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Re: Online applications
Posted by Merrill on 6/17/08

Ah, but I have taught high school--during my internship. I also taught two
years of junior high. I have a teaching certificate and I'm about 6 hours away
from an MA in T&L. Many college students are unmotivated as well--you should
see some of the stuff we deal with on this level.

But I'll tell you a secret... the education courses are generally a joke. And
just about everyone in any university outside the ed department thinks this.
Not all the courses, but many of them.

You are not going to reach every student--that is nonsense from the ed
department. You know this, but you talk the party line anyway. Some students
will drop out, some will go to jail, some have bigger problems than you or I
realize.

Teaching is an art, it is not a trade. We are not plumbers who get better
simply because we spend more time under the sink. Teaching takes knowledge &
talent--and a whole lot of dedication. It is not a cartel, it is a profession.

I would be sympathetic to your position if the public schools in Chicago and the
outlying suburbs did a suburb job of educating kids. They don't. The education
system in Illinois is an unmitigated disaster. The drop out rates are huge and
the test scores are some of the lowest in the country.

So when you say that I am the one with a problem, I think you should check
again. The students are the ones with the problems--the education system in
Illinois sucks, and they pay the price.

I can go get a job at a college or in the business world--heaven forbid a guy
like me who wants to help out be admitted into the cartel of civil servants.

It's like the football coach who went 1-15 last year saying that his system
works, and everyone else is the problem.


On 6/17/08, spedhead wrote:
> On 6/17/08, Merrill wrote:
>> Well I think the problem is this...
>>
>> Schools won't take someone with a BA because they don't have enough
>> experience. They also won't take someone with a graduate degree, because
>> they cost too much money. So they want "some" experience, but not too much.
>> Some education, but not too much. They want people with a lot of content
>> knowledge--but not too much.
>>
>> Sounds like Goldilocks syndrome here.
>
> This is not a problem if you have a wealth of applicants to choose from, as my
> collegues in the English, Social Studies, and Fine Arts depts have. I, on the
> other hand, in special ed, have to take what I can get. Sometimes thats a
> rookie with only a BA, sometimes thats someone with 15 years and a MA+30.
> See, you need to start realizing that we (schools and districts) don't have a
> problem. You do. You need a job. We'll keep on educating students with or
> without you. I'd suggest you look at what you can do to get a job, and not
> blame others.
>
>> I suggest you go check out the writings of E.D. Hirsch, who contends that
>> children need to be taught "knowledge" not "mental skills."
>
> I've read him in a graduate school class. A quick google search seems to
> confirm what I believed about him when I read his book: he's never been a
> K-12 teacher. Academia is full of philosophers. Thats a good thing, its
> where they belong. There are many educational philosophers in the Ivory Tower
> who are sure they know how to teach 13-year-olds all kinds of stuff, and of
> course they can do it better than the people actually doing it. Of course
> they never actually teach those 13-year-olds because they're too busy doing
> much more important things like writing books that few will read and fewer
> still will care about.
>
> Our teachers
>> know all about the procedures they need to follow in the classroom, and the
>> forms that need to be filled out, but they can't teach writing because they
>> have no exposure to research, modern composition theory, rhetorical theory,
>> history of pedagogy, etc.
>
> Teachers have quite a bit of education in pedagogy, but your opinion of
> knowing teaching strategies is disturbing. You seem to downplay it as
> "classroom procedures" and paperwork. Here's the major disconnect between
> teaching at college level, and teaching in K-12 public school in the US.
> They're as different as Earth and Mars. I'll let you decide which is which,
> but the point is, while they might both be planets, the similarities end
> there. Many of the students don't want to be there, and they don't care
> about what you have to say. So, a major tool in the K-12 teacher's bag of
> tricks has to be how to educate students who do not want to be educated, at
> least to be educated in what you want to teach them. How do you hook them?
> How do you get a 13 year-old interested in something they came into the room
> not caring about?
>
> So, your content-area PhDs have all this knowledge, but they can't teach any
> of it and if they try, they end up talking to themselves because the students
> have checked out. I've seen it. Its one of the reasons PhDs teach in
> college, because they don't want to deal with disinterested students.
>
> > You can't have it both ways. You either hire experts who can teach, or you
>> try to do things "on the cheap" and hire paper-pushers. If schools hired
>> people who could teach, we wouldn't have a lousy education system with
>> dismal results.
>
> You haven't said anything that leads me to believe that you're "an expert who
> can teach." Many people with Doctorates are great students, but having a PhD
> in English has nothing to do with teaching secondary students. If you've
> gotten a teaching certificate, and had no experience teaching grades 6-12,
> then you're a rookie teacher and far from an expert. A person with a BA and
> 32 credits in English, but 5 years in the classroom is worth much more to the
> English department, because that teacher has proven he/she can teach
> real-world students.
>
> If you're a 9th grade teacher who ends up teaching regular Freshman English in
> a run-of-the-mill High School, guess what? Half your students won't go to
> college and many of them have 7th grade reading levels. A third think reading
> literature is "gay" and that same third think you are too and aren't worthy of
> their respect. About 3 kids per class, usually the 16 year old Freshmen, have
> a calendar in their locker with their 17th birthday circled on it labled
> "Dropout Day!" This is the real world. My question for you is: What are you
> going to do to educate ALL of these students in your room? These are the kids
> you WILL have if you get a job. A hint: if your answer involves refering to
> your PhD and how you're an expert in content, or talking about some other PhD
> who wrote a book, that's a wrong answer and you won't be getting a job. The
> buzz word is "student (child) centered" for a reason.
>>
>> But part of what you say is correct--"content" people do tend to get
>> frustrated. When students go through 5 years of education with no
>> expectations and no accountability, they don't respond well to a teacher who
>> suddenly wants them to know something.
>
> Again, wrong answer from the point of view of a teacher or administrator who
> is living in the real world. Every school's mission statement has something
> like "we believe that all children can and will learn!" Blaming the previous
> teachers, system, students, lack of money, and/or the blue sky isn't going to
> float. What are YOU going to do to get ALL students interested and learning,
> including the students who are reading and writing like middle-schoolers in
> 10th grade? When you have an acceptable answer, you have a chance of getting
> a job.
>
>

Posts on this thread, including this one

• Online applications, 6/15/08, by Merrill.
• Re: Online applications, 6/15/08, by Don't worry.
• Re: Online applications, 6/15/08, by Merrill.
• Re: Online applications, 6/15/08, by mrsd.
• Re: Online applications, 6/15/08, by spedhead.
• Re: Online applications, 6/16/08, by Merrill.
• Re: Online applications, 6/16/08, by KKL/2nd/IL.
• Re: Online applications, 6/16/08, by Merrill.
• Re: Online applications, 6/16/08, by KKL/2nd/IL.
• Re: Online applications, 6/16/08, by spedhead.
• Re: Online applications, 6/17/08, by Merrill.
• Re: Online applications, 6/17/08, by Rebecca.
• Re: Online applications, 6/17/08, by spedhead.
• Re: Online applications, 6/17/08, by Merrill.
• Re: Online applications, 6/17/08, by spedhead.
• Re: Online applications, 6/17/08, by Merrill.
• Re: Online applications, 6/17/08, by spedhead.
• Re: Online applications, 6/18/08, by Merrill.
• Re: Online applications, 6/18/08, by spedhead.
• Re: Online applications, 6/18/08, by Without Words Thanks to Sped Head!.
• Re: Online applications, 6/19/08, by discouraged.
• Re: Online applications, 6/19/08, by spedhead.
• Re: Online applications, 6/20/08, by Merrill.
• Re: Online applications, 6/20/08, by spedhead.