Apparently there was a contract negotiation, several years before my wife started working there, in which the district offered to give the teachers a raise and in return stop paying for their medical insurance. Foolishly, IMO, the teachers accepted.
Mine pays for mine, but its another $1400 a month to cover my hisband and son, and that with a high deductible.
Depends on whether or not a majority of teachers had access to coverage from their spouses/partners.
I worked for a company where union leaders were shocked that a workforce that was predominantly young adults voted to take a cash stipend in lieu of health care coverage. There were probably 20% of the workforce plus retirees that were using 90% of the benefits. Older people who had been there for decades and people who were “bridged” from retirement age at 55 to Medicare eligiblity. The retirees couldn’t vote and were shocked by the “betrayal”
My older kid (and currently my younger kid) are going through on Beast Academy, which seems to really try to do something like this for math by using interesting sorts of problems to attach to the lower level concepts. WAY better and more interesting than Khan Academy.
But my kids are also highly-self-motivated and good at math, and I know the subject in this thread is more how would you do this for kids in general. I don’t know that Beast Academy works for kids who aren’t good at math already without a lot of extra scaffolding.
Beast Academy is pretty unique. Its a homeschool curriculum, and I don’t know how the one-line version presents itself, but at least in concept it expects a full time adult to help worh the sense making. Its also aimed at establish8jg very high level mathematical reasoning skills: the Art of Probelm Solving books, for older students, are fantastic, but designed to prep kids for the AIME and above. Its really the complete opposite in thinking from your typical computer-mediated program.
To be clear, I’m not talking about students learning remotely, but in a lab setting, where each student works independently (on a computer) with a teacher available for assistance. This is a far cry from the mess of options attempted during Covid. But Covid should have provided school districts with a foundation on which to build nontraditional student learning – some clues about effective programs, administrative tasks they’d like included, etc.
Note that most of the services on your list of things only a teacher can do – psychologist, social worker, etc – are a distinctly different aspect of teaching/learning than presenting students with facts & new concepts. Teachers frequently complain that being required to perform these services, on top of administrative tasks, leaves them little time to actually teach the material. Letting computers teach subject matter frees up teachers for holistic support. And in this regard, computers can do many things a teacher can’t – concept review, alternative presentation, problem area diagnosis, etc.
While I don’t have teaching experience, I have a great deal of classroom experience, and I’d say your view of teaching is rather idealistic, it requires teachers be engaged & competent, when in reality there are a tremendous number of teachers who are not interested, or capable, of providing either facts or support of any kind. And no matter how dedicated & competent, no teacher can provide support OR subject matter to a class of 30 kids and reach all, or even most, of them. Computer learning can rescue students inflicted with bad teachers, while aiding the good teachers.
Facts are essential components of productive thinking – thinking the earth is flat leads to disastrous space exploration.
But the beauty of computers is they can be programmed to present material in multiple ways – read the problem to aural learners, show it to visual learners, let read/write learners copy it on a writing app, or combinations of the above. Not long ago I watched a 2-year-old learning to read almost entirely independently on a tablet. She selected a book, the story was read to her, each word was highlighted as it was sounded, with links & pictures to illustrate. It all ran at her speed, font size, screen colors were adjustable, etc. No preschool teacher in the world can provide that sort of learning-to-read experience for a classroom full of kids.
I think this is a pretty good summary of the situation. Sadly.
I’m not sure how you expect me to parse this. Everyone has a great deal of classroom experience. The vast majority of Americans have at least 12 years of it. It doesn’t grant a special insight into teaching. It’s like saying, “I’m not a dentist but I have a great deal of chewing experience.”
My view of teaching is quite frankly deeply cynical, but I’ve come by it honestly.
In physics classes, there are what they call “conceptual classes” (with no math beyond basic arithmetic), “algebra-based classes”, and “calculus-based classes”. You can count on the students in the algebra-based classes to be fully competent with arithmetic, and you can count on the students in the calculus-based classes to be fully competent with algebra.
As for the learning techniques attempted during covid: Yeah, they sucked. But the thing is, they sucked less at the end than they did at the beginning. Over the course of the pandemic, we improved. If we kept on working on improving remote learning and computer-assisted learning and recorded lectures and all the rest, maybe eventually we’d get to something that doesn’t suck, and maybe, ideally, we’d get to it before the next time when we need it (because that next time will happen eventually). But instead, schools across the country just gave up entirely.
Of course being a student grants special insight into teaching – their quality has an immediate and long-range affect affect on your life, so you’d better believe students are assessing a teacher’s methods, strengths, & weaknesses. Not necessarily in a way that fits formal evaluation methods, but read through any teacher ratings site & it’s remarkable how the students pinpoint the key aspects of a given teacher’s class. How the material is presented, whether the teacher is a hardass, are assessments easy or absurdly difficult, is the teacher a lech, do they stick with the book, or expand on the material, etc etc.
If my fillings fall out every time I chew, I know that dentist is no good. Just because I can’t explain the specific tooth-filling technique he’s doing wrong doesn’t mean my assessment is not accurate.
Granted.
Also granted.
Now at what point does this insight translate into telling dentists how they could be doing their job better? You can say, “Hey! Do those fillings better!” But that doesn’t really help, y’know?
Here’s the thing. Teachers burn out at stupendous rates in their first few years, and the ones who quit include the starry-eyed idealists who had that one amazing class: the one where the curtains were thrown back and they saw how one excellent teacher could change the world. The ones who say, “Mr. Johnson changed my life and now I want to do the same for the next generation!” They’re no more or less likely to break on the wheel of the system than the next newbie.
