How hard is teaching.

The purchaser of a service is presumed to be qualified to judge whether they want the service they are purchasing.

Oh, wait, the government has taken over and effed up that whole "provider being responsible to the the buyer" thing.

 

It might be interesting to replace the word "teachers" with "karate teachers" or "guitar teachers". How are these particular type of teachers different than the socialized teachers the government provides?

 

Ok. Maybe you're right.

 

You have a point too!!

 

Teaching is not easy. If you have ANY doubts about that... go talk to a few of them.

 

No doubt you missed many of my earlier posts. I am not saying that there is nothing that can be done. I am saying that most of what can be done to improve the quality of education can only be done by the students.

You can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make him drink. You can, however, salt his oats.

There are changes in the school environment that would likely encourage students to make the necessary changes. The structure of our school systems a critical part of the problem. The problem cannot be addressed at either the school or the classroom level. Depending on the state, it cannot even be addressed at the district level. States must make wholesale changes to how public education is structured.

1-- Age grading must go away.
2-- Students who do not want to show up, follow directions, and do the work should be somewhere else, not school. This must be enforced with draconian decisiveness.
3-- The K-8 curriculum needs to be simplified to basic skills (Reading, Writing, Mathematics, Logic, Research/Library skills) and critical knowledge (Science, Civics/Government, History, Geography).
4-- The 9-12 curriculum needs to go back to the track system (college prep or vocational certifications). There is something grievously wrong with a model wherein after 13 years of free and appropriate education, the students are only prepared & qualified to go to more school.
5-- No student should ever advance to the next level without mastering the current level.
6-- Courses should include a smaller range of skills with more time dedicated to practice and development, not exposure to new material. Narrow the scope and increase the depth of each course.
7-- Courses should be 6 weeks, not 18 or 36 weeks. That way students who need to repeat a course for mastery are repeating a more targeted range of skills.
8-- Courses should not include review of prerequisite material, but be focused on the material defined for the current course.
9-- Students should test for credit. If they don't pass the test, then they do not get credit and advance. If they pass tests for classes they have yet to take, they get those credits. If a student gets a 12th grade education (by credits) in 10 years (K-12), then the remaining 3 years of funding are credited to a state college/university for the student to use. This way it rewards hard workers, and eases the impact of holding kids back who do not pass.
10- Normal education should receive as much or more funding/student as Special Education. Investing more in those least likely to benefit society is a real problem.
11- Schools need to stop acting as social services agencies, as daycare providers, or as medical/mental health service providers. This scope creep has added undue liability to schools, and impeded the focus on education.
12- Schools must go back to only 6 hours of classes per day so kids have time for other activities that give them opportunities for non-curricular learning. The addition of class time has not yielded improved learning, just fewer kids with well-balanced experiences and less time for homework.
13- Teachers must be evaluated on the basis of their performance, not on the basis of their students' performance. For the reasons I discussed in a previous post, it is not practical, precise, or accurate to evaluate one person on the basis of the performance of another person. There is no opportunity to create a standard.

One of the main reasons our schools have become decreasingly effective over the past four decades is that they have focused more and more on equality of outcome, not equality of opportunity. The upshot is that due to all the attempts to level playing fields and protect the self-esteem of precious snowflakes, the responsibility for learning shifted from the students to the teacher. The effect has been the loss of learning opportunities and decrease of success, especially in inner city schools.

 

B.F. Skinner taught pigeons how to play ping pong. This is called operant conditioning, which is distinguished from classical conditioning in that it's not really natural. It's not like dolphins will jump through hoops because there are hoops, but rather because there is a tasty dolphin snack when they do it.

So I disagree with you. This training can be done on humans, just as it is done on other animals. It really is possible to make a horse drink.

Salting his oats is one way, but not the only way.

That's going to be the challenge, and a reason why teachers unions don't want school vouchers. The emphasis on academic achievement is not something they want. They'd much rather blame parents, the neighborhood, pop culure, or whatever. Anything that directs attention away from their abysmal failures as teachers will be used.

