Comments on: Just how good are they, really?

By: My own brave new world « Bookworm Room

My own brave new world « Bookworm Room — Sat, 26 Aug 2006 18:19:28 +0000

[...] Just how good are they, really? [...]

By: Joe

Joe — Sun, 02 Jul 2006 07:38:39 +0000

Becky comments above:
“Non-educators are often clueless about whether what goes on in the classroom is good or bad. They just want their children to score well, and that, it appears to me, is the way they judge their school system and their teachers.”

Yes. We do. And I will.
My son will be starting school in another year. One of the major criteria I will use when judging his school are test scores. This just seems sensible to me.
I am much more concerned with outcome than I am with process. I don’t particularly care if the teachers are nurturing or kind. I care that they are good teachers. Good teachers at a MINIMUM teach children skills. Great teachers teach children to think. I expect the former. I hope for the latter.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Fri, 30 Jun 2006 16:03:40 +0000

By: Don Quixote

Don Quixote — Fri, 30 Jun 2006 01:42:46 +0000

Hi Heather,

My apologies. I’m a captive of my environment; in California you would be a member of your union or you would suffer severe consequences among your peers. There are very, very few teachers here who are not members of the union and the union vies with the Indian tribes lobby for the most powerful lobby in Sacramento.

All the best, DQ

By: bigear38

bigear38 — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 22:03:17 +0000

Bookworm wrote:

Just a short comment that the difference between my 17 year old daughter’s excellent spelling, and my 14 year old son’s terrible spelling, is due to more than the better performance by girls and the hours spent by boys in front of the computer. After my daughter left the local elementary school, the school adopted an “invented spelling” program. Five years later I went to a workshop at my son’s middle school where the parents were furious over how badly their children spelled and wrote. The school principal had no answer. The damage had already been done and the middle school wasn’t equipped to repair it.

By: Ymarsakar

Ymarsakar — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 21:19:51 +0000

My fourth grade teacher, Ms. Moore, gave me Peter Pan as a Christmas gift. It hooked me on reading books, and reading books is how you get children to self-educate themselves and do better on tests. People don’t do well on tests because they don’t understand the questions. If they don’t understand the questions, then they can’t even make an educated guess by eliminating the 2 obviously wrong answers.

By: Bookworm

Bookworm — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 20:04:32 +0000

Kevin’s point reminded me of something interesting. I happen to be a fan of Jay Leno’s “Jaywalking” segments. These are the “man/woman in the street” interviews, where he stops people and asks them questions. The ones with the most clueless responses end up on Jaywalking, to be laughed at by Leno’s audience. Interestingly, in his segments on history and world knowledge (“Who wrote the Star Spangled Banner”) he always has a teacher or someone in the process of getting a teaching degree, who is absolutely ignorant about basic principles of history, governance, and world events. Now, one could say that the point is that the person is dumb and ill-informed; not that he or she is a teacher. There are, after all, dumb people teaching. But come on, folks — should there be any, any fourth grade teachers out there who don’t know in which year the Founders signed the Declaration of Independence? Can we really explain away the fact that, at least twice a month, Leno, in LA alone, standing on a corner on the Universal Studios shopping mall, is able to find a teacher who knows absolutely nothing?

By: kevin

kevin — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 19:25:39 +0000

All teachers should be required to take a yearly proficiency exam to test their general knowledge (make it at a high school level so they can’t complain that it wasn’t fair.) If they fail, they should be fired. I’m curious as to what the attrition rate would be…

By: Marguerite

Marguerite — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 18:41:20 +0000

An underlying and perverse socialist worldview underlies all of public education, attested to by the fact that it is almost impossible to fire an incompetent teacher. The fact that parents are expected to supply not just their own child with crayons – but shell out $$ to send multiple boxes that are then passed around to everyone – is right out of “from each according to his ability to each according to his needs.” Can’t indoctrinate ‘em too young in the public schools.

By: Heather

Heather — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 18:08:43 +0000

Tsk, tsk. Don’t assume I’m a union member! I never was, for philosophical reasons, as well as financial.

By the way, I agree whole-heartedly with most of your points stated above. I just cringe to hear the 8 or 9 months thing, and couldn’t resist replying to that. I think that we, as a society, have some serious problems to address in the realm of education. Heck, I am even seriously considering home-schooling my own kids during their middle school years.

I am also glad that you brought up the perception people have that upper-middle class neighborhood schools are fine. That is hardly the case. Just because they are not as bad as inner-city schools, does not mean that there are not some serious deficits.