I'm truly sorry some don't agree on this particular issue, but I will no longer allow innocent children to be harmed by the rare few bad teachers out there. In my example, I used the possibility of there being 100 really bad teachers in Missouri. We have many thousands of teachers in our state, so if there are only 100 really bad ones, it still means the overwhelming majority are good or even great, but even if there were only 100 really bad ones, the result would be that 35,000 innocent kids lose a year of instruction, and that cannot happen.Let me see if I understand this, an "overwhelming majority" of Missouri's teachers are good, even great, according to Brian Nieves.
Then why in the world are we trying to "reform" a system that has provided Missouri with this many good, even great teachers?
In my experience in R VII in the '70s, most were "good, even great", some were wretched, like my Parkwood senior year trig and calculus "teacher" who simply refused to teach us anything. He'd recorded some tapes for us to listen to, but as I recall didn't even grade our homework, the classes were automatic As.
ReplyDeleteAlmost the same for our physic teacher, but he at least lectured the whole period and taught us a lot of useful stuff (and since algebra based high school physics is as classic a case of cargo cult science as you will find---there's a reason Newton invented the integral calculus to do his mechanics (laws of motion)---that was actually a favor, I didn't have anything to unlearn when I did it for real in college).
That first teacher should have been fired a long time before I sat in his classroom; a system that makes it well neigh impossible to do that is unconscionable.
Not to mention that the #1 reason for teacher tenure, academic freedom", is simply not an issue for K-12. You aren't expected to do research, you're hired to teach. And if you can't acknowledge some some of your peers don't, or eventually lose it (the above math teacher was biologically fairly old, one of his sons was a classmate but he looked older than that), then you're part of the problem, not the solution.
Anon 8:01
ReplyDeleteShould a biology K-12 instructor teach evolution, intelligent design, or creationism? Would you teach only biology - as science demands - as an untenured instructor?
Should a history K-12 teacher talk about questionable aspects of America's past? Or teach a happy-go-luck Pravda approved version? As a history teacher, which would you teach, untenured?
Moreover, as a K-12 teacher, you need to demand things from your students. That said, many of the parents of those students want As more than they want their kids to learn. Since harshly graded students lead to many unhappy parents who will complain, would you be demanding, or not so much, if you were untenured?
Hmmm, I wasn't aware that K-12 tenure was such a strong institution that a teacher could teach whatever they felt like; that's the notorious prerogative of tenured college professors.
ReplyDeleteAnd you must have missed that bit above where I noted 2 (and there were more) tenured teachers who gave automatic As.
Last time I checked grading policy really came down to the policies (and I suppose character) of the Principle .... and today's mandatory standardized tests are a nice check against grade inflation.
Assuming teachers don't cheat; that happens a lot, but while I haven't been following it closely, I haven't heard of any mass firings for it. Maybe they've got tenure?