On 6/17/08, Merrill wrote:
> 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 again, they're different animals. I used the planet analogy, but I'll try
something else. Its what good teachers do: A while ago, Michael Jordan decided he
wanted to play baseball. He was a GREAT basketball player. He wasn't a good
baseball player. The skills didn't transfer from basketball to baseball. They
were different games.
Similarly, teaching at the secondary level, which you want to do, is a totally
different from teaching college. I'm not saying there aren't challenges there,
but the difference is great. Yes, there's a classroom and desks, but thats about
where it ends. The stakes are different. In the college world, you're dealing
with adults who don't have to be there. If they fail, they're grown-ups. If our
students fail, they're minors who didn't know any better. As educators and
adults, we are expected to educate everyone, regardless. Thats not the
expectation in college.
>
> 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.
I had an undergrad philosophy class where we sat around talking about everything
but philosphy all semester. No assessments at all. At the end of the class, the
professor passed out slips of paper and we were invited to give ourselves a grade.
Another Intro to Poly Sci class was a class about the legalization of Marijuana.
This was the 101 class that should have taught about the branches of government,
Constitution, etc. Instead, we read a book about how great weed was and wrote a
paper. If you loved weed, you got an A. Liked weed you got a B. If you were
anti-weed, it was a D- for you. That prof called one straight-laced student who
challenged him a right-wing conservative zealot and gave him the nickname of
"Godboy" for the rest of the semester.
My point... those classes were jokes, but those profs STILL have their jobs. I
don't much care what professors outside of the ed dept. think. Yeah, I agree
educational programs need reform. They don't need more theory and philosophy
though. We need fewer hours in the college classroom, and more time in the
real-world classroom and time spent learning effective teaching practices.
>
> You are not going to reach every student--that is nonsense from the ed
> department.
And George W. Bush. Its NO child left behind, after all. I know its nonsense,
but its the goal. Its a noble goal, and all students deserve good teachers who
are going to try to teach them. Not scholars who are there to teach the smart kids.
> You know this, but you talk the party line anyway.
And you darn well better talk it and mean it and be able to tell me how you're
going to do it if you want a job. Its a guy like me you're trying to impress,
after all.
Some students
> will drop out, some will go to jail, some have bigger problems than you or I
> realize.
Yep. You can't save the world, but you can't wash your hands of them as long as
they're still in your room.
> Teaching is an art, it is not a trade.
I would say its more of a science, but to each his own...
> We are not plumbers who get better
> simply because we spend more time under the sink.
I don't really know where you get that idea from. Experience does help. In
comparing my first year to my tenth year, there's no doubt I've gotten much
better. Everyone does. You just learn as you do...
Teaching takes knowledge &
> talent--and a whole lot of dedication.
Agreed, but that doesn't mean that experience doesn't count.
>
> 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.
Your opinion. Many politicians agree with you. CNN agrees with you, but the
world is constantly ending in the 24-hour cable news world. I watch too much of
that crap in the summer.
As far as being "sympathetic" to my position. I am a public school, tenured
teacher with administrative responsibilities in a middle-class, Western suburban
district that most people in the area would agree is both good to work for and to
send your kids. It seems to me you might be ENVIOUS of my position, not sypathetic.
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.
No they're not. There is no national test, so how are you comparing state test
scores? The "I" in ISAT stands for Illinois. What is the drop-out rate in
Illinois? How does that compare to the rest of the country? CPS, sure, why not,
they have problems. Of course, you just mentioned many of the issues CPS students
face, and CPS is better, in my experience, than other inner-city districts. Take
a look at Detroit schools, then we'll talk.
> 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.
Oh yeah. I forgot about the massive need for English PhDs in the "business
world." Sorry.
By the way, if I was an English teacher, I probably wouldn't have a job either.
Quit complaining about something you can't fix and blaming everyone and everything
and go get the skills necessary to get a job. It would take 6 classes to get an
ELL endorsement and I guarantee you would get multiple offers in the Chicago
suburbs. It would probably take you 4-5 classes to add a Special Education
endorsement. Middle school math is 18 credit hours. All these are high need
positions.
You have a PhD. I think you can handle a few more college courses. Heck, you'll
probably enjoy it more than most. Your Doctorate makes you too expensive to get
hired as a run of the mill English teacher, like it or not. You can bash Illinois
and American schools all you want, its the way it is and its not changing in your
lifetime.
To be honest, I wouldn't mind hiring (well I don't hire, I do the 1st interview
then push a few people on to the Principal) an English PhD sped teacher. You
would have knowledge and skills others in my department would lack. I might be
able to justify paying that extra money, because of the high need we have for sped
teachers. My collegue in the English department isn't going to be able to do it,
sorry. Just the way it is...
> It's like the football coach who went 1-15 last year saying that his system
> works, and everyone else is the problem.
Yeah, but you aren't in a position to be a coach. I'm like the special teams
coach as a department head, to extend the analogy. You want to be a player. No
one ever made a team telling the coach that his entire system sucks and that he's
a joke, etc. You're like the guy at home watching the game trying to convice
people he'd be better than Brett Favre. You really should try to make the team
instead of armchair quarterbacking it, and you might get a team of your own
someday. I like analogies... that was fun.
Good luck to you
>
>
>
>
> 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.
>>
>>
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