The previous 12 changes you mentioned seem like fine things that we can try. This one, though, is what I disagree with. Their performance is tied directly to the performance of their students. I don't care if a teacher sleeps through the entire class. All I care about are results, and those results are academic achievement of their students. Some methods might be a bit too much, but the end result isn't what the teacher does during class, but what students learn during class.

I understand why you distinguish between inner city schools and the rest, but that just means the challenges are different. Maybe they're even insurmountable, which just means you can't polish a turd. What you do then is stop trying to polish the turd.

I don't know whether it's a pursuit of equality of outcome, or equality of opportunity. Those are cute phrases that I'm sure are considered important to teachers throughout the country, but what goes on in the teacher's lounge or educational conferences is another one of those things that doesn't matter to me. What they do with their time is entirely irrelevant. Where are the results? Where are those graduates who are a benefit to society?

What I do know is that these "special snowflakes" they've been churning out aren't what they are being paid to produce.

 

I can tell you have never been a teacher because you seem to think they have some magic powers to control the minds and actions of independent beings possessed of free will.

Based on the way you blatantly discount the effects of students' free will, I am pretty sure you have never been the parent of a teenager, or you have, but used corporal punishment most effectively. If you allow teachers to use duct tape and cattle prods on the kids, yes, teachers can have enough control as to be viably accountable for what the students independently decide to do.

You definitely have never actually tried operant conditioning on a group of people who involuntarily interact with you on a daily to accomplish fine-tuned goals, because if you had, then you would know that there is a feedback cycle, wherein the 'subjects' start conditioning the 'trainer' to hand over rewards. It plays hob with the reward schedule, and becomes insanely expensive, regardless of how cheap the rewards are. Moreover, when the subjects begin using punishment, they can bring the whole Skinnerian project to a grinding halt, merely because there are more students, and because the teacher needs the job (and the good evaluation) more than the students need to know how to diagram a sentence, solve one-step equations, etc..

If you ensure that the ONLY students a teacher is evaluated on are students who actually want to learn the material, then sure, it is fair to evaluate a teacher on the performance of other people.

Otherwise, nobody will teach for more than a year at a time in the inner city schools, and those schools will chronically be very short of teachers, because teaching there would be a guaranteed career-ender.

 

I feel there should be exceptions for the Special Education and underpriviledged kids. But besides those, what parents are going to accept their kid is not as gifted? Who on this thread who have kids would admit that about their own kids.

 

I've raised two teenagers, and never once used corporal punishment on them. I admit that my son tempted me a time or two.

Radical behaviorism is not merely a methodology, but rather a scientific approach to understanding behavior, and how to affect behavior. Teachers use it all the time, whether it be using a classrooom which is a sort of skinner box, to handing out grades. Good grades are positive reinforcement and bad grades are negative reinforcement. The problem is that the philosophy is not well understood, as Skinner really lost out to Chomsky back in the late 50s - early 60s with Chomsky's review of verbal behavior. What happened afterwards allowed teachers to gravitate towards the softer sciences, and the results have been predictable.

That could well be true. Teachers who try to teach a room full of rocks how to dance the Mambo aren't going to have a very successful record. The thing is, I think they can teach inner city school students how to read, write, and eventually become productive members of a civil society. Just that with all the rules in place now, that's not really a possibility.

You just might want to bring a whip and a chair to class...

This is a pretty good assessment of radical behaviorism in the classroom.

https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Classroom_Management_Theorists_and_Theories/Burrhus_Frederic_Skinner

 

I've raised four, and only used corporal punishment on the first, when he was very young (you make all the mistakes with the first). It is completely unnecessary and has been proved counterproductive, as I am sure it was with our eldest. He turned out very well, but would have been better if treated more humanely.

 

Students are not in charge of the system. There are much better systems, and they were not created by students.

Including changes to funding. Local property taxes are the wrong source, because property values are so low in poor areas.

All agreed.

