A letter from a disgusted teacher:
I QUIT
Kris L. Nielsen
Monroe, NC 28110
Union County Public Schools
Human Resources Department
400 North Church Street
Monroe, NC 28112
October 25, 2012
To All it May Concern:
I’m doing something I thought I would never do—something that will make me a statistic and a caricature of the times. Some will support me, some will shake their heads and smirk condescendingly—and others will try to convince me that I’m part of the problem. Perhaps they’re right, but I don’t think so. All I know is that I’ve hit a wall, and in order to preserve my sanity, my family, and the forward movement of our lives, I have no other choice.
Before I go too much into my choice, I must say that I have the advantages and disadvantages of differentiated experience under my belt. I have seen the other side, where the grass was greener, and I unknowingly jumped the fence to where the foliage is either so tangled and dense that I can’t make sense of it, or the grass is wilted and dying (with no true custodian of its health). Are you lost? I’m talking about public K-12 education in North Carolina. I’m talking about my history as a successful teacher and leader in two states before moving here out of desperation.
In New Mexico, I led a team of underpaid teachers who were passionate about their jobs and who did amazing things. We were happy because our students were well-behaved, our community was supportive, and our jobs afforded us the luxuries of time, respect, and visionary leadership. Our district was huge, but we got things done because we were a team. I moved to Oregon because I was offered a fantastic job with a higher salary, a great math program, and superior benefits for my family. Again, I was given the autonomy I dreamed of, and I used it to find new and risky ways to introduce technology into the math curriculum. My peers looked forward to learning from me, the community gave me a lot of money to get my projects off the ground, and my students were amazing.
Then, the bottom fell out. I don’t know who to blame for the budget crisis in Oregon, but I know it decimated the educational coffers. I lost my job only due to my lack of seniority. I was devastated. My students and their parents were angry and sad. I told myself I would hang in there, find a temporary job, and wait for the recall. Neither the temporary job nor the recall happened. I tried very hard to keep my family in Oregon—applying for jobs in every district, college, private school, and even Toys R Us. Nothing happened after over 300 applications and 2 interviews.
The Internet told me that the West Coast was not hiring teachers anymore, but the East Coast was the go-to place. Charlotte, North Carolina couldn’t keep up with the demand! I applied with three schools, got three phone interviews, and was even hired over the phone. My very supportive and adventurous family and I packed quickly and moved across the country, just so I could keep teaching.
I had come from two very successful and fun teaching jobs to a new state where everything was different. During my orientation, I noticed immediately that these people weren’t happy to see us; they were much more interested in making sure we knew their rules. It was a one-hour lecture about what happens when teachers mess up. I had a bad feeling about teaching here from the start; but, we were here and we had to make the best of it.
Union County seemed to be the answer to all of my problems. The rumors and the press made it sound like UCPS was the place to be progressive, risky, and happy. So I transferred from CMS to UCPS. They made me feel more welcome, but it was still a mistake to come here.
Let me cut to the chase: I quit. I am resigning my position as a teacher in the state of North Carolina—permanently. I am quitting without notice (taking advantage of the “at will” employment policies of this state). I am quitting without remorse and without second thoughts. I quit. I quit. I quit!
Why?
Because…
I refuse to be led by a top-down hierarchy that is completely detached from the classrooms for which it is supposed to be responsible.
I will not spend another day under the expectations that I prepare every student for the increasing numbers of meaningless tests.
I refuse to be an unpaid administrator of field tests that take advantage of children for the sake of profit.
I will not spend another day wishing I had some time to plan my fantastic lessons because administration comes up with new and inventive ways to steal that time, under the guise of PLC meetings or whatever. I’ve seen successful PLC development. It doesn’t look like this.
I will not spend another day wondering what menial, administrative task I will hear that I forgot to do next. I’m far enough behind in my own work.
I will not spend another day wondering how I can have classes that are full inclusion, and where 50% of my students have IEPs, yet I’m given no support.
I will not spend another day in a district where my coworkers are both on autopilot and in survival mode. Misery loves company, but I will not be that company.
I refuse to subject students to every ridiculous standardized test that the state and/or district thinks is important. I refuse to have my higher-level and deep thinking lessons disrupted by meaningless assessments (like the EXPLORE test) that do little more than increase stress among children and teachers, and attempt to guide young adolescents into narrow choices.
I totally object and refuse to have my performance as an educator rely on “Standard 6.” It is unfair, biased, and does not reflect anything about the teaching practices of proven educators.
I refuse to hear again that it’s more important that I serve as a test administrator than a leader of my peers.
I refuse to watch my students being treated like prisoners. There are other ways. It’s a shame that we don’t have the vision to seek out those alternatives.
I refuse to watch my coworkers being treated like untrustworthy slackers through the overbearing policies of this state, although they are the hardest working and most overloaded people I know.
I refuse to watch my family struggle financially as I work in a job to which I have invested 6 long years of my life in preparation. I have a graduate degree and a track record of strong success, yet I’m paid less than many two-year degree holders. And forget benefits—they are effectively nonexistent for teachers in North Carolina.
I refuse to watch my district’s leadership tell us about the bad news and horrific changes coming towards us, then watch them shrug incompetently, and then tell us to work harder.
I refuse to listen to our highly regarded superintendent telling us that the charter school movement is at our doorstep (with a soon-to-be-elected governor in full support) and tell us not to worry about it, because we are applying for a grant from Race to the Top. There is no consistency here; there is no leadership here.
I refuse to watch my students slouch under the weight of a system that expects them to perform well on EOG tests, which do not measure their abilities other than memorization and application and therefore do not measure their readiness for the next grade level—much less life, career, or college.
I’m tired of watching my students produce amazing things, which show their true understanding of 21st century skills, only to see their looks of disappointment when they don’t meet the arbitrary expectations of low-level state and district tests that do not assess their skills.
I refuse to hear any more about how important it is to differentiate our instruction as we prepare our kids for tests that are anything but differentiated. This negates our hard work and makes us look bad.
I am tired of hearing about the miracles my peers are expected to perform, and watching the districts do next to nothing to support or develop them. I haven’t seen real professional development in either district since I got here. The development sessions I have seen are sloppy, shallow, and have no real means of evaluation or accountability.
I’m tired of my increasing and troublesome physical symptoms that come from all this frustration, stress, and sadness.
Finally, I’m tired of watching parents being tricked into believing that their children are being prepared for the complex world ahead, especially since their children’s teachers are being cowed into meeting expectations and standards that are not conducive to their children’s futures.
I’m truly angry that parents put so much stress, fear, and anticipation into their kids’ heads in preparation for the EOG tests and the new MSLs—neither of which are consequential to their future needs. As a parent of a high school student in Union County, I’m dismayed at the education that my child receives, as her teachers frantically prepare her for more tests. My toddler will not attend a North Carolina public school. I will do whatever it takes to keep that from happening.
I quit because I’m tired being part of the problem. It’s killing me and it’s not doing anyone else any good. Farewell.
CC: Dr. Mary Ellis
Dr. June Atkinson
I know I have touched on the subject of what’s wrong with public schools many times on my own blog. As a Yankee who was once a long-term substitute, I find the differences between the North and Southern schools to be stark. In Charlotte, NC for example, each area or district has its own superintendent…in most Northern cites, there is one superintendent for most citiy school districts, with proxies. Southern schools seem to be very top-heavy with administration. In addition, there is very little choice. In Northern schools, children are free to move around to different schools within a district, without special permission from the top. The only restriction is not crossing city limits to another jurisdiction. In the South, once you are sent to a school, you seem to be committed there by the powers-that-be. Finally, school districts are held hostage by bad parents and their unruly children who make it hard to teach in class, and will sue at the drop of a hat if you “violate their children’s rights” (nevermind their children violating other’s rights to learn). Teachers get very little respect, smashed in a no-respect sandwich by disrespectful parents and detached and equally disrespectful administration!
Good for you! Its seems to be like this everywhere now. Its disgusting and there should be a class action suit put together to sue our government for all of the education that we paid for to become teachers. Between the tuition up to a masters level and the interest rates I owe out over $100,000 thousand here in NY. Its sick and we are treated the same way….Its a jail sentence…we all go to work sick to our stomachs everyday because we are lied to and treated like the enemy! This is sick and anyone who sends there kid to college to become a teacher in this day and age is a fool!!! You kid will be treated like crap!
The education field is more corrupt then our government! The nepotism that goes on with administrators is PROFOUND! You can be the best teacher , if they don’t like you for whatever reason you a gonna! Thats why teacher evaluations should be done by outside agencies of the state should send someone to the schools. The admins lie through there teeth 99% of them. If they need to get a friend on board of someone that they like you don’t have anyone to go to. No support what so ever! It needs to STOP! Its sick but true!
I too come from another state—Oklahoma. Unfortunately, it is not much better there with all the same standardized tests that only stress students and teachers alike. Oklahoma teachers, however, were still getting step raises yearly, which is more than I can say for NC. We constantly jump through hoops placed in front of us by those people in their “ivory towers” and know not what they do to the students and the teachers. How sad to realize that teaching has become less about students and more about test scores, money, and prestige. It’s even more sad to realize that the kids will suffer the
most as they will leave our “hallowed halls” lacking the tools we as educators so naively attempt to provide. We are thwarted at every moment as we are bombarded with more paperwork, meetings, and workshops that we are REQUIRED to attend without compensation, and we must get to the meetings and such with gas paid for with what little we are paid. Instead of teaching our students, we are doing training that, in many cases, is common sense and thereby a waste of our time and of the time we SHOULD be giving to our students.
My question? When do we teachers get to go back to what we decided to devote our lives—TEACHING?!
You know I have to say that I can totally understand the frustration. I too was a classroom teacher for Special Needs Children in Texas. I know God gave me this wonderful gift to HELP and provide insight to parents, teachers and children. It is very hard when such a noble profession is degraded and disrespected. This is why I have taken my gift into my own hands and started my own company here in Fuquay-Varina, NC. I have started Brighton Oaks Tutorial Services. Not, only do I help children and adults with “extra help” but I provide them tools through my Advocacy services, to help them through these hard times.
I honestly have to say as soon as I was told that “If you keep excelling these children, we will loose funding….” I WAS OUT! I got into education not to dumb down these children but to enlighten them and allow them to reach their full potential. If you are aware of anyone who can use my services, please point them in my direction.
http://brightonoakstutorialservices.yolasite.com
OR I also have formed a support group here in NC to help teachers, parents and students understand what is really going on in the system and to provide tools for academic success despite the circumstances. You can visit this site at: http://www.meetup.com/Education-Concerns-for-NC-Parents-and-Teachers/
Again, these are hard times, and even though we may not be in the classroom, I still feel we have a God given talent that we must use.
Cheryl Reed
I don’t know if wonderful should really be used here as a description concerning a system that is failing our youth and the future leaders, teachers and business people of this country, but this letter of resignation is wonderful!
I myself lived in Pennsylvania where I was subjected time and time again to the failure of the education system in supporting my children to be innovative and to excel not become robotic test takers. Curriculum was all based on standardized testing leaving handcuffs on wonderful teachers who really wanted to take learning to the next level.
I’ve left all of that behind and have moved west (2300 miles) not only for my family but to give my children the chance to have those opportunities. I have moved to an area where the guidance counselors are tailoring my son’s high school education to his goals, not the states; to the teachers who are innovative and create relationships with their students; to involved parents who don’t use school as a babysitting service and expect teachers to raise their children for them; to max 18 children per class to allow one on one teaching. This is what we need across the nation!
Kudos to you to stand up for what you believe in concerning yourself as an educator. I would love to see more teachers like you!
I began homeschooling my now 12 year old son last year after they didn’t care to resolve the reading issues and instead were just offering accommodations to pass testing. After just one year as a home-schooler and using an intensive remedial phonetic program for 3rd graders to adults, he has had amazing progress. With phonetic understanding both the reading and writing issues were solved! They gave him a computer that had word prediction software on it to help with writing and the first time he used it the vast it didn’t have the word he tried as his vocabulary is well above grade level. He never touched it again except to do the testing in the spring…. He now says “I didn’t have a learning disability, they had a teaching disability” I shudder to think where he would be if I had sent him on to middle school. I greatly admire your stand and getting the word out….
Tired of hearing about how bad teachers have it and how low they are paid. They get all holidays off spring break winter break summers off and off by 3 or 4? Then complain about having to take their work home with them? They would never survive in the private sector. When I have a deadline I work till I get it done. I get two weeks off a year plus 9 holidays. I’ve worked till 3 in the morning to make a deadline with NO recognition. it’s called life. The kids are the ones who suffer not the teachers. Get a job in private sector and see what hard work is like…until then, suck it up and do your job. I don’t get paid crap either but I’m thankful for what I have.
Not as tired as a lot of teachers are to hear that we’re supposed to roll over and accept poor working conditions (the shaft) blindly like too many people in this country.
It’s sad that so many Americans even wallow in this, like it’s some kind of a virtue these days to say you work long hours for little pay and recognition. I have this hobby of battling respondents on my local newspaper’s Web version and am always amazed at how they like to take this working man’s hero posture about employment in the private sector. I’m even more amazed at how the teaching profession has become vilified.
I spent five years on active duty in the navy, enlisting at 17. I worked in college writing parking tickets on campus. In fact, I was the highest paid student on the campus after I was promoted to supervisor. I spent nine months taking care of mentally retarded adults in an IFC. I spent three years running a shift in a textile mill (50+ hours a week) and then a year in consumer finance.
I chose to be a teacher because I love children. Recognition? I don’t care about that. Getting paid on a level commensurate with my education and skills? You bet. Summers off and long vacations? I get paid for the days I WORK. I don’t get paid over the summer. I sacrificed ever making over 100K, a salary many people with masters degrees make, for teaching. Not everyone can teach, evident in the extremely high teacher turnover.
Master teachers like me know what’s really at stake right now. We’re seeing money, massive amounts of it, going into an agenda of privatization and policies not based in solid educational research. This is even tougher for teachers like my wife and I who teach in the “nitty gritty inner city.” Most of our students are on free and reduced lunch. We know how important our jobs are because we’re the ones who help give these children a shot at upward mobility.
Bravo! Well said.
You have no idea the hours we put in. Do you think elves come in the middle of the nght and prepare your child’s classroom for the next day? How long do you think it takes to set up a classroom before the children arrive for a new school year or to pack it up for summer cleaning? I have calculated the hours I spend outside of my contractual day to ensure that my students have the best educational experience possible. It turns out that I probably have two weeks vacation a year. That’s right, just two weeks. I may get 15 minutes a day to choke down my lunch, all the while answering the endless emails I get. I am tired of ignorant people telling me how easy my job is. My challenge to you: spend a day with a teacher or, better yet, an entire week. Then tell me we have cushy jobs.
Most minimum wage workers are entitled to more frequent breaks and access to the bathroom on a regular basis than teachers are. What you say about our vacation days and summers off just shows how little you understand the working conditions, pay rates and unpaid obligations most teachers experience. I don’t know anyone else who gets only 20 minutes to eat and go to the bathroom while having to supervise children. When you need to take a day off for illness or emergency, it’s almost not worth it because of the chaos that can result of you not being there. Your points are simply not informed.
