she hadn’t shown me any understanding of anything all semester. Even so, I wasn’t really interested in flunking her. I took extra effort in helping her, seeing her after class to explain that her midterm paper (on Things Fall Apart) had nothing to do with the novel and letting her rewrite it with no penalty (and no real improvement, either, unfortunately). As bad as she’d been all semester, I concluded to myself that I would let her slide with a low D if she showed anything on the final.

The last week of class, I showed an *American Experience *DVD on Fidel Castro. Four days later, we had the final, and one of my questions was, in a nutshell, “write a paragraph on Fidel Castro.” All she got down was that he was from Latin America–not Cuba, just Latin America–surrounded by a bunch of fluff. The rest of the exam was even worse. I never felt more frustrated in my life, but there was honestly nothing else I could do.

[Thudlow_Boink]

@Left_Hand_of_Dorkness

Yep: the hard part of teaching isn’t knowing the subject matter, it’s knowing how to break that subject matter into a series of tiny logically-ordered chunks, and then figuring out how to communicate those chunks with a mixture of explanation, modelling, and guided practice, and then how to assess every student’s understanding on a near-constnat basis to figure out if they’ve got it or if they’re missing something, and if they’re missing something, exactly which tiny chunk they need to work on next, and how to work on that chunk with them to correct their misunderstanding, rinse and repeat. Knowing the subject matter is the barest beginning.

Agreed. Knowing the subject matter is a necessary, but hardly a sufficient, condition for teaching it well.

FWIW, I find that it is much easier to teach complicated math to bright, motivated, well-prepared students than to teach simple math to dim, unmotivated, and/or ill-prepared students.

And the stories you told above make my head hurt.

[Left_Hand_of_Dorkness]

@Blaster_Master

But really it sounds to me like if all her kids are stupid, then the problem is with her teaching. She could even give the perfect lecture and create the perfect study guide for someone who learns like her, but if that’s not how her students learn, they will only pick up so much of it. That she may be blaming it on race, in my mind, is a completely different issue.

So, where’s the voting option that she’s just a bad teacher?

Agreed with this. There are some times when I teach something and it feels like I’m teaching a bunch of bricks for all the understanding my students show. It’s immensely frustrating, but when it happens, it’s a sign that something’s wrong with the pedagogy. Sometimes the fault may be with the curriculum: it might be that your average 8-year-old simply isn’t cognitively ready for equivalent fractions. But in general, if nobody understands the subject the way I’m teaching it, alarm bells go off in my head, and I start thinking of how I could teach the subject differently.

For example, in math I’m a pretty quick study: tell me a rule once and explain why it works the way it works, and I can apply it right away. When I started teaching, I thought that was the way brains worked. It took me years to learn that repeating something wasn’t a sign that I’d failed as a teacher, nor was it a sign that the student was a bad learner; rather, it’s just the way a lot of people work. These days, instead of shying away from constant repetition in order to avoid boring the smart kids, I deliberately repeat as many concepts, using the same words, as I can, because there are a lot of kids who need to encounter the concept a dozen or more times before they internalize it.

[control-z]

She’s just misguided. What she’s seeing as stupidity is probably lack of attention span and lack of interest.

[R3d_Anonymous]

I see you voted the third choice on the poll, pancakes3. I disagree and I actually voted the second choice.

@pancakes3

1. She’s not verbalizing this to her students. She’s venting to a friend.

Okay, but still, that’s a bad mindset to have has a teacher. In my opinion, as a teacher, you should have a positive, encouraging attitude for your students. I just think that even thinking that, is wrong, because she now has this bad attitude about her students. Then when she complains about them all being white or black, that’s just flat-out racist. Overall, I don’t think that’s a good mindset to have as a teacher. Yes, constructive criticism like, “My students just aren’t very good at math,” or, “They have trouble with Algebra,” or, “He/she needs help with factoring,” I can accept. But just flat-out insulting her students, even if it’s secretly, is in my opinion, wrong.