I'd say 12 weeks, four per year. Six weeks is too short to develop a productive relationship between student and teacher, especially if the teacher only sees the student a few hours each week.

Yes, the bias against testing has to go. "If you don't measure it, you can't manage it," is a fundamental of effective management. "Teaching to the test" is only a problem if the test is not valid -- i.e., is not testing what we want the kids to learn. If that is the case, create better tests until they DO test what we want the kids to learn.

This makes total sense, but you might run into constitutional problems. One solution is to make the same total amount of funding available for each student, but release it only as they progress and demonstrate academic mastery at each level. This rewards both effective teaching and student effort by providing more funding for faster learning.

Agreed.

There is no solid, empirical evidence that more homework = more learning. Modern families have both parents working, and some arrangement must be made for the kids. Providing activities like sports, music, etc. at school, during school hours, would help break up the academic day and give students broader learning opportunities.

Strongly disagree. It is quite possible to use student performance to evaluate teacher performance by comparing the students' progress under different teachers. How do we evaluate coaches but by the performance of their teams? Giving more effective teachers more students and more money (and less effective ones fewer students and less money) would help even out the quality of different students' education, as well as providing an effective incentive structure.

 

Interesting, it's complex.

 

It is very complex, but the idea behind it isn't. Basically, you follow the rules of science as it pertains to behavior. This means ignoring things that can't be observed and measured. This leaves an awful lot out, such as feelings, emotions, thinking...

to teachers, this is almost heretical. Ignore what students feel and think? Yes, exactly! Ignore it and just rely on empirical data.

 

How do you grade student achievement in terms of teacher quality? Who gets more of a bonus, a teacher of gifted students (all above the 90th percentile) who manages to keep their test scores at high levels, without any increase in score, but still very high, or a teacher of tough students (all of whom scored in the 20th percentile at the beginning of the year), but who manages to get them to 40% (still failing, but better). How do you account for a teacher who has several students who don't come to school when their siblings are sick in order to take care of the younger siblings?

If you ignore how students feel and think, you will not be able to teach them. How a student thinks DIRECTLY influences how much they learn. Learning involves thinking, and is impossible without it. My wife is an excellent teacher. Her main skill as a teacher is being able to reach kids who's feelings cause them to turn off to school. She gets them to care about school, and not surprisingly, they produce better academic results. Your views are basically what semi-educated people think about education, and is the reason that our schools are falling apart due to "teaching to the test."

 

I think teachers should be trained on how coaches in sports do it. They have to get along with the kids as well as teach them properly while commanding respect.

 

Apparently grammar and sentence structure need to be taught better. Maybe a little philosophy to teach how to properly construct a logical argument?

 

Way to be a teacher. Sign up in school. They need more like you.

- - - Updated - - -

I still say teaching is a gift that needs to be shared with the students. Everyone doesn't have it. And some don't appreciate the gift they have. It's a serious thing.

 

Won't do a thing. Most coaches are teachers, and if the above idea worked, you would think that the coach teachers would have better results. Usually they have worse results, (at least based on personal experience).

Coaches are successful because the kids WANT to be there.

 

Ok. I see what you're saying. You make a good point.

 

In my high school we had a coach who was injured and couldn't run around the field any longer, so they put him in a classroom teaching math.

He was the worst teacher in the school and everyone hated him. His method was insult, intimidation, and belittlement. He would get the girls up to the blackboard and get them crying. It's interesting looking back on it with the mind of an adult and now wishing I or someone had stood up to him. But he got away with it for years and years.

 

So the trick is getting students to want to be there. So what are the reasons they don't want to be in the classroom?

 

Well, my wife's students don't like school "because it's hard." They'd rather sit at home and play videogames.

Do you have kids? If you do, you realize that not all kids like school or things that are good for them.

 

Video games have been around for 40 years. What is so different now? Kids still went to school before and learned. Or am I missing something?

 

Coaches of Sports have (usually have) a "classroom" of people who are dedicated to the sport and want to improve and win. Many students are forced to be there.