I’m a writer for the Huffington Post and I recently wrote an article detailing the tough times teachers have been going through in the US as of late, and I was blown away by the hundreds of emails I received from teachers all across America telling real stories of heartbreak about things they’ve been enduring. It touched me so much I wanted to make a difference.
I teamed up with a teacher to start the nonpartisan “You Made A Difference” campaign, which is an effort to thank teachers for their service by either writing a note of thanks on our Facebook wall or, even better, creating a video.
I want to apologize for my first post being a reference to a campaign to thank a teacher. This will not be a random plug – I truly wish to discuss this topic with anyone that wishes to.
[[removed Facebook link]]
I’m looking forward to discussing issues with individuals here!
Personally, I prefer teacher anecdotes about how amazingly dumb their students can be, like the term papers that consist of printouts of wikipedia entries and such.
Ha, I’m sure there are a lot of those. When I was in college, my history professor told us that he assigned a term paper about the Holocaust to his freshmen history course. He said he received one paper that went on and on about how the Holocaust never happened, and her sources were from a neo-Nazi site.
Marley23: I was hoping the Facebook link wouldn’t be a problem. Would it be okay if I posted how to find it on the Internet rather than posting a link?
Hi differencemade, welcome to the message board. I’m sure you can find a lot of people who’d be interested in discussing the issue with you, but please don’t use the SDMB to promote your campaign. ETA: Since you mentioned the name of the campaign, I think everybody who’s interested can figure out how to find it if they’re interested.
Not a problem. If you want to discuss the campaign and teacher stories, one of the “softer” forums is probably a better fit (which is why I’ve moved this thread to In My Humble Opinion from Great Debates). If you want to debate policy and issues related to education, a thread in GD is a good idea.
In the interest of being helpful to your writing (and I haven’t seen your article), it is one of the most controversial efforts to turn around an ailing school system, and a very big deal. The efforts were captured in a recent documentary.
Basically, the proposal boiled down to this: teachers were offered substantial raises and performance bonuses in exchange for giving up guaranteed employment. Or, a teacher could retain tenure and get only the regular, scheduled COLAs.
Proponents saw this as a way to reward good teachers and clear out the bad ones. Opponents saw it as a power grab to weaken or bust teachers unions. Here in DC, those who talk about teachers having a tough time would generally be taking the side of the teachers unions, who have argued for substantial raises and guaranteed employment. This is all in the context of the terrible performance of the DC school system over the past several decades.
So, I was curious as to whether you had a view on the merits of the reform program that has been going on here. (Or had been – the schools chief who proposed the reforms was more or less fired by a new mayor last year.)
The “You Made A Difference” campaign is a nonpartisan effort to just thank a teacher who’s made a difference in your life. I would say it isn’t unreasonable to think that every person has had at least one teacher who’s made a difference to them, and that’s where I stand – just saying thank you. That in no way reflects my views on teachers’ unions, just to offer some context.
The documentary you reference has been criticized for its accuracy by academics, which puts some of what it presents into question. A good example is a recent study by Vanderbilt that tested the idea of incentives for teachers. It offered them a pretty hefty salary bonus if their students performed better on a standardized test. It didn’t work. Now, that’s just one study and more research will undoubtedly follow, but it should be noted.
I think everyone, regardless of where they stand, would agree that the current educational system isn’t performing well. How exactly to fix it is the real challenge.
As one of those woefully underpaid teachers, one of my secret joys is to occasionally overhear students talking about me in the hallways or wherever when they don’t know I can hear them.
99% positive comments - which makes me feel at least appreciated by the people who matter, even if I don’t get much else in compensation.
Also, at our school the students are given an online survey at the end of each term to comment on class content, book(s) and teacher. I often get some really nice comments and heart-felt compliments. Yes, there is the occasional disgruntled student, but it is not difficult to figure out who that student is and why they are not happy.
Everyone always says how poor neighborhoods have crappy teachers. I grew up in poor minority/immigrant neighborhoods and I don’t believe I ever had a crappy teacher. Some were better or more entertaining than others but none were ever crappy or didn’t care.
Being liked–or at least respected–is a big part of the job. People work a lot harder when they care about their teacher’s opinion, and you can’t get to there if they don’t think much of you.
That doesn’t mean you have to be everyone’s best friend, or the happiness fairy, or that they won’t sometimes hate your guts, but all the really effective teachers I know inspire some sort of positive emotion from their students. It may be mixed with dread and fear, but the positive stuff is there too.
It is not the fact that they like or don’t like me, but it is nice to hear students say they learned a lot in my class, or that another student should take my class as I know what I am doing and am good at what I do.
Being Mr. Nice Guy scores no points and is not always a good thing, but having a student tell another student, “he’s great, and you will really learn a lot in his class” kind of makes me feel good. I take my little pleasures where I can find them.
The problem is that teachers are right in the middle. On one side they have the bureaucrats with huge salaries, generally fucking the school system and making their lives miserable, and the useless education courses they have to take. On the other side they have different groups parents demanding contradictory things, plus the parents with less disciplined children demand more tolerance for misbehavior.
The bottom line is that the public education system is fucked up right now, has been for decades, is getting worse, and the country will suffer greatly from it. Unfortunately, better compensation for teachers will solve none of the problems.
From the report A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform, by The National Commission on Excellence in Education, April 1983. Things are far worse now than they were back then.
