My wife is a teacher, and a damn good one. She has 2 degrees in education, and has a firm grasp on how to teach as well as what is to be taught. Her number one complaint about her job is that most parents have the attitude that “beacuse I went to school, I must know how to teach as well.”
Many states are facing teacher shortages and thus are allowing people to become certified as teachers with no teaching degree and as little as 6 weeks of training. The worst new teachers are more often than not the product of these programs. They are people who became dissatisifed with their original field, or retired, or wanted to “make a difference.” They know almost nothing about how to teach, and it is painfully obvious in the classroom.
I mean no offense, but it is likely this physics teacher and you have more in common than not. He is probably quite adept at physics, but knows nothing about teaching. Your daughter would be far better off with a real teacher who learns physics than a physicist who learns teaching.
racekarl, I don’t expect to walk from my cubicle to a classroom - except as a student. I know I need education classes. The Master Plan is to take a year off after retirement and go back to college. I know enough about teaching to know that I’m not yet qualified to do it, but I’ve conducted enough training, including the 2 algebra classes that I taught, to know that I am pretty good at it.
Back in the old days when my options were limited to “girl” jobs, I thought I might want to teach. Instead, I joined the Navy, then studied engineering. Still, the lure of chalk dust remained strong. I hope to be there in about 8 years.
andymurph64, that’s a big part of why I’m working as an engineer now - once the kid is out of college, I can afford to work for half or less of my present salary.
On another forum I have found an English teacher who teaches science also. Yet she spells the chemo treatments that her mother had as kimo. And that’s just the beginning!
Fairy Chat, under the circumstances it sounds like you made a careful and reasonable decision about revamping the middle school report. But why fault the teacher for recognizing a good project? I know of one case where an elementary school project left adult scientists amazed. It was a very simple project.
If it is any consolation to you, I graduated from a high school where actual lab work was not available for science classes. And we had no science projects at all. That did not seem to handicap me in any way at the university level.
I do commiserate with your daughter and her classmates for having such a boring class and with you for not having your child sufficiently challenged. You deserve better.
I support salaries that are at least equal to what a babysitter would receive and much higher standards for teachers in knowledge of their subject matter, educational psychology, classroom management, etc.
All you people complaining about the salaries the teachers make should move north. Median salary around here (NYC suburbs) is around 70 K, Nassau just under, Westchester just over. (2000 numbers) cite
Do we get teachers who don’t know their stuff? Had a discussion a while back with my brother. Someone made a joke about the French and war. Got to when the last war was they won without the US bailing them out. Was it Napoleon? Was it the Crimean War? Were they in that one, and did they win? (lest you think us effete intellectuals, it was a weird discussion over beer and wings en route to a boxing match)
"Hey Joe, was France in that war? "
“I don’t know.”
“Hey Joe, what do you teach?” (I think he teaches middle school)
“Social studies.”
and he doesn’t even know if they were in it. Tech geeks missing history is one thing, but a history teacher?
Tho it should be repeated, a teacher who may not know all THAT much about a subject who CONVEYS what they know is better than a great authority who doesn’t communicate it.
To play devil’s advocate here, the teacher described in the OP just sounds like he’s in way over his head to me. He’s probably reasonably qualified to teach a non-honors physics course but isn’t prepared for the faster pace or increased expectations of an honors course. (The case reminds me very much of my mother, who is an elementary special-education teacher; she’s generally excellent at her job, but the few years that the school district had her teaching gifted children were miserable, because she was completely unprepared for it. It’s a different world.) If he sticks with it and gets help learning how to cope with an honors class, it’ll probably get better, especially if he’s younger and needs more experience anyway.
I sympathize with you, FairyChatMom, and I hate to say this, but it could be a lot worse. My high-school physics teacher, for example, is one of the few teachers I’ve ever met to obviously know what he was doing but actively resist teaching us how to do it. (The fact that he couldn’t pronounce basic terminology like “joules” and “components” right to save his life didn’t help.)
This is exactly how my daughter’s middle school social studies teacher approaches her subject. The children read the book all class period (she says that’s the only way she knows they’ll actually read it), and then she has them fill in the blanks in a worksheet. One sentence in a worksheet I reviewed was: “Here, the problem is _____.”
I met the teacher during Open House at the beginning of the year. She actually retired at the end of last year, but when the school’s new seventh-grade social studies teacher and their sixth-grade one both quit just before the beginning of the school year, the principal called her and begged her to come back for one last year. She is, not surprisingly, not motivated to go above and beyond the call of duty. I talked to her about her class; because of teacher shortages she started the year with 35 students (10 more than the state mandates) and the state requirements for social studies had been changed at the end of last year, so she was trying to fit what used to take a semester into nine weeks. She said that having the class read and do busywork was about all she could manage under those circumstances. I expressed sympathy and told her that once the class size issue was resolved, I’d be happy to do anything she needed in the way of gathering material to supplement the book (which, like most social studies books, is deadly boring). She looked at me and said, “Oh, they’ll put her in the other class. I never get to keep the A students.” :rolleyes:
Unfortunately, the class that was ultimately added, with the new teacher who sounds like she’s got at least some enthusiasm for teaching, was at a time that conflicted with the rest of my daughter’s schedule. So, in the interest of keeping her in the excellent math class, the excellent science class, the excellent English class, and the excellent (believe it or not) home ec class, we decided she could stay in the mediocre social studies class. She reads her book, she fills in her worksheets, I give her supplemental materials at home (I try desperately to convey my belief that history and geography are anything but boring), and she fills in all the extra class time by doing her math homework and drawing little animals on the inside of her folder. Her teacher is content to let her do this, and seems relieved that I’ve given up trying to change anything.
My daughter had teachers all through elementary school who were not only excellent but award-winning. She had very good teachers in all her sixth-grade classes, although she was a little bored in some of them. I look at this teacher as a learning experience for her. Sometimes you just don’t get the best of everything.