@pancakes3

2. She’s still going above and beyond what the other teachers are doing.

Okay, she is. That’s also why I had a good impression of her at first. But the bad outweighs the good in this case.

@pancakes3

3. Her gripes aren’t entirely unfounded. Be it sociological, cultural, or plain coincidence, her experiences have show her that Asians are better than Blacks and Hispanics.

Alright, I would have been fine with it if she had said something like, “Generally, the Asians tend to have an easier time,” or something like that. But just complaining and venting about it is racist and denying other race’s ability. She’s stereotyping by implying the white and black students can’t do math, or whatever.

The reason I don’t think this is a good teacher is because her attitude is way too negative about her students. I believe that teachers should be optimistic and encouraging.

Just attitude, in my opinion, has a lot of effect on one’s performance. If you have an optimistic one, then you are usually likely to be more effective at getting the task done.

[MandaJo]

@shijinn

that all teachers complain about students being amazingly stupid. that teaching these stupid children is such a chore for teachers that they need to vent just to keep their sanity. you may be all smiles while teaching, but if you’re thinking it, chances are your body language is showing it too. i agree with Saint Cad, your post would be more palatable if you replaced “stupid” with “lack of work ethic”.

that is not true. students who cannot even add fractions would get a PSLE score well below national average. like you said, these students would more likely have a terrible work ethic as opposed to being stupid. if they knew what the fractional notations meant and had bothered to try, they would know two parts greater than half would be more than one whole. it shouldn’t be a big step from there to explain that you’ll need to cut them all to equal parts to calculate the total.

ignorance is not stupidity. if you don’t know something, you could be taught. if you don’t care to learn, you might be inspired. if you’re plain stupid, you’d better be hardworking.

I do truly believe that all teachers have a few stories of times kids were amazingly stupid. This isn’t to say that all kids are amazingly stupid, or that any kids are amazingly stupid all the time, but the sheer frustration of trying to help a kid move themselves forward one tiny little increment is, at times, mind boggling. It’s also simply false, and insulting to kids, to assume that if they are failing to grasp things, they must be lazy. I’ve had some incredibly hard working kids who were still significantly behind their peers, and who have to work a lot harder to still not get to the same place. They just learned more slowly, and some things were more of a struggle for them. I cannot imagine anything those kids would find more demoralizing than to be told they weren’t really trying, and that if they “bothered to try” it would be clear.

However, and I think this is important, being frustrated at my kids when they don’t learn is not the same as not liking them, or respecting them. Their stupidity is age-appropriate: as I said originally, it’s frustrating in the same way watching a 4-year old swing and miss (and miss and miss) at t-ball is frustrating. It’s normal and appropriate for them to be bad at hitting the ball. It’s normal and appropriate that they would need a lot of practice and support to get to the point where they can hit it. But it’s also normal and appropriate to be frustrated by the process.

Teacher-student is complicated. I love my kids. I have bailed them out of jail, held them while they cried, talked to their parents when they couldn’t, helped them file police reports, paid for I can’t even tell you how many important things, edited their college essays and written their rec letters. The more you love them, the more you are involved with them, the more committed to them you are, the more frustrating all this is. The least frustrated teachers I know are the least effective, because they just teach over their kids’ heads all day and never realize how lost the little darlings are. The most frustrated are the ones that do a lot of effective individual tutoring because what makes individual tutoring effective is getting in there and figuring out exactly how they see the problem, exactly what they are understanding, and moving them to what they need to understand.

I was a worse teacher when I gave my kids the benefit of the doubt in terms of understanding. I do a much better job now that get down in the proverbial dirt to really see how their minds work. It’s often amazingly poorly, but understanding that is the first step to fixing it.

