I was an attorney for several years (still am, in California). But I moved to Ohio some years ago and changed careers. 
It’s not a best practice, but it’s not a crime against humanity, and it’s not enough to draw any sort of conclusion about the teacher: any teacher can look brilliant or incompetent if you look at one small slice, like the sub plans they leave one day.
I think the OP is too quick to judge.
Going to retract any of your false statements, correct your argument or at least address me directly when taking swipes at me?
We really need a head-smacking-wall-smiely. 
I think that no matter how often you, I or anybody else for that matter, points out that you need to take a view of the teacher’s curriculum beyond a single day and consider a multitude of factors in making any judgments… there will still be folks maintaining that their posts are their cites. Heck, we’ve got one math teacher who likes inventing his own facts about teaching and learning English.
Sometimes the fight against ignorance reaches trench war status.
Yeah, maybe. But this isn’t biology class - it’s an environmental unit on wetlands. I imagine when she takes biology they’ll correct this. And at the time I wasn’t thinking it was very funny.
What actually made me sad was when I saw the copyright date of 1997. That told me two things - either in 11 years not a single parent saw this and complained about it, which is sad, or parents have complained about it and the school board hasn’t done anything, which is even sadder.
I don’t want to make a big public issue out of it because for all I know this was a photocopy that only this teacher has been using. But I did try to correct this at the school. I went in with my daughter the next day, and had this conversation in the office:
Sam Stone: “Who do I need to talk to at the school board to inform them that some of their material is wrong?”
Secretary: “What’s the error?”
Sam Stone: “The wetlands unit is teaching kids that beavers are amphibians.”
Secretary: <blank look>
Sam Stone: “…Beavers aren’t amphibians.”
Secretary: “Oh! Well, I don’t know.”
I will take this up with the school board, but my guess is that they will tell me something like it’s old material, and they aren’t responsible for older stuff the teachers might have, and I need to take it up with the teacher. The teacher is very ill and out for the rest of the year. So nothing will happen with this.
This isn’t the first major error I’ve caught, btw. I’ve corrected my daughter’s assignment sheets several times when I’ve found factual errors.
I know how the system works. The school board hires college students in summer to prepare coursework. These kids come in and are told to write a wetlands study guide or whatever, and they get paid student wages for it. Some of them don’t know what they’re talking about. There’s supposed to be fact-checking by teachers, but often the teachers don’t know what they’re talking about either (they rely on the textbooks for the facts), or the teachers are lazy or busy so they give it only a cursory review. So stuff gets through the cracks. Once you start looking at material produced locally or anywhere other than the major educational providers, you find a lot of dreck.
Aside from factual errors, you also find exams with questions that are so poorly worded you don’t know what the student is supposed to do.
It could also be that it was corrected in the next year or two (along with other stuff) and that a new packet was sent out but this particular teacher isn’t using the updated stuff for whatever reason. And if she’s terribly ill and there is a long-term sub, the teacher or someone else may have just directed the sub to use a bunch of dusty district materials that are not good, but better than what the sub could come up with on their own. I know I have a huge pile of district-distributed crap that I never use.
TWEEET!
All right, everyone! Stick to attacking the actual arguments presented and leave the commentaries on other posters for the Pit.
[ /Moderating ] ::: sigh :::
Well tom, the fact of the matter is the DSY’s claims are inventions, fabrications, fiction. While I was certainly in error for pointing out that he likes to debate in such a manner, the fact is that his claims are universally untrue and in several particulars, display a marked ignorance of his own state’s educational standards as well as best practices and the actual craft of teaching.
On a board dedicated to fighting ignorance, spreading ignorance, especially a type that could lead to people losing their jobs over bullshit claims of incompetence, probably shouldn’t be kosher.
Here are Ohio’s standards. That any teacher in Ohio would be unaware of them is doubtful. Here are the ELA topics. Here are their content standards.
Notice that DSY’s claims as to the job of an English teacher are shown to be 100% fictional. Here is a more fleshed out document divided by grade level. Notice that for reading standards, the only real defining metric is the ability wrt poetry are that students must be able to identify the defining characteristics of poetry as a genre as opposed to prose, nothing on scansion. Check the grade standards as far forward as 12 grade, notice they bear not even a passing similarity to DSY’s claims. Ditto for the benchmarks. Ohio’s standards are quite specific as to what they expect teachers to have taught students.
Nowhere, at all, are DSY’s claims of teacher incompetence mirrored in what his state actual says a competent teacher will do. The fact of the matter tom is that DSY has simply invented this accusation, as well as a few others. The specific accusation that teachers who don’t teach scansion aren’t doing their job is, quite frankly, untrue at best. These sorts of accusations, as well, can and often have led to grief for English teachers.
Better not to have such results come about from ignorance based proclamations of fictional teacher incompetence.
They are willful ignorance, pure, simple and damaging.
And fighting ignorance is part of the board’s mission statement.
Have you ever taught kids who have never been taught “how to think”? It’s one of the most maddening things in the world. I am a teacher in Cameroon, and the education paradigm is that the teacher is god, he writes stuff on the board for kids to copy and memorize, and then they are tested on the most obscure details they’ve learned and expected to spit it out word-for-word.
So, I’m trying to teach these kids computers. They can define perfectly just about every computer aconym imaginable. They can draw detailed pictures of processers with ease. But, if I teach them in Word how to, say, make something bold, they have absolutly no way of figuring out how to use the button right next to bold to make something italic. They are absolutly terrified to even try something they have never done, have trouble making what we consider simple connections, and cannot deal with conflicting information (like that there are several ways to do the same thing.) They arn’t even comfortable looking at the keyboard to find a symbol they want to use- they ask me and I have to point it out and demonstrate it before they will give it a shot. I have honestly had to teach kids who know how to type “3”, how to type “4”.
I firmly believe that this is a contribution to Africa’s acceptance of bad leaders (unquestioning obedience to authority) and economic stagnation (which comes in part from people’s reluctance to embrace new things and embark on new enterprises.)
Okay.
So…
Well…
Shit.
Shit.
Sam Stone, I owe you an apology. Let me explain why.
I was convinced you were making this up. I know, to you this probably comes out of the blue, but it just seemed so… implausible to me that an error like this could not only be introduced into the curriculum, but make it through the proof-reading process, and then stay there for years, and not be (effectively) brought to someone’s attention by even a single teacher or parent. I just thought there’s no way. And I know people exaggerate, and sometimes hardly are even aware they are doing it. And, well, I thought you were doing that.
And it turns out I was wrong. Because [nerd alert! nerd alert!] I emailed the curriculum director at your school district and told them about the claim you made, to see if they could definitively deny it. I figured they’d probably just ignore me, since who the heck am I? But they didn’t. I just got an email back from someone at the district which included the following paragraph:
So. It was there. It’s been there for years. It was proofread. It was translated. And no one has caught it. And you, Sam Stone, were right. And I feel a bit of an ass. :smack:
There is the positive consideration that now, apparently, as a result of my email, the error has been corrected. That, in my mind, however, is offset by the phrasing “printed a correction on our errata pages.” Just exactly what this amounts to, and how effective of a correction it is in practical terms, I don’t really know.
Well, anyway. There you go.
-FrL-
Well hey, thanks for doing that. I hope that some good comes of it.
Now I just have to convince them that the Grizzly Bear isn’t a fish. You know, like the fish that the teachers wrap with their errata pages…