There’s no special insight. If anything, it’s the opposite. It’s very difficult to prepare somebody for the classroom, because from the outside it looks simple.
And here’s the paradox. The very best teachers? The ones who are exciting and engaging and effective? Or the ones with super effective classroom management where everyone is polite and studious and everything runs like clockwork? They make it look easy. They make it feel easy. And after a number of years, after you make a career of it, it does get easier - but that’s because you grow your callouses and learn your tricks and by slow degrees grow comfortable standing in the middle of the rapids.
Meanwhile, the first-year teachers cry themselves to sleep and wonder what the hell am I doing wrong because Mr. Johnson has all the same students but they act so differently in his class and I can’t keep up with my lesson plans and they want me to learn three new computer programs and four new websites and I think I saw Johnny hiding a bruise under his sleeve and I have that curriculum meeting coming up and how the FUCK does Ms. Smith go so long without peeing she’s like 80 years old and and and and and
You have no special insight.
Or maybe I’m completely off base. It wouldn’t be the first time and won’t be the last. Maybe you really do see into the heart of the profession.
So I take it all back. I apologize without reservation. And I beg you, beg you beg you beg you to become a teacher. You’re so badly needed.
I would like to point out that my original suggestion of using technology was intended to help teachers. Because with less teachers, those remaining will be getting more students, more responsibilities, and no more pay. How’s that for insight.
As I explained previously, my insight says technology can help teachers do their job better. I stand by that – Khan Academy is better at teaching math/science than any teacher I had in 12 years of school.
This is a separate topic. But if new teachers are quitting in droves, maybe someone should take a look at the teacher education curriculums because this suggests they aren’t effectively preparing teachers for the reality of the classroom.
Look, I understand what you’re saying about the unquantified aspects of teaching & how important they are. But the reality is that most teachers don’t have those skills, so while computer learning may not be as effective as a great teacher, it is much more effective than bad teachers. And it can be a useful tool for the great ones.
The biggest objection from teachers seems to be the increased workload. Because you’re already overwhelmed. But technology could decrease that workload. Now that would require qualified administrators selecting and overseeing the integration of learning apps into the current system so, no, it’s not likely to happen anytime soon. But desperation is a good motivator so maybe this crisis will help.
Why is the response to, “Let’s try something new in education”, always, “So why don’t you become a teacher if you think it’s so easy”? I don’t think it’s easy, I think our educational system needs a major overhaul. Based on teacher burnout and student test scores, what we’re doing is not working. Maybe teacher unions will drive this overhaul.
it never goes that way. Not in the real world and not in this thread. It goes like this:
Civilian: “Let’s try this new thing!”
Educator: “Well, we have tried it. Here are some reasons it’s not working, or why it’s not feasible yet, or why it works but only very circumstantially, or why it’s just a bad idea overall, or how it could work under a different structure or system of supports. But here are some things we are currently doing. And here are some things we’d like to try. And and and and.”
Civilian: “Okay, but I strongly feel like this would work really well if you guys would just, like, do it?”
Educator: “…but all those things we just said?”
Civilian: “Yes, but as a parent and/or student and/or politician and/or [take your pick] I think I have a special insight that you might lack.”
Educator: “O-okay! Okay, good! Come be a teacher! It’s really hard! We could use that insight!”
Civilian: “Oy, here we go again with the why don’t you do it if you think it’s so easy.”
Educator: “No, you don’t. Go away!”
You want to improve education in America? Shoot every sonofabitch with a Doctorate in Education. Then identify every politician who has written, supported or voted for any bill that tries to tell us what to do, how to do it or mandates that we teach/don’t teach any particular curriculum. They get torn apart by giant tortoises, for the amusement of the children and the edification of others.
No computer program is going to help teachers unless it is designed by teachers and you can quickly and easily demonstrate that it takes less time to use than the alternative and gives greater flexibility to the front line educator. Then go away and let us break it. Personally I am very impressed by Google Classroom, because there were practical teachers involved throughout the development of the program and it shows. But it is a tool to help teachers, not replace them.
You want more people to become teachers? Stop making the profession a target for every idiotic idea to come down the pike. Then get the fuck out of the way and let us do our damn jobs!
No, it gives you exactly the same insight into teaching that every other person who’s gone through the educational system has. There’s nothing “special” about it at all.
Oh, that’s DEFINITELY true. In my brief exposure to education classes, they did things like trying to prepare us for teaching high school by giving us field experience in a 3rd-grade classroom. When we asked when we’d be getting any high school field experience, they told us that we were free to schedule that on our own, as long as we kept up with our class time at the college plus our assigned field experience time, which together comprised all of the time in the school day.
We have alligators down here, but I presume any kind of reptile would do?
And I stand by what I said, which is the extremely rote, “master topic 1.234 before looking at topic 1.235” approach is inherently lower level thinking, which makes the learning both tedious and short lived.
Post pandemic closures, all the teachers I know agree that more than anything, students came back demotivated and unwilling to engage in higher-order thinking. This is a problem inherent to computer-mediated, self-paced instruction. Ita lonely, linear, and lower-level.
I’ve talked with several friends that taught and one that still teaches high school.
The common concern is a rigid curriculum and standardized tests.
Teachers can’t plan their classes anymore. There’s no creativity or inspiration in teaching.
It’s all about checking off the list of things to cover and make sure the kids passed the required tests.
A close friend taught algebra and basic math classes. She was required to use the tests that came with the textbook. The special needs kids went to the testing center. She couldn’t even give them a simple pop quiz.
I can see why people don’t want careers teaching anymore. It’s assembly line work.