HERE is a linky-poo. The only majors lower than education are trade school, agriculture tech, consumer sciences, health sciences, business management & office, and community & personal services. Of the 24 majors listed, education was 7th lowest. Trade school, ag tech, health sciences, business office are probably mostly 2 year programs. So among 4-year degrees, education majors are pretty damn low.
Look at it statistically. If the new hires had a typical distribution (some good, some bad, some average…), and the ones you fired were the bottom 10%, then you’d have an overall improvement.
This, of course, is predicated on being able to define “bottom 10%” in a meaningful way, and then being able to accurately identify said bottom 10%.
For several years I taught a course in history of math. All math ed teachers were required to take it. A lot of math majors did too and some from Arts or other sciences. The very worst were the math ed majors. For the most part, they just had no feel for math. But HS math teachers are in demand. The teachers who will not accept criticism or correction are the worst.
Seriously. Of all the things a teacher could get wrong, I can’t see getting worked up about something so arbitrary and made-up as spelling. And there is plenty to worry about. The insisting that a kid is wrong when the kid is right that others have mentioned is seriously wtf. I remember having an argument with my teacher in 3rd grade because he insisted that rabbits are rodents, even after I brought one of his books on animals down off the shelf to show that they aren’t.
Pretty easy to screw up if you’ve never even noticed that there’s a difference until reading this thread, and if you will promptly forget it upon closing the thread. Although maybe this thread will cause it to be one of those annoying facts that I don’t care about that sticks in my head for some reason. Maybe I can trade that knowledge for something useful.
Hari SeldonThat sounds like a cool class.
Or, it was just a typo, one that spellcheck wouldn’t catch.
Sum part uv me agries that speling is arbitrarie and nuthing to get worked up about, but on the other hand, peeple hav to cummunikate using langwage, and won uf the ways to make things unambiguus is to hav a standerd way of speling wurds.
I had a college English professor who marked down for use of a serial comma, and refused to acknowledge that it is a stylistic alternative that exists, or that multiple style usage guides exist. Simply, if one didn’t follow his own pet elements of style, they were marked down.
I had a paper reduced from an A to a low C just based on accumulated comma subtractions 
(I hereby declare open comma-hunting season on this post for any style pedants that wish to do so)
Then according to that article, he was going against the venerable Strunk and White and The Chicago Manual of Style.
I pay attention to the grammar and spelling in my students’ papers too, but it never counts for more than 12/75 points. That means that the worst a student could get because of grammar alone would be an 84. Reducing an A to a C because of a debatable grammatical point is asinine, even for an English teacher.
How long ago was this? I was taught all though elementary, junior, and senior high school that the serial comma was, in fact, the correct usage.
You guys need to post this stuff on the internet.
I bet it would be viewed by millions of people in a week. It would spread like a wildfire.
I know that it’s a common error to spell Gandhi as Ghandi, but my daughter’s 5th grade teacher had it misspelled on the weekly spelling vocabulary list.
:eek::eek::eek: Oh Me God
I commiserate with those who have had ignorant teachers. I’ve had my share too.
What percentage of teachers are actually education majors? If you are going to be a teacher, you do have to take a good number of education courses, but that doesn’t make you an education major.
Cite? (I just want to know if you are speaking of the AFT or are you saying that the NEA went ape shit.) If it was the NEA, please cite.
Most of the teachers that I know support testing for teachers. They don’t want the deadwood making their jobs harder.
I had to pass the National Teachers Exam before I began teaching. BTW, most teachers are certified. That sometimes has little to do with testing in many states.
As teachers we are also. It’s called professional growth (usually accounted for on an annual basis) and recertification (usually requiring additional college courses over a period of five or ten years.) I don’t know why you would think that we wouldn’t be expected to study and stay current.
We are particularly fortunate that in Nashville, Peabody College of Vanderbilt is ranked #1 in teacher education in the nation. As a research center, it is just amazing.
I’ve never even met anyone with BA in education. In California, most teachers have a BA in the field they teach, sometimes with extra courses to specialize in pedagogy.
The state then has certain requirements for issuing a credential based on having a bachelor’s (in general) and a certain number of credits in the field. The local school district in turn requires a credential as it sees fit, and then determines how to place the teacher.
I know quite a few people with PhDs in education, but they typically end up in administration.
An A to a low C seems like more than a bit much for comma errors, but handing in assignments in accordance to a class’s style guide is not unusual. When I did papers for my journalism classes, I had to follow AP style or get marked off (and AP has some weird rules, like the hyphenating of “teen-ager,” which may have been revised in more recent editions.) For my psychology papers, APA style. For general English classes, Chicago Manual of Style. However, this would cost us, at most, half a letter grade.
So, marking off for inability to follow the given style conventions for a class was not unusual, in my experience. The amount you were marked off, though, is totally disproportionate to the error.
I never taught English (my credential was computer science), but I’ve given quite a few lectures and workshops on freelance writing as a career. I tell the students that they will spend their lives working to a style guide. “Correct” and “Incorrect” are irrelevant. If your boss or editor says you should use serial commas, then you by golly use serial commas. If the editor at the next magazine or publishing house says you don’t, then you don’t.
While at school, teacher=editor. Not all teachers require the same things. Figure out what they want and give it to them. It’s a lesson that will serve you well later in life.
But he is. His maternal great-great-great-grandfather, Fulmuth Kearney, left Moneygall, in County Offaly, for New York in 1850.
There’s no doubt, there’s no one as Irish as Barack O’Bama.
Zoe, I’m glad to hear teacher certification is in place. The law I mentioned was passed and later repealed 25 years ago. A lot has changed since then.
This cite understates the teachers association opposition. I lived through that period and saw many, many interviews on our local news. This dragged on for several years.
This was an early attempt to repeal the law.
Heh. A few weeks ago, I sent a note to my fifth-grader’s teacher to tell him that he had misspelled the word “kernel” on their spelling list (spelled it “kernal”).
My seventh-grade social studies teacher used the following spellings: Isreal, Ghandi and Bhuddist. He also wrote in a weird mix of upper- and lower-case letters. It wasn’t random, like StudlyCaps. For instance, his L’s and T’s were upper-case no matter the location.
This must really stuck with me. It was almost thirty years ago.