[MandaJo]

@Left_Hand_of_Dorkness

Yep: the hard part of teaching isn’t knowing the subject matter, it’s knowing how to break that subject matter into a series of tiny logically-ordered chunks, and then figuring out how to communicate those chunks with a mixture of explanation, modelling, and guided practice, and then how to assess every student’s understanding on a near-constnat basis to figure out if they’ve got it or if they’re missing something, and if they’re missing something, exactly which tiny chunk they need to work on next, and how to work on that chunk with them to correct their misunderstanding, rinse and repeat. Knowing the subject matter is the barest beginning.

I agree with this, but I would take it one step further: it’s understanding what they don’t understand, and how they misunderstand it. It’s not just knowing, say, the supply curve and how to explain it in a dozen logical steps, it’s knowing the five different misunderstandings that will arise about each of those steps (in different combinations for different students) and getting in there early to head those off at the pass without further confusing the kids who got it the first time.

[Left_Hand_of_Dorkness]

@MandaJo

I agree with this, but I would take it one step further: it’s understanding what they don’t understand, and how they misunderstand it. It’s not just knowing, say, the supply curve and how to explain it in a dozen logical steps, it’s knowing the five different misunderstandings that will arise about each of those steps (in different combinations for different students) and getting in there early to head those off at the pass without further confusing the kids who got it the first time.

Well said.

A few years ago, I was teaching a class of second graders about right angles, and one of my brighter kids just wasn’t getting it. I showed him a rectangle and said, “Okay, how many right angles does this shape have?” He gave me a deeply suspicious look and said that it had two.

I was bewildered. “Point to them,” I said, and he pointed to the angles on one side of the shape. I pointed to one of the angles on the other side and said, “What’s this, then?”

He looked at me like I was an idiot and said, “It’s a left angle.”

Thirty seconds after I had my revelation about student misconceptions, he had a revelation about what “right angle” meant. It wasn’t until I understood his particular misunderstanding that I could help him.

[pancakes3]

AU:

This teacher is WRONG? This teacher is FUCKED UP?

Would you rather have a completely unbiased teacher NOT hold these tutoring sessions or this completely fucked up teacher to hold her tutoring sessions? Should she stop? Should she not tutor her kids because she has these heinous hatemongering thoughts?

Of course she’s not a perfect teacher, but I think we can all agree that a perfect teacher is out of the question. The false dichotomy that you’re projecting of her being “not perfect” and therefor “a bad teacher” is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Do you really believe that being race-blind and optimistic trumps being an effective communicator and willing to work an extra 15 hrs a week?

[MandaJo]

To me, the best way to judge her effectiveness is if kids are actually coming 15 hours a week. Kids are very sensitive to having their time wasted, and if they really are lining up outside her room for additional help–and coming from other teachers to get her help–I suspect she’s pretty effective, and just dealing with huge deficiencies in their base knowledge.

If she’s sitting in an empty room waiting for kids that don’t show, and cursing their laziness and stupidity, that’s a sign she’s less effective.

[MandaJo]

@Left_Hand_of_Dorkness

Well said.

A few years ago, I was teaching a class of second graders about right angles, and one of my brighter kids just wasn’t getting it. I showed him a rectangle and said, “Okay, how many right angles does this shape have?” He gave me a deeply suspicious look and said that it had two.

I was bewildered. “Point to them,” I said, and he pointed to the angles on one side of the shape. I pointed to one of the angles on the other side and said, “What’s this, then?”

He looked at me like I was an idiot and said, “It’s a left angle.”

Thirty seconds after I had my revelation about student misconceptions, he had a revelation about what “right angle” meant. It wasn’t until I understood his particular misunderstanding that I could help him.

And now, of course, you mention “Right doesn’t mean not left” in passing and the same kids that would have been confused by that now think it’s funny that anyone would ever think that.

This is why teachers get more effective with time, and why the current school of thought that teachers peak at 5 years (popular in my district right now) is crap: it takes years and years and years to compile all these little passing comments, and people that don’t teach don’t realize that what looks like just a group of very bright kids who get it quickly is actually the result of gentle, preemptive shaping.