Angela,
Many ignorant Americans think as you do about teachers and the teaching profession.
I taught in both sectors–private and public and worked longer, harder hours in teaching than most people in the US work unless they work two jobs.
After earning my BA, in the private sector I was paid a monthly salary, worked an average 12 hours a day sometimes six days a week but I did get days off and that two week paid vacation you mention was about all I got as a teacher–three weeks, two before the New Year and one in the Spring but I had to take work home to catch up. During the school year, even when half of the more than 200 students I taught in five/six classes turned in work, I’d spend hours correcting one half hour student assignment and new assignments were being turned in almost daily. My work weeks as a public school teacher were never less than 60 hours and often reached 80 or 100 because of the stacks of student work that I took home to correct and record in the grade book. On weekends, I corrected half a day Saturday and half a day Sunday. On weeknights when I arrived home before seven PM, I corrected until ten or later and sometimes fell asleep at the kitchen table.
Then there was the three years I worked days Monday to Friday teaching and nights and weekends as a maître d because my teaching pay was too low to pay the bills. I knew two teachers that taught history all day and students how to drive in the late afternoons, early evenings and weekends. Those years I survived on two or three hours sleep a day.
As a teacher, during the summers, there was no paycheck. The contract for most teachers is for ten months a year—not twelve and we are only paid during those ten months.
Most teachers had to save during the year or work another job during the summer. I often taught summer school. However, some summers, I installed sprinkler systems for homeowners. I knew one teacher that worked in a pickle factory in the summer. Another teacher worked at Disneyland each summer because he was good at crowd control.
When I taught summer school, the pay was much less because summers were not covered under our contract so we were paid by the hour and I earned maybe a third of what I earned during the school year for the same number of hours worked.
In the private sector when I worked in middle management for a large truck company, no one ever threatened to kill me but as a teacher I taught gang bangers that had killed rival gangsters in turf wars and I was threatened every year. I saw drive buy shooting from my classroom doorway. Sometimes some parent would show up or call on the phone and yell at me because his or her kid earned an F. It didn’t matter that I tried to call the parents at work, at home (several times) and sent home warning letters that the parents often claimed they never saw. For every contact attempt, we had to fill out paperwork to prove we were doing our job. For example: make twenty calls in one day and fill out twenty forms.
I’m a former US Marine and I fought in Vietnam. I’ve been shot at with bullets, mortars and rockets and that was easier than teaching in America’s public schools. At last in combat, I had support from my fellow Marines and I carried a weapon to defend myself.
I retired from teaching after thirty years and if for some reason, the teacher’s retirement fund, that I paid 8% of my salary to for thirty years, went broke and I had to go back to work, I’d rather fight in Afghanistan than go back into the classroom and have to deal with kids that don’t want to learn and ignorant parents that think it is the teacher’s fault when his or her child will not read, study, do homework or behave in class so the teacher can teach.
Oh, lest I forget, when I retired, I took a forty-five percent pay cut—after thirty years—and most teachers do not retire with health care if he or she retires before age 65 as I did. Most have to wait to qualify for Medicare before they are covered again or pay for a very expensive COBRA health plan that may eat up a third or half of whatever the monthly retirement payment is. I was fortunate. Because I had a combat related disability, I was qualified for the VA medical system.
After I went into teaching, the hours increased. There were days I’d arrive at the high school where I taught when the front gate was unlocked at six in the morning and at 11 PM seventeen hours later, a custodian would come to the door and tell us we had to leave, the alarms were being turned on.
What I want to do is take people that think as you do and make them teach in the average American classroom fifth grade to ninth and see how long any of them would survive before they went screaming back to the private sector where work is usually much easier. About 50% of new teachers leave the profession in the first three to five years and never return to education. I know of one new teacher that didn’t even last one day. On his first day, with two classes left to teach, he walked into the principal’s office at lunch and tossed his room keys on the desk and said he was quitting because the students would not treat him with respect and cooperate while he was teaching.
I worked more than ten years in the private sector. I stared working 30 hour weeks washing dishes at age 15. I attended high school days. At nineteen, after I graduated from high school, I joined the US Marines. A few years later I was honorably discharged from the Marines and went to college on the GI Bill while working part time nights and weekends. From college, I went to work in the private sector.
I went into teaching at age 30 in 1975. My job was to maintain control and teach. It was up to the students to learn. If a kid doesn’t understand something, he is supposed to ask questions. Most students don’t ask questions. In the same classroom, I had students that learned nothing because that was his or her choice, and others that earned good grades because they read, worked and studied and then went on to Cal Tech, Stanford, Berkeley, USC, UCLA, etc. Same teacher. Different students. Different parents. The average American student has 42 or more teachers K -12 but only has one father and mother if he or she is fortunate to have both parents.
Buy a clue woman. Show me one private profession with such a high attrition rate as the teaching profession, then maybe, just maybe, your points can be taken seriously. This is not just one teacher leaving out of distress from a job that others simply do without stress and do well for years. This is a job that a teacher quit, in which 50% of his coworkers will also quit in 5 years, and that is in good school districts – move to an urban district and almost the whole teaching faculty will be gone in 5 years.
The difference between Kris is that he went public, and Diane Ravitch publicized his story. His story is the story of a vast bunch that goes untold.
Now name another profession in which professionals with multiple degrees leave to the extent of teachers. Show me.
That’s interesting, because my husband is a Civics teacher who works 9 hours a day, then comes home to an evening job because God knows he doesn’t get paid nearly what he deserves. He works on the Holiday team, therefore gets no real holidays off, and will work all summer. He gets no lunch break and no planning period but is expected to be prepared for an observation at a moments notice. I am also a teacher. I work with special needs students. I also get no lunch and no planning period, and also have two part time jobs to supplement our income. Funny that people like you forget where you got the education to be doing your private sector job.
I’m an educator and I have responded to this post a few times. I have seen a few people (who obviously know nothing about the teaching “profession”) make blanket statements about how we have summers off and holidays off. Private sector? The private sector makes enough money to DEFINE their arrogance and cockiness. Who put them in that position? A TEACHER! A person who dedicated their lives to a job that mandates and dictates how they act, who they marry, where they live, what they put in their grocery buggy, etc. Yes, we have to take our work home with us and now, we even have to put up with the fast pace of principals who want to “look good” in their counties and communities. Older teachers don’t stand a chance. WE CARE and are trying our best to teach former methods that used to guarantee learning. You simply cannot do that as the bureaucrats and moneymakers continually change teaching methods that absolutely NO one can pass and eventually ALL CHILDREN ARE LEFT BEHIND. It’s become a survival of the fittest in school. If your child is sharp enough to understand a concept quickly, he/she will be fine. If they have ANY developmental delays, then they won’t see success in the public school system because we aren’t allowed to provide patience, love, and concern anymore.
Trust me. I’m the nurturing teacher type and I’m hated by most in my school. I’ve actually HAD teachers express that I must be giving my kids candy or some other bribes. It’s a reversed form of bullying.
With all of that said, I feel damned if I do and damned if I don’t. The general public dislikes me because I’m a “whining teacher” and my colleagues don’t like me because the students “appreciate” me. I feel like I’m less than a mother because I can’t afford to keep my bills paid and am a step away from applying for some type of welfare, food stamps, or being homeless in general.
At 40, can I change my career and get a job in this private sector that someone mentioned? I don’t know but I know I have numerous degrees and a plethora of graduate credits. I can’t stay on this educational rollercoaster much longer. I can’t afford the physical, mental, emotional, and social anguish it has provided. My insurance (because I’m also overweight) won’t cover it. Oh yeah, did I mention that smokers and folks whose body mass is over a certain number were automatically regulated to a 70/30 coverage? Private sector indeed?! I say we all become entertainers or athletes and just earn millions of dollars from the masses who love to splurge on ignorant propaganda schemes. The day the Kardashians have enough money to buy respect and a teacher does not is the day we ALL need to STRIKE, PROTEST, or QUIT.
Signed,
Almost Out the Door!
That’s what I said, too! Teachers provide the foundation for EVERY occupation in the world yet we get treated like used car salesmen and they end up making MORE money than us. It’s a sad tale.
Actually, most teachers end up working at least one, usually two (and sometimes even three) part time jobs in summer. If you call in sick, money isn’t taken out of your paycheck to pay a sub. Teachers may leave the school building at 3 or 4, but many arrive at 7 a.m. (or sometimes earlier). They also take work home with them to grade and set up lesson plans. In addition, they respond to parents’ e-mails. Oh, and don’t forget open houses and parent/teacher conferences (that a lot of parents seem to avoid like the plague). Ms. Quintero, I think you truly fail to understand the life a teacher. Perhaps you should teach for a couple of years and then tell us if it really is as easy as you seem to think it is.
Amen!
I worked in the private sector for most of my career and did very well owning and running a small business. When I decided to become an elementary teacher in the mid 90′s I had to go back to college for a year with no pay (actually I had to pay). Then I worked in a Catholic school in 1996 and 1997 for $14,900.00/year. Unable to survive on this, I left and subbed in the public system to “get my foot in the door for $60.00/day and finally landed a job in Providence in 1999. My starting pay there was app. $28,000.00 and I was in heaven.
It took 10 years to work my way up the step scale to what I was making when I quit a month ago. My “RI Teacher Says I Quit!” YouTube video explains why.
By the way, I never did work my way back to my 1980′s pay level…
Amen!
Teacher do not get paid vacations. Teachers sign annual contracts with school districts to work a certain number of days per year. I work 190 days in my contract. I am paid for 190 days. I also work many more than 8 hours per day. I usually work 10 or more hours so if you add up all the extra hours, I work many more than 190 days for which I do not get paid. I do get 2 days of paid personal days per year. Most people I know in other jobs get 2 weeks of paid leave per year. When I was in the insurance business, b4 I became a teacher I worked up to 3 weeks of paid vacation a year. If I do not use the 2 personal days they do not accrue or roll over to the next year. IOW use them or lose them as we are told. I also get sick days, but if I call in sick I have to spend usually 2 hours getting my classroom ready for a sub with written lesson plans (usually 2-3 pages typed) with activities ready and available for the substitute. So I can’t just pick up the phone and “call in sick” as many people in other jobs can do.
I do not get paid for summer breaks, holiday breaks or spring break. I get 12 paychecks a year and I get paid on the 15th of each month. Therefore, money that I earn in May is not paid to me until August because they spread 9 months work of work over 12 months of paychecks. What other job holds onto your salary for 3 months before paying it to you? Most people get paid their salary within 2 weeks or one month of when they work.
People who have a misconceived notion that teachers are paid for summers and holidays are strictly ignorant of these facts. Please educate yourself about teacher contracts and please stop misrepresenting what you believe is true but which is actually false, misleading and incorrect.
Come to Nebraska. A state led by a common sense dept. of education and a smart, reasonable teachers’ union. We don’t rush to jump on every new educational bandwagon (Nope, we didn’t get any Race to the Top money and the verdict’s still out on Common Core–we’re one of the few ‘wait and see’ hold out states) and try to comply with mandatory standards while doing the least amount of damage to our kids. We aren’t averse to change–indeed, we’re always looking to be on that cutting edge, however, if we’re going to spend hard earned tax dollars, it had better be worth it. I’m a high school special education teacher and co-teach algebra and geometry. I work with a tough population and my school isn’t perfect. Lots of hard work. But the difference is that public education is supported in our state. We have no charter schools. I feel appreciated by my students, my co-workers, parents and administration just about every single day. Now, it’s not a Shangra-la…I DO work with teenagers, many with behavior dsorders, and don’t always agree with administration or co-workers. Our state legislature passed a law and implented a state-wide test many educators aren’t crazy about. We are under the same gun to improve test scores as any other state and that can be stressful. However, we are encouraged and celebrated whenever we infuse creativity, active learning, and technology into our classrooms. In a nutshell, we’re held accountable, the state testing is a pain and possibly a waste of time, but overall I feel the higher ups try to stay out of our way as best as they can. The biggest threat to our educational system here is out of state money with an agenda to privatize education and run it like a business–a fate experienced by other states. I only hope we can fight them off and maintain what we have.
I teach in Nebraska also, but I do not have quite as rosy a picture as you do. I work with high risk ELA students and I feel extreme pressure from admin to get these “language-deficient” students up to par. In our district everything revolves around test scores and it is becoming very competitive between each school. Admin micro-mangages our every move, we have endless and meaningless meetings and SIP (school improvement) obligations. We now have cameras in most of the classrooms watching us. While our teacher association tries hard to work on our behalf, they are virtually powerless in this right-to-work state. I feel like we are under the careful watch of Big Brother and authoritarian eyes. Our voices are not heard by admin and we are typically patronized and told to be “team players” and have a positive attitude. I want to retire as soon as I possibly can. I feel bad for the students who are burning out at such a young age. I used to love to teacher and no longer feel that way. College professors I know in NE tell me that kids are coming to college with fewer and fewer skills, interest and motivation. I think our public schools are moving in a dangerous direction.
@Sunflower: You are SPOT ON in all of your responses to these other writers. The private sector person ticked me off, too, but your retort answered the accusation just fine. We DON’T get paid vacations PLUS we DO have to work more than any other profession in the world. Even the brain surgeon can operate and then take days off afterwards. Think about it: when we need surgery, we have to get the ok from the surgeon for us to plan around HIS schedule. What school system allows us that freedom?! None! When the parents say ‘conference’, we have to give them one. When the parents come in ‘unexpectedly’, we have to drop what we are doing and give them an audience. When the principal says ‘staff meeting’, we have to do it no matter how much of a rest we need, a break. Unfortunately, now, when you need to take a ‘mental health’ day (just to get away from it all), you have to provide a medical note.
To piggyback on what Sunflower said, ‘please research the information about what a teacher has to do’ before you make such ignorant, blanket statements about how “good” we have it.
I have one birth daughter and twin teenage boys that I’ve “adopted” and guess what? My single teacher salary with all of the deducted taxes and insurances and loans and regular cost of living WITHOUT luxuries are not enough for me to properly feed them, clothe them, and/or give them heat in winter and air in summer.
The solution: Pay us what you pay doctors and lawyers and engineers and we’ll have no choice but to take more pride in what we do. I don’t believe that teachers start off ineffective but after being harassed and unsupported and living paycheck to paycheck, they get burned out. If I’m physically unwell, I am of NO benefit to ANY child.
Signed,
Burned Out, Fed Up, and Needs a New Career.
Teachers, I’m sorry you have awful jobs, 60, 80, 100+ hours a week, have to pay for ‘teaching supplies’ with your own money, get nasty objections from parents, get contempt from your bureaucracies, seriously object to standardized tests, are barely paid enough even to keep your car running to commute to the school, and are subject to dismissal for nearly anything or nothing at all. Bummer.
