'What teachers really want to tell parents'

High school. I want to say senior year, but I might be wrong on that one.

 

Or you will have a "smart" teacher.

 

Rick, you are one of a kind. I mean that in a good way.

 

I'm not home school advocate, but I'd be careful in assuming this. It's anecdotal - and in truth probably dependent on the parents - but I met a couple of my wife's teen-age cousins who were home schooled and now in college over Christmas break. They were both 18 going on 35. Way, way, way more mature in the way they carried themselves with us than most kids that age that I meet. I was floored.

That being said, I believe they also think that the earth is 6,000 years old and that Jesus rode a dinosaur. So there are disadvantages.

This is all so hard to talk about because from teacher competence/intelligence to social skills to everything else involved in education, everything is so situation-dependent. Every kid is different. Every parent is different. Every school system is different. Hell, two kids in one system might have totally different experiences dependent on what teachers they get and what groups of kids they fall in with socially.

As a parent, the uncertainty frightens me, if you can't tell from above posts.

 

I had no problem whatsoever with your point about questioning teachers, just as we would a doctor, lawyer or mechanic. It is a valid one. But you didn't stop there.

My issue was with your ignorant comment questioning the overall intelligence of teachers. You were talking out of your ass on that one. It is not a personal attack to point that out, or to point out your history of doing so on other subjects.

 

I would vehemently dispute that I was talking out of my ass. From SAT scores to GRE scores to IQ tests and every other objective measure, education majors/teachers typically rank near the bottom of professionals. There is all kind of data out there to back that up. We have talked about it on here before, multiple times, typically in the context of: (1) Whether the profession needs to increase salaries to attract better candidates; (2) Whether raw intelligence is a fair proxy for competence in this particular field.

Now, I feel bad that you missed prior threads on this where there were links provided and so forth. And I suppose it's on me to provide that this time around.

But it seems to be on you to make sure that I am actually wrong - which I wasn't - before you go off half-cocked and self-assured, like you did. And then, to top it all off, a few posts before we have JC trying to goad me about lawyers, like I give a fuck. A few posts before, I'm the one who was saying that people should question their lawyers and doctors.

I have very little use for your method of argumentation. Next time, make sure you know what you're talking about before you pop off. It would help.

 

"From SAT scores to GRE scores to IQ tests and every other objective measure, education majors/teachers typically rank near the bottom of professionals. There is all kind of data out there to back that up."

Please, show your work.

 

http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d05/tables/dt05_128.asp

User-friendly version complied by me, of average SAT score among college majors (numbers from 2004-05):

Mathematics: 1171
Language & literature: 1158
Physical sciences: 1156
Foreign/classical languages: 1126
Engineering: 1108
Biological sciences: 1105
Philosophy/religion/theology: 1103
Library & archival sciences: 1088
General/interdisciplinary: 1081
Social sciences & history: 1066
Military sciences: 1048
Undecided: 1047
Computer information sciences: 1043
Communications: 1036
Arts: Visual/performing: 1027
Architecture/environmental design: 1022
Business & commerce: 1006
Health & allied services: 991
Education: 974
Agriculture/natural resources: 973
Home economics: 929
Public affairs & services: 928
Technical & vocational: 901

Essentially, I think that a lot of the grand sweeping educational reforms, which seem to center around incentivizing teacher performance with merit pay and promotions, are inefficient because what you really need are better hires to begin with. If we equate test scores with intelligence and intelligence with competence - and I'm pretty certain that there are some strong correlations - then you are trying to push a group to heights that it is simply not capable of achieving. You can dangle all the carrots on sticks you want, and I will never run a 4.4 40-yard dash, right?

Or, better stated, let's take a collection of professionals, rather than a single person. Let's call them sports journalists. And let's tell them all that they can get twice their salary if they can run a 4.6 40. No matter how hard they work, they won't get there - not as a group. Now, you might have the occasional former track or football star who is capable, just like there are plenty of teachers, by raw numbers, who could have just as easily been engineers or (good) lawyers or doctors. But, in general, as a group, they don't match those groups.

So how do you get sports journalists to all run 4.6 40s? Well, you weed them out on the front end instead. You set up incentives that draw people into the profession to begin with who are capable of running that fast. You install world-class training facilities at newspapers, you increase the salaries, and then you make physical fitness a vital factor in hiring. Next thing you know, you have a group that, in general, would be faster than the group you drew before you created incentives to draw fast sprinters.

Then again, I'm just an ignorant person talking out my ass.

P.S. And, yes, parents need to do a better job, as well. Especially low-income parents. There is no magic-bullet solution, just a bunch of pieces of the pie that make up a whole, and quality of teachers is one of them.

By way of comparison, there was a good piece in The New Yorker lately about the U.S. prison population that went into the drop in crime in the last few decades. It talked about how there was no single reason that crime has fallen - just a lot of small reforms that added up to an effective whole. So, in other words, it's useless to set this up as a Better Parents vs. Better Teachers, either/or debate. It's not.

 

My best friend recently quit teaching. She has a master's degree and is still paying for that. She taught several years before having her son, then lost tenure when she took off to be with him for two years.

She's been back for 6-7 years and has not been given a pay raise ($30k) in all that time, plus this year she had to cough up a 3 percent pay cut for some state reason.

She teaches "at-risk" kids, which is code for "kids who are going to hurt you" On a daily basis, she'd get attacked, spit on, etc., and was not allowed by law to defend herself. She cannot touch a child. Kids have rights, you know.

The parents and the administration did nothing. Parents, in particular, expect her to raise their children, which is not her job.

This school year, the administration, in all its brilliance, decided to change up the teachers and move them from their current grades to others. My friend, who had taught 4-6th grades, suddenly had little kids. Beyond the whole "I chose to work with older kids because that's my forte," she also had to redo every single lesson plan from scratch.

At Thanksgiving, she realized she couldn't handle it anymore. She wound up quitting mid-year (and had to work even more weekends than usual to write lesson plans through the end of the year) and took a $10k pay cut to get out of there.

And it really stinks, because at one time, she LOVED teaching. I've known her all my life and that's all she's ever wanted to do. But between the lousy pay, the administration and the parents, it ran her off.

If we don't treat teachers better, most people with half a brain would want to stay away. God bless those who stay with it, though, because our kids need them.

 

. . . mostly if you're a parent who gets off on the opportunity for full-bore "intellectual" and social indoctrination.

 

I thought we were beyond stereotypes. This may have been true 10 years ago, but homeschooling numbers have risen dramatically over the past decade, mostly because of the condition of public schools, and this simply isn't the truth anymore, if it ever really was. Cities have so many programs available to homeschooling parents that, if anything, homeschooling kids socialize with more kids than they would ever socialize with in a traditional classroom setting. talking with principals and teachers of many schools, they say that, for the most part, most of their transfers from homeschool to school are better adjusted than many of their current students. And there is very little comparison from where they are, grade-level wise, to their classroom students simply because of the environment differences. It is easier to move more quickly when you have 1 or 3 kids than it is when you are teaching 24. But that is another discussion for another thread.

 

You really do have some serious issues.