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Re: Online applications
Posted by Merrill on 6/18/08

Actually, I am interested in ELL, and I have a background in Linguistics.

Unfortunately, it is next to impossible to get an endorsement in this area in
Illinois. Why? Because you need 100 clinical hours teaching ELL--but no one is
going to let you teach ELL without an endorsement. Now I might be able to teach ELL
at the college level if I get enough courses under my belt, but that is a big "if."

And yes, businesses would love to hire a PhD in anything. When I worked in the
computer industry, we had to hire someone for a pretty demanding technical job. We
ended up hiring a guy with a PhD from Northwestern in a different field with almost
no experience--we concluded that he could learn the systems quicker than others, and
that he had an excellent work ethic. He worked out great, and beat out people with
10-15 years experience.

Businesses like teachers as well--they tend to be people with good interpersonal and
organizational skills.

On 6/17/08, spedhead wrote:
> 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.
>>>
>>>

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.