I’m supposed to know something about ‘education’: In the words of the movie ‘Pretty Woman’, I “went all the way in school” and got a technical Ph.D. from a world class research university. I never had any instruction of any kind in ‘educational’ techniques, methods, or theories. The usual advice in teaching was just “start writing in the upper left corner of the board”. But I’ve taught both undergraduate and graduate courses at three well known research universities, as graduate associate, lecturer, and professor.
I never for even one milli, micro, nano, pico, femto second had any academic aspirations at all, and still don’t. Instead I went to school to learn material that would help me make money, the green kind, as needed to buy food, clothing, shelter, etc.
For teaching, it was fun and easy, but I always felt that I was going on a detour guaranteed to keep me from being financially responsible.
My technique of teaching and learning are the same and simple: Take a good text, study it, work the exercises, and get ready for the test. Teaching? Can help the students learn from the text. Done.
Just what is it about that technique the K-12 teachers on this thread have so much trouble understanding? What the heck are you doing to make the work so difficult? Why?
Out of school, my career has been in technology, basically applied math and computing, initially for problems of US national security and now for the ‘consumer Internet’. Gotta tell you, in this work all along it’s been just crucial to be able to find, study, learn, and apply technical material new to me, and at times it’s been crucial for me to do original work, i.e., ‘research’ as in “new, correct, and significant” and publishable in an appropriate peer-reviewed journal of original research. In this work and learning, never was the situation as good as “Take a good text …”, because there didn’t exist a good text. So, the learning technique “Take a good text, study it, work the exercises, and get ready for the test.” is, on balance, considering the real world outside K-12, not too difficult but the EASY way.
That’s my view of ‘education’. Now for the view of the teachers on this thread:
One teacher posted here about how much effort she had to do to get the classroom ready for the fall semester. Gads! Here’s how that worked at the K-12 school I went to: At the end of the school year, the janitors picked up the trash, dusted the room, washed the black boards, and decreed and declared the rooms ready for the fall semester. Done.
Yes, since then I’ve seen some pictures of grade school classrooms with the walls covered with colorful, enticing, enthralling, exciting whatever, about leaves, bugs, stories, dogs, cats, space flight, etc. When I voted this week, the polling place was in a grade school, and just in the halls it was clear that the teachers were posting all kinds of student ‘work’ in ‘crafts’ of displays of leaves of various tree species. There was a nice poster of the stringed instruments in a classical orchestra, with the names of, I assume, four music teachers. WOW — one grade school with FOUR music teachers. Enough for a string quartet! The school looked like a just super nice, fun place with all the students awash, surrounded, and infused in positive emotional social and learning experiences. Amazing. Where can I apply to be a first grade student again? Maybe if I look sad some REALLY cute, sweet, sensitive, empathetic, emotionally insightful, highly concerned, responsive, dedicated, and professional teacher’s assistant will notice and provide sympathy and ‘comfort’! The she’d have to stay up all night writing up the event in my personal ‘assessment’, have long consultations with some school clinical psychologist about my ‘case’, etc. Gads. Her being cute would be PLENTY!
Then the teachers in this thread keep describing individual student ‘assessments’ and ‘portfolios’. You GOTTA be kidding! Or have you teachers been smoking funny stuff? I never saw any such thing. Now I’m beginning to understand how the 100+ hours a week are used. WHERE did US K-12 education get the idea of individual student ‘assessments’ and ‘portfolios’? Sounds like, when a student can’t do the desired work, then the teacher finds some other work the student can do and describes the student’s progress in that work in some individual assessment and portfolio. Is that it? Why? Who wants that in K-12?
When I was in school, K-college, although much of graduate school was different, the ‘assessment’ was simple — take a test. Then somewhere sometimes there was a standardized test. For me, in K-8, I didn’t care about any of it. In 9 on, I cared about exactly two subjects — math and physics, and I always wanted much, Much, MUCH more of both than I ever could get in K-college. And in 9-12, in math I did MUCH better on the standardized tests than those of the teachers. In the end, my school sent me to one state competitive exam in math and one NSF summer program in math and physics. Apparently someone in my school, likely the principal, looked at the state tests and did an ‘assessment’ for me. But that ‘assessment’ for me was never much work for the staff of my school: I just took a standardized test and the school got my score and entered it on a form somewhere.
To me just a simple state test, say, sampled once every other year just in, say, the really important subjects, i.e., math, physics, reading comprehension, and English grammar, should be quite sufficient. Else, just give the SAT and CEEB tests. E.g., in college they give the GRE tests: When I got out of college, it was clear that I knew some math — I got 800 on the GRE test in math knowledge.
Net, it seems to be that testing and ‘assessment’ are simple, really simple, just dirt simple. So, I don’t understand the objections to testing or the role of individual student ‘assessments’ and ‘portfolios’. I don’t understand why your teaching work is so difficult or why or how the US K-12 system is making the teaching so difficult. What’s going on here? Why take something simple, easy, and fun and make it difficult?
So, so far, I see the goals and work of K-12 as fairly simple with no need for anything over 40 hours a week for nine months a year. For all that other stuff, I suggest that somehow it be left on the cutting room floor.
Then there is the issue of ‘inner city schools’, ‘disadvantaged children’, classrooms full of ‘disruptive’ children. For the teachers, don’t teach in such a school. Do anything else instead.
I suggest: For the students, the third time a student does something disruptive in class, they should be transfered to a ‘reform’ school. There many of the teachers are former US Marines, and the first time a student gets out of line he gets ‘correction’ as US Marines are fully able to provide. A student who thinks he’s a ‘tough guy’ has yet to meet a US Marine. The first time he challenges a Marine, he leaves class in tears from excruciating pains, crawling on all fours. The second time he’s carried out on a stretcher. The third time, he’s carried to a cell with bars where his food comes in through a small slot. Gotta stop that stuff.
What’s the problem?
Norm, a U.S. marine wouldn’t last 2 seconds in a public K-12 school. Much of your analysis is spot on – I have always advocated for alternative schools that are indeed ‘no excuses’. I advocate for alternative schools to be nard-nosed, raking leaves, and cleaning toilets – a place that is dreaded. But there are detractors from such an approach, and some of the arguments are good ones, but I do agree with you here.
Other than that sir, I would also tell you that YOU wouldn’t last 2 seconds in a K-12 public school. With your attitude (which I’m not saying is all that bad), a principal would help you out of the profession quicker than you can blink. With your extreme views (some of which I agree – I did go to a private, military school after all), you would stick out like a sore thumb. You would be ushered to the door.
I am very much like you in that all I need is a book, some quizzes, and a test. I skipped many science classes while I was in college because with the book, I could do my thing, walk in and pass the test. I only attended my physics courses to take the tests – the professor was Chinese, and I could barely make out what he was saying. He had no attendance policy and there were about 200 kids in the class. But science was my thing. I could not do such things in other subject areas.
I have taught K-12 public ed. for 15 years and coached for about the same. It is not as simple as you think. There are lots of rules, meetings, and red tape. For this I think some level-headed reform measures would do public K-12 some good without having to institute charters to make the teaching profession even less appealing for would-be teachers.
The bottom line is this – something is wrong in public education when teachers leave their schools and the profession in such high numbers. This is not make believe – the attrition rates are soaring, and there is data to prove it. Nearly 50% of teachers leave within 5 years in suburbia, and that rate is much higher in urban areas.
Yes, the kids are tough, and the parents aren’t much better, even in suburbia, but more than anything, I think K-12 teachers are tired of being beat up like no other profession. The ones who planned on making this a life-long profession and obsession are even more upset. We’ve been mocked, demoralized, deskilled, and now we are getting fired because test scores are low.
This is all the result of politicians and profiteers engaging in a decade and a half smear campaign since the NCLB Act in 2001. All reforms are set up to see to it that we fail. The RttT initiative is even more so designed with such an end in mind, but rather than show schools as failures, and close them down (aim of the NCLB Act), now RttT seeks to label teachers as failures and fire them.
This promotion of blaming teachers and schools has hit the perfect storm of conservatives, who have historically hated public K-12, and neoliberal democrats that are out to make money by turning public K12 into a marketplace.
Another piece adding fuel to this fire is the inability of our kids to be academic because of the issues surrounding their poverty at home. About 25% of our kids come to school from deplorable conditions at home, and many of them come to eat free breakfast, lunch, and in some cases, dinner. There are places where kids steal ketchup packets to make tomato soup at home for dinner.
But the politicians don’t care. This is the perfect opportunity to blame teachers and schools, break unions, and steal money from the public sector in order to prop up the private sector during this strange economic time. Aggregate teacher salaries are perfect pillaging material, and so are teacher pension plans. They want it, and they want that money badly.
They will stop at nothing to get it, including making our lives a living hell by holding our jobs over our head, and hiring TFA scabs to take our places when we decide “enough is enough”.
Politicians want churn in teacher employment, where they can pay entry level robots to accept they are failures, but to layover until a better job comes along. This keeps costs low.
“Norm, a U.S. marine wouldn’t last 2 seconds in a public K-12 school.”
I was a former U.S. Marine and I taught in the K-12 schools for thirty years, and I know army and navy vets that taught in the same schools with no problem. In fact, I never heard of a vet that quit in the first 3 to 5 years.
In fact, I doubt if most teachers in the US would survive in the barrio, gang infested schools where we taught near Los Angeles.
You could say I exaggerated a bit – trying to make a point.
I would also like to mention that I stated some statistics wrong in the above post – its about 50% of all NEW teachers that don’t make it in suburbia and a rate even higher for NEW teachers in urban schools.
The same point applies.
[...] A North Carolina Teacher Quits. [...]
Okay, maybe I’m beginning to ‘get it’: Gotta tell you, for some well educated teachers, you are a bit inarticulate and obscure. Maybe you are just being politically correct.
So, apparently here’s what’s been going on: Long US K-8 or K-12 education was to teach the 3Rs. Even in a one room school house, say, in Indiana or Iowa, that worked fine. Maybe the situation was as in ‘Little House on the Prairie’ or ‘Anne of Green Gables’ or some such. That Anne was CUTE!
Alas, there was a ‘dark side’: There were poor people, especially poor Blacks in the South and later in some of the inner cities. There long the approach was just to f’get about their education, regard their school as just something to keep them off the streets, give them ‘social promotion’, pass them through, and let them out.
Then results included ‘high school graduates’ who communicated in just different inflections of just one phrase of just two words, the first of which was ‘mother’. They couldn’t read or write, and only the very best could do simple arithmetic ensured, on penalty of death, by their drug wholesaler.
Eventually a lot of communities concluded that this part of education was turning out young adults who were very expensive for society. So we ended up with a major fraction of the males in jail at more cost per person-year than a scholarship to Harvard and a major fraction of the women single mothers on ‘aid to dependent children’ repeating the situation for the next generation.
So, major parts of US government, if only to save money, decided to have major parts of US education do something about this horrible situation, and the result was to set up some minimum standards for learning and, then, make absolutely, positively certain, week by week, day by day, even hour by hour, that the material was being taught and learned. Everything else was secondary. Period. It was a ‘forced march’, all in ‘lock step’.
So the material to be learned was developed by the school district, along with the ‘lesson plans’ and ‘learning materials’, and then the results were tested not just annually but at least weekly and maybe daily or even more frequently. And the test scores were communicated up the bureaucracy. Then, even one hour lost on the ‘forced march’ was easy to observe in the principle’s office and the school district.
I can understand this! It’s nothing like how I learned, but it’s apparently close to something I heard about! My father wanted to be a school teacher. At the time, in the 1930s, the hot subjects, as hot as computing and the Internet are now, were, broadly, the ‘industrial arts’ with wood working, metal working, printing, strength of materials, welding, casting, forging, heat treating, electricity, etc. So he got his Bachelor’s in industrial arts. Then he got his Master’s in education and started teaching in high school. Soon WWII started; he submitted an application; and soon the US Navy had a job for him: The Navy needed to train people to maintain airplanes — work in electricity, electronics, hydraulics, mechanics, and sheet metal — and set up some schools. Dad became the head ‘educational theorist’. He knew about the Gaussian distribution and test construction with ‘difficulty index’ (likely expected value) and ‘separation index’ (likely standard deviation).
Eventually his schools were teaching 40,000 young men at a time and became one of the most important sources of technical education for all of the US and the world.
He had those schools very well organized: He had a staff of people who developed the teaching materials and then, graphics departments that made films, slides, and printed manuals. In each course, the learning objectives, lesson plans, teaching materials, teaching, teaching techniques, and testing were all very precise. He explained to me that he could walk to any course, note the day and the time, and then within minutes describe what was going on in the class. It appears that this ‘lock step’ approach to ‘training’ is much of what the school districts want now and the teachers here are objecting to.
So, with this system, everything was carefully specified, measured, and evaluated — students, lesson plans, teaching materials, and the teachers.
Classroom ‘discipline’ problems? You GOTTA be kidding! On a US military base, awash with MPs and Marines?
Poor students? Not much chance: There were ‘entrance exams’ that ensured that the entering students had to be relatively bright.
So, net, the schools worked, very well. The US Navy got people to maintain the aircraft; the US taxpayers got good value for their money; and the US economy got a lot of well trained ‘technologists’. Since now one Navy airplane can cost $50 million, with the cost increasing rapidly, bad maintenance from bad training is expensive.
Curiously, at home, Dad’s view of my education was very different: He wanted me to be curious and interested and learn based on that. He emphasized that I understand the material and never once discussed my grades or report card. In the fifth grade, a teacher had some personal problems which she took out on me, and Dad defended me and took her apart for her incompetence into tiny little, quivering pieces. I had no more trouble with her. He was proud of my high SAT and CEEB scores.
In the fourth grade, as usual in K-8, I didn’t do homework. So, the teacher sent a note home saying that if I didn’t complete the arithmetic workbook in time, then she would fail me. So, Dad checked that I understood arithmetic well; I did — took him about 90 seconds. Then the next night he brought home his office calculator, and we finished the workbook together.
Apparently as is standard for boys through middle school, my handwriting was just awful — somehow over the years it became decent on its own. So, through the eighth grade, when I did arithmetic, I didn’t keep the columns aligned and only occasionally got correct answers. So, in the eighth grade, my arithmetic teacher gave me a D and warmly advised me never to take any math again and in 9-12 take only ‘high school arithmetic’. BS. Dad laughed! Eventually a physics professor told me in clear terms that I had to work carefully enough to get correct results, and from then on I did. Simple lesson.
Dad was correct: I got math SAT 752 one time and 768 another time, was one of the best math students in my relatively good high school, was a math major in college and got ‘Honors in Math’ from a paper on group representation theory (as used in molecular spectroscopy and elsewhere in quantum mechanics and physics). My Ph.D. dissertation was in the mathematics of stochastic optimal control. Net, the eighth grade teacher was badly wrong, and Dad was correct.
It sounds like NC is tired of their high schools graduating students who can’t read, write, or do arithmetic, males who become drug dealers and go to jail and females who become single mothers on aid to dependent children. So, the NC idea is to have K-12 do a ‘forced march’ in ‘lock step’.
But, then, the rest of education is neglected. So, what to do about that? Should be simple enough: For the better students, see what they are interested in and give them some appropriate materials and guidance. Maybe want the 9th grade biology students using software to analyze DNA sequences and 9th grade math and computer students writing software applying ‘machine learning’ to ‘big data’.
There are some world class people at UNC and Duke — connect with those. My last paper was reviewed by an EE prof at Duke, Editor in Chief of ‘Information Sciences’ — not your father’s electronic engineering! My favorite prof in graduate school, very bright guy, is now at UNC.
Still, warning: If want good results, especially from math, physics, and engineering, especially for the ‘future’, then it stands to be just crucial actually to learn the basic material. That is, can’t just do ‘projects’ and, instead, need good grounding in the prerequisites. E.g., if are going to use martingales in mathematical finance, then need actually to understand martingales and, thus, the Radon-Nikodym theorem and measure theory. If are going to follow Stanford prof Ng’s applications of maximum likelihood estimation and steepest descent to ‘machine learning’, need actually to understand much of, say, Fleming’s ‘Functions of Several Variables’. Sorry ’bout that.
In simple terms, in math, get through first and second year algebra, plane and solid geometry (more fun than eating popcorn watching a James Bond movie except in the case of watching with a pretty girl!), trigonometry, analytic geometry, college calculus (never but never do anything in calculus from high school, e.g., the AP materials — just do college calculus from any of the many highly polished texts), linear algebra (from any good, first text, e.g., Noble, maybe Strang), then some good text in abstract algebra comparable with the classic Birkhoff and MacLane, Halmos, ‘Finite Dimensional Vector Spaces’, Rudin, ‘Principles of Mathematical Analysis’, Fleming, ‘Functions of Several Variables’ (these last three apparently do well covering Harvard’s Math 55, claimed to be the hardest undergrad math course in the country, which is not really true!), Coddington, ‘An Introduction to Ordinary Differential Equations’ and from there on to topology, measure theory, functional analysis, probability, stochastic processes, mathematical statistics, optimization, etc. Then a grand gourmet desert buffet is Luenberger’s ‘Optimization by Vector Space Techniques’ or how to have fun and make money from the Hahn-Banach theorem. This list has an applied emphasis toward engineering for the next 100 years; past, say, functional analysis, pure math is a bit different although still with major connections.
Fun stuff: Of course, tough not to have seen the movie ‘The Day the Earth Stood Still’. There Klatu is discussing an infinite series solution to an initial value problem in ordinary differential equations and mentions “variation of parameters”. Well, can see a really pretty presentation in Coddington! Once I generalized it to difference equations! And, may have seen ‘Sneakers’; well the white board actually has some good abstract algebra, and the speaker, a bit overwrought, mentions ‘splitting fields’ which can learn about in abstract algebra, uh, which is also a nice place to learn a little number theory sufficient for Rivest-Shamir-Adleman (RSA) public key cryptography! Also with abstract algebra can learn about group representation theory for molecular spectroscopy and finite field theory for error correcting codes — e.g., much of why CDs, DVDs, hard disks, satellite communications, and the Internet actually work! With some Fourier theory can have great fun with Shannon’s information theory — it boils down just to how many little balls will fit in a big ball. With a good background in linear algebra, can tap lightly and knock off linear programming and network linear programming, an application of spanning trees, and introduce integer linear programming and the unsolved problem of P versus NP. With Fleming, can tap lightly and knock off the Kuhn-Tucker conditions and much of mathematical economics. So, can ‘inspire’ your good students!
In simple terms, the material on this short, simple list covers a large fraction of what there is for some of the top, center crown jewels of civilization. As the owner of a restaurant which got five stars from Mobil for at least 14 years in a row mentioned to me while pouring a Morey St. Denis, “you won’t find better”!
For most of this work, can do quite well, close to best possible, just by starting with a good text, studying the material, and working the exercises, hopefully but not necessarily with some supervision and guidance from a good teacher. Some Internet video clips might help, if they were up to the good texts which so far as far as I can tell they very much are not; some on-line fora, like StackOverflow, might help. Many of the best texts were written by the best guys; tough to compete with them.
But there is no royal road to understanding math, and it is not a spectator sport. With such math, can do the physics in the footnotes (most of that math is actually very close to mathematical physics — e.g., Halmos is really giving a baby version of Hilbert space theory, directly from von Neumann, as used in quantum mechanics and my startup!, and the inverse and implicit function theorems in Fleming are the main prerequisites for manifold theory for general relativity), and it is like ice cream and cake dessert!
Look, guys, von Neumann was doing such math as a teenager in Hungary nearly 100 years ago; we should be able to have students doing simpler versions of it in the US now!
Still, in all of this, I’m failing to see just why the teaching has to be such a painful job.
Norm,
You know what it is truly painful…reading your posts. I have tons of grading and I just don’t have the time. Anyway to be more concise….that is a useful skill.
Norm, I would suggest you apply for a K-12 job. You would wind up another statistic.
You wouldn’t even make it in a private school.
Number one rule – relate to your students, and understand they could hardly care about you are anything you have to say, especially in an urban school.
All of your blathering means zilch. I’ve seen some Einsteins come in and go right back out. It doesn’t matter how smart you are. What matters is how well you play the game (in order to keep your position), and ultimately the rewards from teaching comes from helping kids overcome serious obstacles at home and at school. The material to be taught is secondary to kids. Kids care more about facebook and Halo than anything you have to say. And these kids come from backgrounds with NO support. They don’t have the Daddy that you and I had. More than likely they have a single mother at home fighting to put food on the table.
Please apply to your local K-12 public school system.
“ultimately the rewards from teaching comes from helping kids overcome serious obstacles at home and at school.”
Yes, that says it all. Even if we teach two hundred and only help a handfull in one school year, that is still an utlimate reward.
@ME “All of your blathering means zilch. I’ve seen some Einsteins come in and go right back out. It doesn’t matter how smart you are. What matters is how well you play the game (in order to keep your position), and ultimately the rewards from teaching comes from helping kids overcome serious obstacles at home and at school. The material to be taught is secondary to kids. Kids care more about facebook and Halo than anything you have to say. And these kids come from backgrounds with NO support. They don’t have the Daddy that you and I had. More than likely they have a single mother at home fighting to put food on the table.”
That is one of the most accurate analysis of contemporary teaching I have heard in a very long time. Excellent!
Bla, bla, bla, Norm. Your stream of examples reveals how ignorant you are of the history of the evolution of education in the US.
There has never been a golden age of education in the US. If one exists, it is happening now!
If you go to the bottom of this comment and click on the link, scroll down to Figure 3, and you will discover that in 1950, 37% of white females and 34% of white males age 25 or older had completed 4 years of high school. For Black Americans and other races, the female completion rate was 15% and for males 10%.
Forty-one years later, in 1991, the high school completion rate had soared to 78% for whites and 68% for blacks and other races. The America’s public education system increased high school completion rates 35.5% for whites and 55.5% for blacks and other races.
Scroll down to “Illiteracy” and discover: “For the major part of this century, the illiteracy rates have been relatively low, registering only about 4 percent as early as 1930. However, in the late 19th century and early 20th century, illiteracy was very common.”
In 1870, 20 percent of the entire adult population was illiterate, and 80 percent of the black population was illiterate. By 1900, the situation had improved somewhat, but still 44 percent of blacks remained illiterate. The statistical data show significant improvements for black and other races in the early portion of the 20th century …”
The illiteracy rate today is less than 1%.
Lots of good information from this government study showing the successful historical evolution of public education in the US despite the challenges that walk in classroom each year for the dedicated public school teachers that do not run away when the going gets tough and it is tough every day for most public school teachers. For some, it’s more challenging than for others.
However, the critics and enemies of public education will keep painting a picture of a glass almost empty instead of closer to being 80% full because these people with a political/religious agenda are willing to cherry pick the facts, exaggerate and lie to destroy an education system they cannot control.
Norm, are you one of these critics? Are you another enemy of a democratic public education system that is not controlled by a dictator, autocrats, corporate CEO’s, religions, etc? If you want to control how people think, then you have to control the schools and keep people as ignorant as possible.
http://0-nces.ed.gov.opac.acc.msmc.edu/pubs93/93442.pdf
> Your stream of examples reveals how ignorant you are of the history of the evolution of education in the US.
No, you are arguing with things I didn’t say. Looks like you are good at reading between the lines. Maybe you are an English literature teacher!!!
That literacy has gone up as you say, I can believe that.
But my father went to a one room school house, and so did my wife’s father. Both graduated from college and wanted to be school teachers, and my father got a Master’s. Both were fully ‘literate’.
My point about one room school houses is that they were able to provide educations that remain competitive. E.g., my father learned plane geometry in his one room school house, and at times I had to work a little, bring my better game, to compete with him in the subject! When I read ‘Brave New World’ for fun, he gave me a really nice Socratic dialog on the contents. When my brother was trying to understand psychometrics in college, my father gave him nice lessons. I, of course, would argue with the role he assumed for the Gaussian distribution!
More generally, a point is that effective K-12 teaching, of children from reasonably good families, should be easy and fun without anything like the angst described here.
For kids who at school need a surrogate parent more than a teacher, I’d advise the teacher to go to a school in a better neighborhood. I wouldn’t try to teach in such a school. I never even wanted to teach; for parenting someone else’s children, no way.
But in my post I outlined a candidate way, borrowing from what my father did for the technical schools for the Navy, for teaching effectively without angst in such schools, and the frequent standardized ‘testing’ being objected to here suggests that techniques similar to what my father instituted are being tried in schools in poor neighborhoods. Still, where my father was, the results were high and the turnover and angst were low.
For the frequent standardized tests, sounds good to me! When I was teaching, by far the most work was preparing the tests, grading the papers, and at the end determining the grades. If I was just handed the tests, the grading was by some optical machine, and I was given the scores, say, via e-mail, then the work would have been reduced.
I say again, and there is no good chance of any serious contradictions for some years, likely decades: (1) For subjects in math, physical science, and technology from, say, grade 9 on, learning is not a spectator sport and there is no royal road to it. (2) Nearly sufficient and nearly necessary are for the student, working mostly alone, to take a well written text, study the material, and work the exercises. So far other teaching materials are from tangential down to just distractions. Tests with high reliability and validity can measure the learning. (3) The role of a teacher can be reduced to some issues of guidance and answering questions.
My education in grades 9-12 and in the first two years of college would have been much better in a one room school house: Just give me the texts and let me sit alone or nearly so in the back of the class and do the work. Nearly all the time the teachers were talking just interrupted the needed work or my attempts at taking naps. A few minutes once a week from a teacher would have been quite sufficient; similarly for the CEEB tests.
Let me put it to you this way: It’s not the teachers who need to do the work; it’s the students. Understand now?
Net, such teaching should be easy and fun without all this angst.
Thank you for your arm-chair insights about education. You’d be better off fully advocating teachers and giving them the power to control what happens in their classroom, which you’ve advocated to some extent.
Let us take care of things – as Loyd had pointed out – we have done a great job thus far.
> Thank you for your arm-chair insights about education.
“Arm-chair? Look, I’ve written a lot on this thread. Maybe a community college could give you some remedial lessons in reading comprehension. I taught, mostly calculus, as a graduate associate for two years in one research university, as a lecturer in computer science for two years at another, and as a professor, applied math and computing, for five years at another. And I never wanted to be a teacher and still don’t. And I hold a technical Ph.D. from one of the world’s best research universities. I learned some about education from my father who was essentially ‘academic dean’ of a technical school with 40,000 students, and both my wife and brother got Ph.D. degrees in the social sciences from research universities.
So, I’m not an “arm-chair” commenter on education.
> Let us take care of things – as Loyd had pointed out – we have done a great job thus far.
Apparently many school districts have been highly concerned about both costs and results for the “job thus far” and, thus, have instituted a lot of standardized testing to measure progress and results and insist that the results be better.
Then as in this thread, teachers are screaming in agony with angst about how horrible their jobs are when to me teaching was easy and fun and didn’t seem much worse for the teachers I had in K-12 who got results competitive across the US — e.g., graduating nearly everyone, sending over 97% of the graduates to college, and sending a nice sampling of the best graduates to the best colleges — Princeton, MIT, Purdue, Vanderbilt. Not so bad for a public school in the Old South. E.g., supposedly now China is working really hard on education and insisting that their students work their little fingers to the bone. So, recently I saw a challenging problem from one of their math tests. The problem was a little exercise in solid geometry. I took that as a high school senior, decades before, and the problem was easy enough for me. Looks like China will have to up their game! To heck with the PISA tests — have them take the SAT and CEEB, and I’ll match their scores for money, marbles, or chalk anytime from anywhere. When the US does it really well, we get a Charlie Fefferman or Eric Lander.
When a discussion keeps going on and on without any clear resolution, it looks like there is a hidden agenda. Okay, it now appears that what’s going on on this thread is a teachers union and their members screaming for more money, worse results, more job security, and less evaluation. So, it’s Obama, union politics. Sorry, guys — you won’t win that battle. Except possibly for teachers in schools in poor neighborhoods, it sounds like the angst, suffering, and screaming are mostly just made up politics.
Hi, Norm. My name is Christine and I’ve been teaching for 28 years. Teaching was not my first profession. I graduated from college in 1982 with a Bachelor’s degree in Medical Technology. I was a good medical technologist, but I felt unfulfilled in that profession and, because teenagers were (and are!) my passion, I returned to school in 1984 to earn my teaching credentials. I started teaching 8th grade general science in 1985 and earned my Master’s in Secondary Science Education in 1988 while working full-time as a teacher. My comments that follow will be brief and to the point– well at least by your standard posts! Here it goes…..
….Just because you stand in front of a bunch of college or grad students and give a lecture, assign them to read a series of chapters in a text, and then give them a test, DOES NOT make you a teacher. You haven’t the first clue about what it means to TEACH. Let me tell you what TEACHING is. Teaching means getting inside a kid’s head and heart and leading them on a journey of discovery that they didn’t even think was possible for them. Teaching means understanding that each child is unique and comes with gifts and challenges unlike ANY other child. You don’t understand the first thing about being a REAL teacher. You simply talk, assign, test, and grade. Like YOU said: What you do is SIMPLE. What a REAL teacher does is complex and challenging and tiring and REWARDING.
I can sum up ALL of your posts in this thread in a very SIMPLE way. It comes from scripture — which was probably taught in that one-room school house you are so fond of mentioning:
“A fool finds no pleasure in understanding but delights in airing his own opinions.” (Proverbs 18:2)
Uh, for your comments on my comment, you need to
improve your reading comprehension of my comments!
What you are calling ‘teaching’ is nice; I’m not
sure I ever had any except less than an hour from
my father; your version of teaching is asking too
much of the teacher; my suggestion, clear in this
thread, is, don’t teach in a school that needs such
teaching. If you want to teach that way, go ahead.
You may do some extra good, but you will suffer and
not get much sympathy from me.
Some people commenting here have claimed I would not
last in K-12. They might be correct. Fine with me;
here I have emphasized how to learn and only
indirectly how to teach; I never wanted to be a
teacher, certainly not in K-12. Still, what I wrote
about what is nearly both necessary and sufficient
for learning, especially from, say, the 8th grade
on, remains true.
Here’s some of what is likely to happen: We will
have a ‘three tier’ system of (1) home schooling
following some well respected curriculum, e.g.,
International Baccalaureate, assisted with some
professional tutoring and carefully evaluated with
standardized tests, (2) good public schools, (3)
poor public schools. By far the best education will
be from (1). (3) will just keep the kids off the
streets. You are welcome to try to convert (3) into
(2) if you want, but I’d suggest you find some much
more promising line of work. There are stories
about such work, about pushing some rock up a hill
or some such.
Norm, You really are clueless. And arrogant. Bye-bye now! Oh, but before I go, here’s that scripture verse again. Maybe you should try taking it to heart: “A fool finds no pleasure in understanding but delights in airing his own opinions.” (Proverbs 18:2)
Okay, Christine, you just totally lost your argument:
Why?
You are only name calling. You learned that from some nasty student in, what, the third grade?
So that even you can ‘get it’, I was talking about how to learn and gave a lot of evidence from some impressive learning of mine and others. Clearly, then, I’m qualified to report on how to learn. For how to teach, I addressed that only indirectly via how to learn.
Again, yet again, if you want to teach in ways highly particular to each student, go ahead.
For your “A fool finds no pleasure in understanding”, anyone with even a small fraction of the learning I’ve done just MUST find great pleasure in “understanding” and, thus, by your quote, must not be a “fool”. So, apparently, twice now, you failed to understand your own quote.
For my points, you addressed none of them: “Clueless” and “arrogant” are not evidence, rebuttals, or arguments.
You’re getting low marks in cognition, reading comprehension, communications, and socialization. Not good.
You lose.
Sorry, Norm. Your posts bounce around a lot. I get lost in the anecdotes. Plenty of us had sharp ancestors. I have a grandfather that dropped out of school at 12 and at the height of his career owned a weaving mill. But this really doesn’t deal with the issues of education today. I think that the teachers who actively follow this blog are some of the few in the know. And it’s painful. I would gladly stick my head in the sand like many teachers I know. The problem is that you can’t “unsee” what you’ve seen. And, trust me, I feel like a conspiracy theory crackpot.
Since you are an English teacher, I’ll assume that you are a really, Really nice person and fully sincere and try to reply constructively. I.e., you are not some thug for a teachers union.
Of course, maybe somewhere in there you might tell your students:
“A good definition of ‘art’ is ‘the communication, interpretation of human experience, emotion’. So, art is about emotions people feel.
“Now those emotions are rarely connected with rationality and/or science; that is, the emotions are usually not just rational. And the communications of those emotions is not very precise or scientific, and the resulting effects are still less so. It’s all so ambiguous that it’s difficult to know what really is art and when art is effective, good, or ‘great’, assuming that there is any such.
“Still, people really like parts of art, and it’s fair to say that not just Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dickens, and Henry James created art but that nearly all of media from radio and TV to movies, newspapers, magazines, fashion rags, and scandal sheets are to communicate emotions of one kind or another. Indeed, it is fair to say that much of journalism is about stories with drama using the techniques of formula fiction discovered by the ancient Greeks and heavily used all the way to recent Hollywood blockbuster summer movies.
“And, then there’s music: Tough to say what it means or that it means anything, yet it has millions of fans, some of them very serious. Beethoven, the Beach Boys, the Beatles, to Beyonce (yes awful alliteration, yes, self-referential irony, since I’m writing for an English teacher) have many fans. Besides, Britney, at 16, was an astoundingly pretty young woman, beyond belief.
“So, we will get some understanding of some of the more ‘important’ examples, parts, and techniques of English literature, that is, a literary art. Mostly the subject is people, and at times people have concluded that English literature is a good way to learn about people, about love, obtained or denied, honesty, integrity, faithfulness, loyalty, responsibility, determination, deception, duplicity, manipulation, superstition, irresponsibility, laziness, drunkenness, greed, conspiracy, collusion, murder, things like that. Yes, there is plenty of all of those in there, but, really, the lessons on those topics in English literature are simple, easily understood, and not deep. Alas, for better understanding of people, I’d suggest the more recent literature on, say, clinical psychology or psychiatry. Don’t ask Shakespeare to compete with the DSM.
“So, net, call English literature vicarious escapist fantasy emotional experience entertainment. In particular, it should be fun.”
Such a description would have saved me all those times I heard “full of sound and fury signifying nothing” and thought, then let’s f’get about it and move on to physics, and had to resist an upchuck.
Instead, the English literature teachers I had, for six years of pure agony, at least for me, kept telling me their subject was “great” when I could see it was no such thing and year by year I wanted more and more to wring their necks. It’s not “great”, not at all, but it’s light entertainment. Or, can learn something about people from the fact that people like such vicarious experiences so much.
Took me a while to figure all that out.
> But this really doesn’t deal with the issues of education today. I think that the teachers who actively follow this blog are some of the few in the know. And it’s painful. I would gladly stick my head in the sand like many teachers I know. The problem is that you can’t “unsee” what you’ve seen. And, trust me, I feel like a conspiracy theory crackpot.
I am trying to take most of the screams of agony from angst at face value. For teaching in schools in the bad neighborhoods, I did suggest some ‘forced march’ rigid ‘lock step’ techniques something like my father organized for technical training for part of the US military. Other than that, I’d say, give up on such schools and do anything else.
However, from all I can see, teaching K-12 in a school in a common US middle class neighborhood should be fun and easy. And if the tests were already developed and graded electronically, then so much the better, especially for the great reduction in work of grading papers.
If the district superintendent and principal are making the teaching a horrible job, spending way too much in resources on middle management, meetings, consultants, etc., then the results should be higher costs for the school district and, especially, worse results for the education, and the parents, tax payers, and school board should explain some simple facts of life to the superintendent and principal.
From all this angst, it looks to me like school boards should be eager, and eagerly competing, for superintendents and principals who can get better educational results at lower costs. So, want high graduation rates, high rates of acceptance into good colleges, high SAT and CEEB scores, with also some good senior class plays, some good science fair projects, students with lab assistant summer jobs in local research universities, etc.
Let’s add in one heck of a district competition playing the Bach unaccompanied pieces for violin and cello — doing as well as Heifetz and Rostropovich should keep some students plenty busy in the afternoons for some years!
Here is some best of Heifetz, right, on the ‘Chaconne’:
Due apparently to length limitations at YouTube, the whole piece is here in two parts. They broke at the right place: The second part here stars with the D major section, and the end of that section with that performance is my candidate for the best bars of music ever realized. You will hear the end of that section because just after it is some ‘cathartic confusion’.
Sometimes that music is played on guitar, and before a concert a guitarist was sitting next to composer Castelnuovo-Tedesco, known to be a man of few words. To make conversation the guitarist said: “The Bach ‘Chaconne’ sure is difficult to play.”
The composer said nothing until the end of the concert where he said, “The Bach ‘Chaconne’ is the greatest piece of music ever written”. I agree, but, since we are considering art, I can’t prove it is the “greatest” or even “great”!
Or, in words that have meaning only for people people who already have the meaning, parts of that music the Bach ‘Chaconne’, especially as Heifetz plays it there, ‘speaks to me about major parts of my life’ in ways that are ‘compelling and astounding’. Bach must have known that; he was a bright guy.
Almost entirely self taught in violin, but with pictures and recordings of Heifetz and the excellent
Ivan Galamian, ‘Principles of Violin Playing & Teaching’, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, 1962.
starting too late, practicing too little, with too little talent, I made it through about half of the ‘Chaconne’ but all of the D major section. Working through that thing, one bar at a time, often just one chord at a time, I couldn’t put my violin down until I was exhausted. In that D major section, especially with the Heifetz performance, the many triplets drive ‘insistently’ toward the end of the section with the many four string chords, several melodic lines played in parallel, etc.
To think I worked for years to learn to play that music, I REALLY like that music, and no one ever introduced it to me or ‘explained’ it, and Bach likely wrote it all in just a few hours. As a result, for more in music, I want to compose and have software do the performance. Ah, I’d likely be at best just a really bad imitation of Richard Wagner or Richard Strauss!
For the cello music, of course there is the Rostropovich
in my opinion, another top, center crown jewel of civilization. The first part is easy to like, popular, and famous, is also fun to play on violin, and it ends with a long ascending chromatic passage that is — in my opinion — a grand moment in all of music.
But the whole piece has enormous variety with some parts orchestral, enigmatic, lyrical, irresistibly joyous, etc. Bach was really something!
In that performance Rostropovich is not as precise in his technique as he was when he first recorded in the West, but his interpretative insight and realization are grand. Look at the score — it’s just black marks on white paper and seems to give no hint of the art that is really there.
Yet, as much as I like (an understatement) such music, my short view of all of English literature from Chaucer on, and especially Shakespeare, is that I deeply, profoundly, bitterly hate and despise it, not to put too fine a point on it. Point: Not all students will like all the material; some students can like some material a lot, be quite good in some other material, but just upchuck at the rest.
And I’d like to see some students doing well taking correspondence courses in freshman and sophomore college courses.
Starting with some good math talent in the eighth grade, a good high school math department should be able to get some students through Harvard’s Math 55, sometimes regarded as the most difficult college math course in the country. Walking into the Harvard or Princeton math department as a freshman ready to take an oral exam on Math 55 could be impressive! Then in two years, take Ph.D. qualifying exams, and then in two more years submit a Ph.D. dissertation. Now get on with the rest of life. I would have loved to have had such guidance and that opportunity!
Look, guys, K-12 teaching should be easy and fun, and if it’s not then the taxpayers and school boards need to get on the case, have the superintendents and principals cut out the nonsense and seize the day.
Back to Bach and writing software.
Norm,
Correct me if I’m wrong, but you use your parents as an example because they attended school in a one-room school house, etc, etc, etc. leading to success, and your reasoning is that the rest of the country should copy that model because it worked for them and maybe the same model worked for you. Or maybe it is some other model of education you admire.
However, one size does not fit all.
In addition, the US has more than 14,000 public school districts and each of those districts has an elected school board. Then each state has its own department of education. Each state decides the educational policies so the US had fifty different road maps for achieving educational goals and objectives.
Below the state level, each school district refines the state road map and this has led to different results from state to state and even from school district to school district in the same state. Each state also decides how to measure what success looks like when someone graduates from high school. In California the standards were set very high (about 9th grade) but in Texas they were set very low while G. W. Bush was governor there. That way he could brag about the high success rate in Texas of reaching those standards set at about a 4th grade level.
The New York Times ran a piece on June 2, 2010 that reported, “Across United States public schools, just 74.9 percent of students who were freshmen in the fall of 2004 graduated from high school on time in 2008, according to a report from the National Center for Education Statistics.”
That is very misleading and does not tell the whole picture of public education in the US, because results vary between racial/ethnic groups, socio-economic groups, children of illegal aliens, rural and urban areas and from state to state.
The dropout rate for Latino children of illegal alien parents is three for four times higher than the dropout rate for Latino children with legal parents that are natural born citizens of the US.
That 74.9% graduation rate for the United States is just the average of all the students lumped into one number in addition to the 50 states and the District of Columbia.
For example: in 2008, the high school graduation rate for Nevada’s public schools was 51.3%, but in Vermont it was 89.3%.
Source: http://www-958.ibm.com/software/data/cognos/manyeyes/datasets/public-high-school-averaged-freshm/versions/1.txt
In addition, the teachers’ unions have nothing to do with curriculum standards set by each state education department. Teachers’ unions are not the reason some kids fail. If that were true, then the public schools in Finland would all be failing horribly because in Finland the public school teachers union is very strong and about 99% of the teachers belong to the union, but Finland has one of the best public school systems in the world because that country turned the teaching over to the teachers and let the teachers decide what is best for students on a school by school basis. And in Finland, most parents do not wait until a child enters school to start learning to read. In Finland most parents start teaching children to read at age 3 and they do not start school until age 7. When those seven year olds start school, they can already read. They are already literate.
Sorry, I can’t give you high marks!
For one room schools, my point is simple: They are an existence proof that, with children from middle class US families, K-12 education competitive with what is average in the US now can be done in a one room school. Application: The problem of low average student performance in US education is not due to low school funding; instead, with the real problem solved, we could do quite well even with just one room schools. Anne of Green Gables could do fine — besides, she was GORGEOUS!
You moved on to many of the really grim realities of education on average across the US with the average made to look just awful by schools with students from families that are poor in money, culture, or whatever.
E.g., you mentioned graduation rates: Again in the K-12 public school I went to, in the Old South, essentially everyone graduated, and over 97% went to college. I was not one of the best students, was only roughly competitive with the other students, was one of the best students in the school in math and physics, and, from SAT and CEEB scores, was essentially competitive with some of the best nationally.
Heck, I took senior physics as a junior, mostly had my head down resting in class, was one of the best students, and three guys from the class one year ahead of me, and likely one or more in my physics class, went to Princeton.
And I didn’t see in the faculty the agony and angst reported on this thread.
Point: Given just a decent middle class neighborhood, it’s quite reasonable and straightforward to run a quite competitive K-12 school without agony or angst.
For the poor students, I explained that my city had a ‘solution’: In the really poor areas the students only went to school half a day, and everyone who stayed around ‘graduated’, although don’t expect many to have learned plane geometry or French.
Sad, ugly, and cruel but real. Look, in a nutshell, that’s a very old story in the US, back to Alexis de Tocqueville, and I see no good solution. Bluntly put, if we deliberately work to have a lower class, then, presto, wonder of wonders, we get a lower class, with all the attributes we wanted and didn’t want with such a lower class.
And don’t give me that ‘melting pot’ nonsense; some of that input doesn’t ‘melt’. Sorry ’bout that. We’re not talking Jascha Heifetz, fresh off a boat from Kiev via Moscow and Leopold Auer, on October 27, 1916 or some such, at Carnegie Hall playing the first chord of the Vitali ‘Chaconne’ and a violinist in the audience saying “Isn’t it a little hot in here?” and getting the answer “Not for pianists”.
We’re not talking John von Neumann, right to the Institute for Advanced Study from Hungary via Goettingen and David Hilbert. We’re not talking Richard Courant, straight from Goettingen to Courant Institute at NYU. And we’re not even talking the guy my mother’s church sponsored from Latvia — he’d been a banker; I wasn’t learning French, and he knew more European languages than I knew words in French. We’re not talking the couple my father in law imported from Latvia — good people, bright, hard working, learned English right away. We’re not talking the guy who first put a violin under my left chin, from Kiev via Israel and high school in France, knew Polish, Russian, Hebrew, Arabic, French, some Spanish and Italian, and learned English in the US essentially instantly. He did a great job sight reading the Vieuxtemps 5th concerto! We’re not talking two guys from two families fresh from the Soviet Union quickly becoming worth about $15 billion each — right, Page and Brin at Google.
Instead, we’re talking students who communicate in just different inflections of exactly one phrase of exactly two words the first of which is ‘mother’. I have a friend who went to such a school; he got PBK at SUNY and Ph.D. at Courant; but his family was Jewish. In one of the early grades, he was home sick with the flu, and his mother noticed that he couldn’t read so taught him in two weeks. The problem wasn’t the school.
Mayor Bloomberg can blow a lot of the money he gets from Wall Street trying to get redemption from his ‘white guilt’ if he wants, but he’s on a hopeless task trying to push a rock up a hill. Same for Michelle Rhee in DC — from Congress, $25,000 a year per student in a hopeless attempt to push a rock up a hill.
In particular, I would hope not a single good teacher would suffer or even attempt for a single minute to undo that situation. If that lower class wants to ‘melt’ and join the US, fine. Else I want to be rid of that problem as much as I can. We should offer some one way boat tickets with $10,000 attached. Heck, we could afford $100,000 and make huge amounts of money. That lower class is NOT cheap.
I will have no, zip, zilch, zero, sympathy for turning more of this country over to pushing that rock up that hill. Trying to ‘spread homeownership around’ we already blew a financial asset bubble and put us in close to a second Great Depression — enormously destructive, enough no doubt to have killed lots of people. Enough is ENOUGH. No more. Not a chance. Done with.
I did outline how one might use the ‘forced march’ ‘lock step’ educational techniques my father directed for technical training for part of the US military. If some school district wants to try that, fine with me, as long as I’m a long way away.
So, for the grim cases you report, I give up. You can push that rock if you want, but I’m not interested and will vote not to pay for it. And for the angst it causes the teachers, I say, leave that school. Give it up.
Instead I’m concerned with something that has some potential. There, my experience is rock solid and totally convincing: Running a quite successful public school starting with just middle class students, and, I confess, some wealthy students and most of the Jewish students in town, and getting essentially world class results has not changed in at least 40 years, is not difficult, and needs no agony, angst, or big bucks. Again, it’s the students who need to do the work, not the teachers.
Then you mentioned Finland. Now you start to lower your grade: I want to see the students in Finland compared with the students of Finnish, and even other Scandinavian descent, in Minnesota. So, as is very well understood in ‘educational statistics’, I want to ‘control’ on country of ancestors. Now what do you think? You want to bet that the students in Finland will blow away the students of Finnish descent in Minnesota? Don’t bet more than you can afford to lose!
Or, I want to see the students in Finland whose parents were fresh from, say, West Africa compared with the students in the US. Are those students going to blow away US students? Again, don’t bet more than you can afford to lose.
I’ll give the schools in Finland one standing ovation: Due to, say, Jan Sibelius, Finland has, for its population, one of the best musical traditions in the world.
I’ll give you one: Look at the ‘Appendix’ to the McKinsey study and there see that Jewish students in the US do better than students in Israel! Why? I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader! And as I recall, that Appendix also showed that US Blacks do better than students of an African country. Bet US students of Chinese descent do better than students in China, even the ones in Singapore. Heck, Berkeley could fill their whole freshman class with just excellent Chinese students near Berkeley.
Or, if ‘control on country of origin’, then the US schools do just fine. For some elementary ‘educational statistics’, that’s important.
So, the ’cause’ of the poor US average PISA performance just ain’t the schools but the countries of origin. Are we learning yet? Just what is it about the importance of country of origin you are having such a difficult time understanding? I mean, you do actually think a little about education? It’s not looking like it.
Are we seeing how not to waste tens of billions a dollars a year and ruin our schools, with all the angst here, hopelessly trying to push some rock up a hill?
Or, here’s a slightly more advanced point: Take a measure, nearly any measure. Apply the measure to lots of countries. Then rank the countries on the country averages on the measure. Right, like the PISA test says they do. For what to measure, you can pick sight singing, knowledge of calculus, running a marathon, knowledge of physics, whatever you want.
Then, may I have the envelope, please (drum roll)? Here it is: The countries at the top of the ranking are nearly all quite culturally homogeneous. The same for the countries at the bottom of the ranking. The ‘diverse’ countries are all in the middle. Net, the PISA scores do NOT say that US schools are inferior to the schools in the homogeneous countries at the top of the PISA rankings. And homogeneous countries are not always better; the countries at the bottom of the rankings are also homogeneous. I’ll let you pick some reasonable mathematical assumptions and then get this result as a theorem. Hint: Review the proof of Jensen’s inequality in Rudin, ‘Real and Complex Analysis’.
And we should not bankrupt our country trying to push that rock up that hill to change that situation, no matter how much the US teachers unions want to bleed US taxpayers white and bankrupt the US to build a huge industry to this end using this absurd excuse.
Again, running a world class US K-12 school for students from middle class families should be easy and fun and not very expensive. A one room school house can still be sufficient. E.g., in good cases home schooling totally blows away the US public schools.
I say again: US public schools as currently organized are highly vulnerable to losing nearly all their money and good students and public support and becoming something really ugly by just home schooling or very small schools, educational materials from the Internet or Amazon, checking progress via frequent standardized tests over the Internet, and certification tests from, say, the Educational Testing Service. Then $25,000 a year per student for really bad results will be less popular than a case of the Black Death.
You mentioned that in the US schools are supposed to be run at the local level. GOOD. Of course there are strong efforts to change this, but I agree with your suggestion that local control is just crucial. My father in law was on his school board. So, his brilliant daughter got one on one tutoring from two teachers in her senior year! Yes, she was Valedictorian, PBK, Ph.D., etc. and my wife.
But, from all I can see, too often the local voters, taxpayers, school boards, superintendents, principals, and teachers fail to take advantage of this terrific situation of local control. Else schools could pick good textbooks instead of the junk the textbook machine gets passed by Texas or some such nonsense. E.g., we’d get rid of AP calculus and just teach from a good calculus book, Thomas, Protter and Morrey, etc.
If my business works, then maybe I will take an interest in my local schools. I’ll shamelessly use my business success and Ph.D. as sources of credibility. And if my business is successful, then I will be able to have influence by using my checkbook. Then maybe we can get some progress — real local control, terrific results, teaching that is easy and fun, and cut out the nonsense from the US Department of Education, etc. And we could have some nice prizes for students who make over 700 on an SAT or CEEB test! I would mention a score of 800 except I doubt that the tests are reliable or valid at three deviations above the mean.
But for leaving the schools up to the teachers unions, no thanks. Apparently the teachers unions want to bleed the taxpayers white and bankrupt the country making a huge industry out of hopelessly pushing a rock up a hill. No thanks. Not interested. No sale.
Lots of people want to put out a lot of publicity nonsense and bleed the taxpayers white and bankrupt the country creating an industry where they can get money. So, a recent biggie is to use photographs of polar bears as measures of Arctic temperature and push a morality play about human sin, complete with the trilogy of transgression, retribution, and redemption, to talk the US into electric power at 60 cents per KWh instead of less than 3 cents from coal and less than 2 cents from nuclear fission.
In the last four years that ripoff effort wasted $92 billion dollars and with its “war on coal” has deliberately tried to sabotage the US economy and do more damage to us than Tojo, Hitler, and Stalin combined.
Right, semi-, pseudo-, quasi-great idea: “Bankrupt” and shutdown our coal plants for no reason at all, 49% of our electric power and 23% of all our energy, and see our electric rates “skyrocket”. We’re talking sabotage, ripoffs, payoffs, shakedowns, kickbacks, political machine building, and grounds for impeachment. No thanks to that, and no thanks to letting the teachers unions have their way either.
It’s all back to ‘The Music Man’ using some “pool table in town” as an excuse have a morality play and get into “boodle bags” except worse. No thanks.
The answer’s no. Just what is it about “No” the teachers unions have such a difficult time understanding?
Be smart: Find something else to do. You might as well start now because the path you are on is hopeless, a long walk on a short pier. Leave education now and avoid the big rush!
Norm said, “Look, guys, K-12 teaching should be easy and fun.”
No!!
A thousand times No!
This thinking was the engine that drove the self esteem movement in the 1960s until that mental virus swallowed the average parent. Kids should feel good, feel beautiful, feel successful, and have fun. The work should be easy. To make this happen, parents put pressure on school boards, principals and teachers until “easy and fun” was driving the school bus.
That’s why rote learning was tossed in the education trash heap because rote learning is boring and most if not all kids do not have fun memorizing the names and capitals of the fifty US states, the names of the presidents, math and science facts, important events and dates in history.
Instead, teachers are encouraged to be a comedian, n academy award winning actor and to sing and dance to make sure learning is “easy and fun.”
That’s also what happened to grammar and spelling. To learn how to spell correctly and the rules of grammar require rote learning and it isn’t easy or fun. That is why in the 1980s the Whole Language concept to teaching reading, spelling and grammar swept the schools and English teachers were forced to dump those boring grammar books in the trash — or else.
The Whole Language approach was based on kids reading at school and at home and by reading books, magazines and newspapers every day at home for at least a half hour or more, they would absorb the rules of grammar and spelling naturally and have fun doing it. A decade later, California plunged from near first place for academic achievement in the public high schools to almost last place and the Whole Language approach to teaching was quietly allowed to go into the dust bin of other failed “easy and fun” magic pill programs that have haunted public education in the US for decades.
It doesn’t matter if the teacher or the subject or the textbooks are easy or fun. The classroom is not a circus, it is not Saturday Night Live, it is not an improve comic club.
Thank god that most universities haven’t followed public education down this rabbit hole. I spent nine years total in college earning a BA in journalism, a life teaching credential and an MFA in writing and most of it was not fun or easy. It was work. There is nothing wrong with the word “WORK” and “WORK” for most of us is not easy or fun and it is often boring and tedious.
American must get out of this self-esteem driven Disneyland, theme park mentality that kids must be happy all the time, feel beautiful, successful and that everything for kids should be easy and fun.
When our daughter was in grade school, I told her that it didn’t matter if the teacher was boring or incompetent; she was the one responsible to learn. From 3rd grade to graduation from high school, she worked hard and earned straight A’s—nothing less, and she graduated with a 4.65 GPA and was accepted to Stanford, the only one from her high school. When she came home from school, the TV was left off (M – F and on weekends the entire family watched about two hours of TV together), she had no TV or Internet connection in her room, there were no video games in the house, she didn’t get a cell phone until she was in high school and even then it was only for emergency purposes and not chatting with friends. There was no text messaging. The only thing she was allowed to do for fun after all the WORK (studying, yard work, washing dishes–we shared the daily chores–homework, studying for tests, etc), she could read a book. In fact, we visited the library once a week.
We ate dinner as a family with no TV or radio on. Dinner was where we as a family talked. We took walks together. Often the only people outside the house and not glued in front of a TV or social networking on the Internet. It was as if we lived in a ghost city.
On the other hand, your “easy and fun” suggestion has led to this: The average parent in America talks to his or her child less than five minutes a day and the average child spends about 10 hours a day dividing his or her time between TV (the average is three hours for this one), listening to music, playing video games, talking on the phone to friends, hanging out with friends in a mall or downtown, social networking on the Internet, send endless text messages, etc.
Heaven forbid that any parent should make a kid feel that life is hard and not fun. That has led to the average child being allowed to stay up as late as he or she wants often sleeping less than six hours a day when studies show that children and teens need to sleep about 10 hours a day because that is when the brain and body does most of its developing and growth. Not getting enough sleep retards mental and brain development. For that reason, we required that our daughter be in bed by 10:00 PM every day, and this caused no end of angst because her friends rubbed it in her face that they were allowed to often stay up until 3:00 AM enjoying the easy life having fun on Facebook chatting nonsense.
At least most of your description of how to help your child learn sounds good.
And with your remarks on sleep, you’ve explained some of why in class in grades 9-12 I often had my head down resting! The best time was in eighth grade general science. The teacher had just explained atmospheric pressure and a traditional farm lift pump. At home I’d been paying a lot of attention to mechanical things so understood the pump just by a glance at the diagram — just one piston and two valves.
So, during the teacher’s explanation I had my head down resting. So, apparently trying to embarrass me, say, like Mellon got embarrassed by the English teacher in ‘The Great Gatsby’ in ‘Back to School’, the teacher asked me to explain the workings of the pump. To be nice, I did sit up and open my eyes, although neither was necessary, and to push back at the teacher gave an excessively detailed description of all the pressure differences and flows that opened and closed the valves, etc. He never bothered me again! Silly, trivial course! WHAT a waste of time. At least I got to rest!
A good, standard way to handle TV is just to turn it to face the wall. I finally just canceled my TV service — now the house is quieter and it is easier to concentrate with less temptation to procrastinate. And I don’t feel like a fool flipping through the same dozen or so channels without finding anything worthwhile to watch, say, while eating dinner.
I did discover that my cable TV company then offered me TV service for free. I still declined it!
Instead, of TV, slowly I’ve found some Internet video clips to watch, e.g., where Prof Ng at Stanford fumbles crudely with maximum likelihood estimation and steepest descent for what is crudely done applied statistics and curve fitting and what he wants to call ‘machine learning’. So far he has omitted any justification for maximum likelihood estimation! It’s not a very good course!
At Stanford I’d expect much better content from, say, Royden, Chung, Diaconis, or Luenberger! Still better from Breiman, Brillinger, or Freedman at Berkeley! Still better from Cinlar at Princeton or Dynkin at Cornell!
Prof Ng needs to learn how to write on a black board and how to pronounce English clearly, and the camera crew needs to get better lighting and zoom in enough so that the black board is legible. So far what he has done through the first few lectures is so simple I can guess at the content. If he gets to some significant material, then the bad pronunciation and video will hurt. Maybe the PDF notes are good.
But your interpretation of my statement that K-12 teaching should be “easy and fun” was completely wrong. In no way was I suggesting anything like what you described. When I was teaching calculus and applied math, the work for me was easy and fun, but the students still had to do a lot of work.
As you can see from much of what I have written here, I have proposed that, students who can should do much more than nearly any K-12 students do now, e.g., get through the content of Harvard’s Math 55 and play the Bach unaccompanied pieces on violin or cello trying to do as well as Heifetz or Rostropovich. Such work is world class stuff and not “easy”. Still, when I was trying to play the Bach ‘Chaconne’ on violin, the work was great fun.
Look, ‘easy and fun’ still has a role even for the student: When I was taking plane geometry, I refused to pay much attention to the teacher and in class usually had my head down resting. If she had just shut up, then I could have gotten out the text and gotten to work.
But alone, I made sure to work all the non-trivial problems in the text, and for me that work was easy and fun except for the one problem that took me all weekend which was still fun.
For encouraging learning, I would make one point of caution: Don’t push too hard on the students. In fact, I’d say, don’t ‘push’ at all. If you want to shower praise and approval when they do well, okay, but don’t deny attention or affection otherwise.
At the core, don’t create a lot of ‘anxiety’ in the student. That is, don’t get high performance by having the student just terrified — with stomach problems, loss of weight and sleep, various other sad symptoms — of loss of affection, security, acceptance, praise, and approval from anything less than an A. Don’t do that. In an auto analogy, such a motivational technique is like running a car at 80 MPH and 8000 RPM in first gear — high performance but soon a ruined engine and no performance at all and maybe a dead car and student. Literally. I exaggerate not.
Instead, the learning should also be fun for the student, including when they are doing world class work working through the materials of Harvard’s Math 55.
Usually as people go farther in school, they find the work more and more difficult. The effort to write a Ph.D. dissertation can be life threatening; similarly for getting papers published. But, the farther I went in school, the better I did.
E.g., while I have had no desire to publish research, I have published several papers, two where I was the sole author (both in good journals) and several more with some coauthors, mostly in conference proceedings. I’ve never had a paper rejected or needing more than trivial revisions. So, that’s considered doing unusually well. And for my Ph.D. dissertation, I did that work quickly — it was easy and fun — independently on a problem I brought to graduate school. Since the dissertation is commonly a big struggle for students, especially ones well adapted to pleasing teachers and making As in K-12 and college, that I found the dissertation easy and fun was also unusually good.
But, since I did better later in school, I did worse earlier in school so that there was some question if I would get out of high school, the eighth grade, or the sixth grade at all!
I’d say, having a student making straight As in high school is a questionable goal: Mostly the high school material is not worth that much work. Also straight As can have a dark side of being from too much anxiety. E.g., the guy who made “Most Academic” in my high school, whom I beat by a few points on the math SAT, went to MIT and soon blew his fuses — that is, had a ‘mental breakdown’ from ‘clinical depression’ from too much stress.
My father knew all this stuff and, thus, never once mentioned my K-12 grades at all and just encouraged my interests and said that it was important for me to understand the material — which in nearly all the courses I did.
I’d say, if a student in middle school or high school wants some good academic progress, then mostly try to f’get about high school work and ASAP get on to college work. For still more, the main theme in academics is to stop learning and just do research; that is, the high end of academics doesn’t care if you can carry the library between your ears and, instead, wants to know what that is good you can create. And outside of academics, the goal is even simpler — just make money. For that goal, if some academic material helps, terrific, but the goal is still just to make money.
But for girls and cell phones, one might look at, say,
Deborah Tannen, ‘You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation’, William Morrow and Company, New York, ISBN 0-688-07822-2, 1990.
Tannen has been a prof at Georgetown and was essentially a student of the author of
Erving Goffman, ‘The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life’, Doubleday Anchor Books, New York, 1959.
when she was trying to understand why her first marriage failed. I’m not sure she ever fully understood! The song about ‘be feminine’ in the Hayley Mills movie ‘Summer Magic’ likely has a better explanation!
But, back to Tannen’s book, she makes clear that girls like to gossip. Why? Because for their feelings of security they want to be members of a group, typically a group of other girls, with acceptance and approval, and a key to group membership is ‘sharing’ via gossip. So, that’s why each girl has a cell phone attached to the side of her head — gossip! 24 x 7 gossip! But you were correct: If you want her to go to Stanford, then in high school she should keep down the gossip, Internet social media, etc.!
“A letter from a disgusted teacher:” and the comments it has generated are more than a little sobering. Thinking of what they mean to students makes them even more disturbing. I’m a Canadian teacher who has experienced much of what the letters and comments tell and I see the solution in parents and teachers coming together to demand a fundamentally different approach to public education.
During one of the most uncomfortable times in my career I read Alfie Kohn’s article titled Choices for Children: Why and How to Let Students Decide (September 1993, Phi Delta Kappan). A Kappan editor who provided an introduction to the article said, “The key to transforming student apathy into student engagement, Mr. Kohn suggests, may be as simple as allowing students to make decisions about their learning.”
Alfie approached the topic through burnout, and if, “hypothetically speaking”, students too suffered it, “How would they talk and act?” he asked.
In answer to the question he said, “Teachers around the country to whom I have put this question immediately suggest such symptoms as disengagement and apathy – or, conversely, thoughtlessness and aggression. Either tuning out or acting out might signal that a student was burning out. In both cases, he or she would presumably just go through the motions of learning, handing in uninspired work and counting the minutes or days until freedom. The fact is that students act this way every day.”
From research and experience in the workplace, the best predictor of burnout he said “is not too much work, too little time, or too little compensation. Rather, it is powerlessness – a lack of control over what one is doing.” He concluded by saying, “these ideas are unlikely to make much difference so long as students are controlled and silenced.”
More recently Daniel Pink wrote Drive in which he promotes the idea that people would be more engaged if given more autonomy. A quote from the book that I particularly like is: “Perhaps it’s time to toss the very word ‘management’ into the linguistic ash heap alongside ‘icebox’ and ‘horseless carriage.’ This era doesn’t call for better management. It calls for a renaissance of self-direction”.
I believe that the problem with public education is that both students and teachers are far too controlled and silenced. Teachers who quit are like the students who act out, and those who are merely going through the motions are like the ones who tune out, but I don’t think the battle can be won if it is fought from the teacher perspective. I think it needs to be fought in the form of a children’s rights movement.
Stan Shapiro in Classrooms that Work spoke of equality for children and had this to say. “All the great events and movements of the last 100 years: the victory of the democracies over fascism in World War II, universal suffrage, the civil rights and feminist movements; and the drive for equal treatment for the physically and mentally challenged, are all about the shift from authoritarian rule to democratic ideals and social equality. The only identifiable group in our culture that has yet to be fully included in this concept of equality is our children.”
Teachers will not like what Steven Horwich has to say about them, but for those who can look beyond his teacher bashing he makes a great contribution to the cause of better education with his “Children’s Bill of Rights and Responsibilities” (http://www.connectthethoughts.net/childrens-bill-of-rights.php).
The democratic learning model respects the rights of children and promises the diversity needed to properly support each child. It provides the autonomy for teachers to adequately address the needs of each of their students, and this leads to teaching being restored as “the most honorable of professions”.
For the uninitiated who want to learn more about the democratic learning model, two organizations promoting it are the International Democratic Education Network (http://www.idenetwork.org) and the European Democratic Education Community (http://www.eudec.org). Googling “democratic education” will also help.
This system has some fundamental flaws in terms of child development. It assumes that young people will act like responsible adults. Even adults don’t act responsibly. I’ve been teaching for eighteen years now and can tell you that although I’ve taught plenty of young high school students who could rise to any occasion, I’ve taught plenty who couldn’t.
Besides, buzzwords like “diversity” shoot up red flags with me.
We have to be careful treating children like adults. They are not. This is why I am against trying them as adults, even for the most heinous of crimes.
Dear English teacher,
Thank you for sharing your thoughts. You express what is probably the biggest objection people have to the democratic learning model, but my view is that it isn’t valid. I have had the advantage of running a conservative mainstream democratic learning program in a high school. It gave students more control over their learning and it proved to be workable and beneficial to both those who initially appeared to have good self-directed learning skills and to those who were thought to lack those skills.
There are students who will succeed whether they are in a democratic or an autocratic program. We know also that there are students who are failing in the autocratic system. The students who people worry will fail in a democratic system are, ironically, often the ones who are already failing in the autocratic system. Autocratic schools try to deal with under-performing or troublesome students by tightening controls over them, and if that doesn’t keep the lid on then these students might end up in programs designed for potential dropouts. The success of these retention programs often boils down to students having more control over their learning in more personalized surroundings. This suggests that students who are seen as the least responsible and most likely to fail in a democratic school are actually the ones who could gain the most from being in one. They have demonstrated time and again that they can succeed with something different and it is a blotch on the record of the educational establishment that these students are still being demeaned and driven to retention programs before they get more of what they need. A student’s disengagement or misbehavior, more often than not, is about a failing system than it is a difficult student.
I am not suggesting that angry, rebellious, or disengaged students are going to suddenly become model students. Most of them will need an adjustment period during which they learn to trust their teachers and acquire the basic skills of self-direction. Black people were once said to be incapable of managing their own affairs. Women were once thought to be incapable of operating in the boardrooms of big business. They appeared to be incapable, but when they were given the opportunity to acquire the necessary skills they proved themselves capable. We don’t want to keep making the same mistake with children. Let’s provide what they need to acquire the skills to be responsible, self-directed, contributing members of a democratic learning community. I’m not advocating a massive flip-flop that ends in such disarray that everybody seeks shelter in the old way of doing things. I want to see the democratic model investigated as intelligently and thoroughly as possible with parents, students and teachers who opt to be part of the investigation.
Marshall McLuhan said we don’t know who discovered water, but we know it wasn’t the fish. The Copernican Revolution speaks to this. We can be so accustomed to one way of seeing things, and so believing in an illusion that we can’t see how things can be different. Shifting from the autocratic to the democratic model in education will be as difficult as was getting people to accept the heliocentric view of the universe over the geocentric one. The democratic learning model is not new, but public educators have failed to properly investigate it. The more they procrastinate doing so the more we will descend down the road to charter schools and privatization – the road that leads to the demise of public education.
“Paradigm shift” was such a buzz phrase at one time that the editor of a respected journal said she wouldn’t publish anymore submissions that used it. Words and terms can get over-used and then people try to avoid them despite their usefulness. “Uniformity” and “conformity” are buzzwords that have been used to discount the autocratic school system, but I won’t stop using them. They’re too applicable. “Diversity” is likewise a word I feel compelled to keep using. The diversity characteristic of the democratic model is what makes it so promising. Diversified schools are needed to better meet the individual needs and interests of students. Trying to describe the meaning of diversity using other words is likely to just convolute discussions. It would be more constructive to accept the use of it, to consider the great potential it, and to test out visions of how it can be applied to public education.
A poem by Dorothy Nolte (now expanded into a book) is titled: Children Learn What They Live. If we want children to understand equality, they need to grow up knowing what it is to be equal. If we want them to be good democratic citizens, they need to live in an environment that could be described as a participatory democracy. Autocratic school systems that train children to be dutiful subjects work against the values of equality and democracy that we claim to cherish.
Thank you for lumping me into the category of closed minded bigot. And I thought I was a realist…
It’s just that I know snake oil when I see it.
I just want one simple thing. I want adequate time for planning in elementary school. I am so tired of knowing that high school and middle school get 90 minutes a day (in many places) and for some reason, districts think that 45 minutes, 2 times a week, is adequate for elementary school. Planning time is not meeting time. I am not demanding more money, I just want enough time to do a good job. It used to be that PLC’s focused on learning one thing well in a year. Now it is a catch-all for every idea from the district on down to the principal. Give me a 90 minute planning period and I will spend half of it at the required meetings and half preparing to be a successful teacher. Since you extended the school day and we now teach as many hours as high school and middle school, we need the same amount of planning time. I cannot devote anymore of my family time.
I would like a lunch break! Sounds silly I know but, it would be nice. I do not even have a place to sit during lunch, instead i walk around my kids table and make sure they are behaving while I attempt to eat my yogurt.
very well said. I think teachers all over the country are feeling the same way. Somehow, it is ALWAYS the teacher’s fault. Never enough planning time, never enough paper work that teachers are responsible for, never supported by administrators… never… never.. never… Teaching is one of the toughest jobs out there, I don’t care what anyone says. After a long day at work, I come home exhausted, with little energy to do anything which is unfair – I have a husband and a two year old who need my attention. Many times, I do not have the energy to play with my two year old. No one realizes how difficult and exhausting it is and it’s NEVER enough!
Thank you for this post!
I’ve been an art techer in OH for 19 years and I feel lucky to have a job when so many districts have removed art from their schools. Art is always on the back burner because there isn’t a standardized test yet. Sad truth is that it is coming down in the near future.
I just want to just teach but feel the stress of proving that I am a “highly qualified” teacher. There are so many hoops to jump through now I feel like I have two jobs! They have nothing to do with creating a better program for my students. Creativity is going to be tested?? Really! I hope I’m gone by the time that happens!
I am a first year teacher in North Carolina. I am already feeling burned out and stressed beyond belief. I knew that the first year would be difficult but I never imagined this. My students are unbelievably disrespectful and know that their parents and the administration will not do anything about it. I feel as though I am drowning in a sea of paper work (much of it I am told to do it but, not how to do it). I have little to no support as a first year teacher. Professional development is a joke. Most of it focuses on issues that are not important. I am living in constant hope that things will get better, “Today will be better” has become my daily mantra. I hope that things change, I feel like I am being smothered instead of being offered a chance to soar!
Sadly, almost no teacher education programs truly prepare you for what you face as a first year teacher. And no school gives new teacher the on the job training, the safety net of at least a few weeks that even a fast-food employee is given. Without an iron class discipline plan (full-proof, not iron-fisted) no one can hope to teach anything. So goes the saying, “Don’t smile until Christmas.” Students won’t learn from you unless they respect you and that respect must be earned by articulating a plan and then sticking to it. You will reap the rewards in full and can enjoy a long career, but that bridge must be crossed. Never-mind an administration and colleagues who are deaf to your woes, invisible and happy to see you stumble, fall and become a cautionary tale.
First things first…get the classroom management down. Teaching expertise will come later.
Learn how to develop meaningful relationships with your students while maintaining professionalism.
I am a successful teacher, not because I am a great teacher of the content, but because I can prod and influence kids to do what they otherwise would not do for anyone else.
Welcome to the south? I assure you that Tennessee is in worse shape than nc by far, yet people constantly migrate in this direction to look for work. As horrible as this may sound. Good riddance! Another westie that couldn’ t hack it over here…nothing new to us. Meanwhile, those who have chosen to live their lives here, have seven generations of family in the area, and have tens of thousands of dollars invested in obtaining a teaching certificate cannot find work because the boards are hoping that a fresh new face from another part of the country would work out better. Please do everyone a favor before dreaming of all of the available jobs in the South…research where you are going. It is not only the schools that are having trouble. The everyday norm here would likely be referred to as child neglect, extreme poverty, or uncivilized by most outsiders. If you really want to succeed as a teacher in ” these parts” you have to leave your whine box where you came from, your feelings at the house, and your shame checked at the front door of the school. Seriously people, why did you think there were so many open positions? It is not because of lack of qualified candidates….it is because everyone quits after a couple of years.
I think you have made a great point or at least inadvertently focused a spotlight on an important fact. Turnover in a school or school district may be a red flag—a strong warning sign— that the school board/administration/students are not the easiest to work with or work for [another word to describe this situation would be "dysfunctional'].
This could even be extended to an entire state since each state has its own department of education that sets policy in that state as directed by the elected politicians from the governor of a state on down. Religious and/or political agendas tend to rule in such organizations and the winds may change direction at any time.
For example, I friend sent me this in an e-mail about the current situation in the high school in Southern California where he teaches:
My friend said,
“-112 scheduling changes in the first three weeks
“-75% of the administrative team is new; a lot of chaos
“-50% of the counselors are new; a lot of chaos
“-we lost our department chairs, so there is no communication between the teachers and administration
[this high school, he says] “once had a top-notch academic program; however, we are falling apart at the seams; our test scores have flat-lined and they will continue to flat-line because there are just too many new faces at our school; two of our Vice Principals have never been a VP before; they’re nice people, but we have to wade through their learning curve.”
I was a public school teacher from 1975 – 2005 and we worked together at another high school before poor administration drove him to quit and find a job in another district that at the time was a better place to work. Beware the grass is greener. During my thirty years in the classroom, I worked under nine different principals. Some were great, some good and some horrible. The horrible ones drove teachers, counselors and VPs out of the schools where they ruled Nazi style.
I had the privilege of attending K-12 in the CMS system. I could have worked harder to get ahead but I always felt so defeated and drained that I just didn’t care. I got very lucky in high school. Independence High had an Academy of International Studies. So I kind of got a private school experience in public school but still it was always very “us against CMS.” I really hope things change before I have kids.
I praise this letter because I know that someone is feeling the changes in our education system in this country.
This is my first year teaching as a full-time special educator in NYC. This year, the common core alignment has made its way into my classroom. With the new expectations, I am feeling burnt out and I am ready to quit. Here are the reasons why: I have been lesson planning, differentiating worksheets for six of my students, modifying and adapting trade books, implementing the ABLLS assessment, trying to meet my student’s IEP, taking data for FBA/BIP, taking data for IEPs, going to workshops, meeting up with my APs during my prep periods, writing in parent’s communication notebook, sending lessons plans to my APs to review with me for the following week, and etc. This LIST goes ON AND ON AND ON. All of this workload does not end for me on weekdays, weeknights, and weekends. There haven’t been a day when I feel like I am really “teaching” my students anymore. All I have been doing is making sure that I am helping the administration meet the district’s expectation so there is budgeting in the education system in NYC.
I am really sick of helping the administration when there haven’t been any support for me as a new teacher. I am getting really fed up with this education system. It really seems like this is happening all over the states, not just NY. I am definitely not going back to the DOE in NYC with this lack of faith in teachers to do real teaching anymore.
RI Teacher – I QUIT,TOO! Below you will find my
resignation, which I presented to the Providence schoolboard last
night: Stephen Round Foster, Rhode Island Human Resources
Department Providence Public Schools 797 Westminster Street,
Providence, Rhode Island 02903 To: Paula Shannon, Susan Lusi,
Carolina Creel, the Providence School Board, and the parents of my
students… Below you will find, word for word, my personal
Philosophy of Education, which was part of my application for a
teaching position in the Providence School System in 1999. “I
believe that my goal as an educator should be the creation of
life-long learners. If I am going to meet that goal I must provide
children with an educational experience that is both rewarding and
enjoyable. Therefore, it is important for students to understand
how the knowledge received in the classroom will benefit them in
the real world. It is my responsibility, as a teacher, to find
various ways to make this processes possible. To do this, I must be
creative and open minded enough to try new methods and approaches
but perceptive enough to embrace only those methods and approaches
that prove to achieve that end.” I was hired for a second grade
position by principal, Nancy Owen, at what was then the Charles N.
Fortes Magnet Academy, and it was a great fit for several years.
Unfortunately, in the attempt to conform and abide by the misguided
notions of educrats, the school system in which I had so much pride
drastically changed. Rather than creating life-long learners our
new goal is to create good test-takers. Rather than being the
recipients of a rewarding and enjoyable educational experience, our
students are now relegated to experiencing a confining and
demeaning education. Let’s take a look at their typical day…
Breakfast is no longer served in the cafeteria – where children
used to have time to talk and socialize. Now it’s piled on a table
in the classroom and consumed during the first moments of class –
supposedly while they are “working”. Lunch isn’t much better. By
that time the children are so starved for social contact and a
chance to talk that the cafeteria quickly becomes unbearably loud
for students and supervising faculty alike. The alternative – the
dreaded Silent Lunch – is often the only answer. So now there’s
recess – which lasts all of 20 minutes when weather permits. This
should be time for all students to run around and work off their
pent up energy. But unfortunately, since recess is the only
enjoyable part of the day for the students, teachers have been
forced to use it as a bargaining chip in the classroom – students
either do their work, behave and keep quiet during class time, or
they lose recess. And, more often than not, the kids who need that
recess time the most lose it due to poor behavior in the classroom.
So then it’s time to line up quietly, form a straight line and
proceed back to the classroom for another session of “learning”.
It’s no small wonder that we have such a high rate of Behavior
Disorder within our classrooms. I, personally, had two children in
my class of 26 who were (and still are) severe behavior problems -
and at least six more who would be considered moderate BD.
Actually, there were only four or five children in my entire class
who could consistently hold it together, day after day, without
getting into trouble. My hat goes off to them! And as for the
classroom experience itself, any type of “fun” activity is long
gone. Classroom pets – gone! Parties to celebrate birthdays and
special holidays – gone –gone… How about field trips? Those
adventures out into the real world to experience what it’s like to
live on a farm, trips to the zoo and even the experience of
visiting a real museum? Gone, gone, gone… And finally, my
determination to be creative and open minded enough to try new
approaches to teaching…. Hah! The Powers That Be say that if it
isn’t in the accepted curriculum and done at the appropriate time,
it can’t be used! Why, I was even prohibited from tutoring my
neediest students – my so-called dyslexic students – on my own time
and after school… Not just once, but twice! In two separate
schools! And, this was after my principal and the student’s parents
had approved of what I was doing. These parents were happy that
their children were finally reading, the students were happy to
know that they really weren’t really stupid, and I had the
satisfaction of knowing that I was truly having a positive effect
on children’s lives. But Chief Academic Officer Shannon would
rather see these nine children fail, than do something not
specifically prescribed in this one-size-fits-all curriculum. When
asked for a meeting, she literally would not give me, the students,
or their parents – the time of day. So gone, gone, gone…. I’ve had
it! I quit… I would rather leave my secure $70,000.00 job (with
benefits) and tutor in Connecticut for free, than be part of a
system that is diametrically opposed to everything I believe
education should be. Sincerely, Stephen Round
The part of this I find most interesting? There are more than 3 million public school teachers in the United States and more than 55 million public school students. Say every public school teacher calls in sick on a Wednesday morning at about 7 am. We could shut down a nation. That’s power! Instead, we complain, go about our jobs and then quit or retire.
Well said. As districts insist they are supporting teachers in differentiating learning, they are actually homogenizing instruction in a One-Size-Fits-All state test prep curriculum. Administrators and superintendents say they care about students, but what really interests them is making quotas and goals that make spreadsheet cells turn green instead of red at the state Dept of Education. The people at the top who are most removed from the classroom, and who loved teaching so much they couldn’t wait to get out of the classroom and into the boardroom, set insane policies and counter-productive strategies that change with every new wind that blows from the “experts”.
well said
I have read all of your posts. I have four children 3 of them school age in 9th and 6th. I have had them in private school and public school in Union County and Charlotte Meck. If I could do it I would return the all back into the private sector, unfortunately, I couldn’t get them to agree to fall back 2 years . My 9th grader is being home schooled as we speak. I have watched my oldest become bored, fought to have the twins tested for learning disabilities, watched them pass on curves to keep numbers up, learn to do math four ways in one day, cry because mommy doesn’t know how to had from left to right. I have sat at my bar and listened to dedicated teachers make fun of their students, I have fought with teachers, principals, and superintendents. The last conference I had with the twins group of teachers, they told me not to feel bad that my kids don’t know how to write sentences, spell, or do proper math, they were not alone. WOW!
I am not a teacher, I admire all of those in that profession. It is a job I could never do with someone else’s child. Thank you for trying even with hands tied behind your back.
I have written letters, talked to teachers, superintendents, and principals. My kids are only numbers, and all I get are shrugged shoulders. The twins need IEPs but don’t get them because they are just slightly above the mark, and while they can pass on a curve they cant get help on one. (I apologize for the randomness, trying to get it all in before baby wakes up)
This is my concern, I am but a parent and can only voice so loud due to the fact that I am not a teacher, and don’t have the in class perspective and can only speak for my children. Have any of you voiced your concerns to those that need to hear it? Has anyone seen what is broke and fought to fix it?
But then I wonder to if in fact this county is letting the ones that could make a difference pack up and leave, and hiring ones that are good with following the leader. I don’t think moral values are even required anymore, I have seen teachers be hired that barely had the stamina for college, that need meds to get thru the day, that value their selves so little they maintain long standing affairs. I don’t teach other peoples children because I am not a fit person to do so, I know this. But I do fight for my children even if I do it alone.
Teachers that voice their concern about a broken system are fired for “insubordination.”
What a great and dead-on letter. The level of administrative incompetence in some districts is appalling. It is likely that the admins in districts and states like this (Florida is notoriously anti-teacher) send THEIR kids to private schools. These admins are interested only in teachers “following orders”, and they chase every fad like private company curriculum (like America’s Choice, etc.). They have no desire to let teachers be the professionals they are, nor usually to provide the discipline support for teachers. For thosenonteachers who read this woman’s letter, find a local teacher and ask that teacher about these issues. They are rampant and ruining public education, which for the most part was good until the last 20 years.
I QUIT and I did not send a letter…One day’s notice ….as I have one life to live and had rather rake yards, mow lawns, and even clean houses thasn to walk in any of these schools..
I am exhausted from trying to figure out what to teach for the next county test……then state test.
I am tired of the CLAWS that come at you and the Ugly Faces of the Powers that be when your class of 33 can not make an A on one of those SO BAD BAD TESTS!!!.
Those “Frowny Powers that Be” people may not know it but they will die early and have so many wrinkles form those Ugly Ugly Facial Gestures!!!
I am so tired of the hiring of all of the coaches that nag and nag and nag the veteran teachers and pretend to know more…but they do not..
I am tired of the Professional Learning whatevers where teachers discuss TEST SCORES for a kid with a 58 I.Q….while an administrator that has never taught more than one year takes notes back to the Super Powers…or they have some person whose position has been created to sit there and take notes to take back to the Super Powers..
NY…..NC….should call those meeting-”TESTER MEETINGS”
I know that those States test and test and test and test and test and test!!!!
I am almost positive that the Powers that be will be in the future mandating Pregnant Women to test their Embryos for Gene Defects in order to get a Head Start on any problems the child may have for Future Testing…
I am tired of not having a book…but am asked instead to get all of the material on the web….run off enough material to kill all of the trees in Pennsylvania…..all of the trees in the National Forests.,…etc…
I can not believe that the State is asking for activities that the teacher creates to put on their website for this Common Core..
If I were that teacher..I would charge the state $500 for each and every activity after I had copyrighted the activity…
What the Educational Super Powers have done is to Drain teachers of any motivation and creativity…
The media has turned their heads on this one…unless someone comes to school with a gun or a knife, you never hear of any news of the Destruction of Public Education.
What a shame..
At the high school where I taught for the last sixteen of the thirty years I was in the classroom as a teacher, we had one new teacher quit at lunch on his first day on the job with two more classes to teach after lunch. During the lunch break, he walked into the principal’s office, tossed his room keys on the desk and said, “If they won’t show some respect for me, then I refuse to teach them.” Then he left.
neanderthal100,
I totally understand your response.
thank you for your honesty.
NC Teacher/Fed-Up
I am a teacher in NYC for over 15 years and wept as I read your blog and could have sworn you were writing about me. I too am getting ready to resign. i don’t know how it will affect me as I’m only 44 years old. I’m physically sick, exhausted, and tired of being made to feel inadequate and incapable when my prior success speaks for itself. My latest story is getting hurt at work by a student who decided to push my arm just because he was angry. Its so sad. I loved my job so much and now I panic at the thought of going back and no one in my family, except one or two, really understand why I just don’t want to go back. What happened when you quit? I’d love to know how you made it financially.
That’s a very good question. If we quit, how do we make it financially? I never had time to save anything living from paycheck to paycheck and with one child to raise. I have never owned a home and my divorce, unpaid student loans, and doctor visits due to the strains of work and stress have broken my budget. I don’t even live beyond my means. I have no computer of my own, no cable or satellite, no regular tv, no land line–all of my furniture was donated–and I pay rent. My car WAS mine but I had to refinance it to get loans to pay for everyday funds. BUT because I “make too much money”, I can’t qualify for any public assistance. So, I am in a Catch22. I want to quit but almost cannot!
I’m looking at options into daycare/childcare and tutoring. There has to be something we can do to finally enjoy and find fulfillment in our jobs again. The pay will be less but so will the stress, anxiety and the continual comments demeaning and belittling me as a professional.
One option is to plan ahead – there are teachers I know that are going back to school now, while they still have some income, while taking out school loans, in order to pursue a different line of work. This is hard, yes, and time consuming, because obviously you would probably only be able to attend part time.
This is something I may investigate. I may just try to get 20 years in, which is the minimum for which we can get any retirement that is worth anything, and try to start taking some classes towards a different career. I only have a handful of years left, so I will probably try and start taking some classes within the next couple years. Then after I retire, even if I have to go full-time for a year or two, I will have finish up the degree for a different profession.
Or plan B – I may try and stick it out for as long as possible after the 20 year mark, because I will still be in my beginning 50′s, and attempt another college degree toward the end of that window.
There are lots of variables here, I know. It obviously depends on how old you are, how many kids you have, and what kind of financial shape you are in. However, this kind of helps me get through the days, weeks, etc…, knowing that I am NOT doing this job forever.
I can’t apply for student loans. I have several defaulted undergrad loans that were not forgiven because I was actually receiving my teacher certification. That was why I said I was suffering from a Catch-22 situation. While I went back to school to earn licensure in teaching, I had to pay tuition as well as taking care of a husband and child. I was the primary breadwinner in the class. My undergrad loan repayments defaulted after a period of years and I don’t make enough to pay for my daily living especially now since I am going through a divorce. Education employment opportunities should pay more, but I still am not making over $40,000 and again, I’m NOT living above my means: no cable, no landline, no fancy car, and I’m renting my home.
I was trying to make the 20 year mark but if this frustration keeps up, I’m going to have to quit because I can’t afford to keep going back and forth to the doctor. I just wish I would have never bothered in choosing Education as a profession. Which is quite disheartening because I DO love warning students and protecting them from making the same mistakes as I did. Avoid the academic track of high school. I would tell every student now to go the technology route or the occupational route. Learn a trade. Start your own business! Try to apply for Early College. Getting in debt with a Bachelor of Arts degree was not worth my time and now I have to make proper changes or MY debt will become my daughter’s debt!
I’m thinking about getting an RN. I can do it in two years. Why get a BSN? I really don’t want to be a charge nurse. I figure I can work as a per diem ER nurse.
There’s also law school in three years.
The job is difficult to say the least and the expectations are very high. My thought is the education system has three strong pillars; the teacher, the parents and the efforts of student. Micro managing does not help the teacher.
I can assure you this is not a job anyone wants in this century.
IT IS OFFICIALLY “DOG EAT DOG”
Read the post of the principal almost jumping over her desk …..gritting her teeth telling the teacher that her scores were not up to par…
Bravo….
You did not quit teaching…Teaching is now officially TESTING..
You quit Testing……..
When I become a senator, I will mandate that all of the people working in the Department of Education for any State must teach 3 classes of 32 students each and must do so every 5 years.
They must turn in weekly lesson plans, must show growth for all students, must attend all school activities (even on weekends)
If they do not show growth for all of their 96 students or they will be be fired!!
Last sentence correction..
“If they do not show growth for each of their 96 students, they will be fired!”