John Merrow learned about the latest trending idea in teacher training. Give a teacher a script, put a “bug” in his or her ear, and let the teacher follow instructions.
This is what he calls “insect-based” teacher training.
He decided to visit some schools to find out how it was working.
Part 1 begins like this:
The latest development in the never-ending struggle to improve teaching involves “A bug in the ear” AND “A fly on the wall.” This insect-based approach has a highly-trained but distant observers watching (on closed circuit video) teachers at work and giving them instructions and suggestions in real time, so the teachers can modify methods and instantly improve their instruction.
According to Education Week, what’s called ‘Bug in the Ear Coaching” is being used in about a dozen states. “The premise is simple: A teacher wears an earpiece during a lesson, which is being live-streamed for an instructional coach who is somewhere else. Throughout the lesson, the coach delivers in-the-moment feedback to the teacher, who can add something or switch gears based on what she’s hearing in her ear.”
I reached out to some of the sources I developed in my 41 years of reporting for a closer look. One enthusiastic superintendent, who requested anonymity, said that the system would pay for itself in higher scores on standardized tests. “While the initial investment of $500,000 per school for cameras and directional microphones for every classroom, a dedicated room of monitors, the cost of a half-time tech person, and the salaries of the instructional experts who monitor the teachers, looks like a lot, once those standardized test scores go up, it’s smooth sailing.”
Are there other costs, I wanted to know?
“Our experts wanted all the teachers to wear identical loose-fitting shirts and blouses to minimize sound interference. I had a great deal worked out with the company that makes the uniforms they wear at the federal penitentiary in the next county.” He chuckled, “But without stripes, of course.” However, he explained, the teachers union shot the idea down.
He (and some educators cited in Ed Week) say that most teachers like the immediacy of the system, saying that instant feedback is really the only kind that sticks. “It was really nice to feel supported and get direct feedback in the moment,” a special education teacher in Washington State told Ed Week.
However, when I reached out to some veteran teachers I respect, I found no support for the approach. (Stop reading here if vulgar language offends you.)
I stopped reading right there, but you don’t need to!
Then he posted Part 2, where he continued his investigation.
Last week in this space I took a poke or two at what I called “Insect-Based Teacher Training,” specifically the practice of wiring teachers so that remote observers can hear and see what they do in their classrooms. What they call “Bug in the Ear training” enables experts to interrupt teachers and tell them what they are doing wrong. In theory, that allows teachers to improve on the spot. You may remember that the expert I observed in action wasn’t particularly effective.
(Full disclosure: In last week’s essay I took a small liberty with the two veteran teachers whose opinions I cited: neither of them actually referenced ‘ants in underpants’ or ‘ticks on dicks.’ I owe my readers an apology because the teachers did not say that. I made that up, just for the fun of it.
Why would I do that? Well, after so many years of reporting for public broadcasting, where the emphasis is on truth, making stuff up gives me a huge adrenalin rush.
However, everything else in that essay is 100% accurate. You can take that to the bank.)
But I digress. What I want you to know is the morning after “Insect-Based Teacher Training” was published, I received a call from the School Superintendent whose district I had visited. He was upset about my portrayal of the process, saying that the observer had a bad day. Moreover, he said, I had failed to grasp the subtle, significant ways that technology improves education. Would I come back and learn more, he asked?
I rushed out the door, and a few hours later the Superintendent and I were in the school’s monitoring room, staring at the 30+ video screens that showed all the school’s classrooms.
I wanted to hear his defense of the “Bug in the Ear” approach. Would he have wanted to have a bug in his ear when he was teaching, I wanted to know?
“I actually never taught,” came his response. “I came up the ranks through coaching.”
Then he chuckled. “That’s an old joke, superintendents starting out as coaches. I was never a coach either.”
What was his background, I wanted to know?
“I studied organizational behavior in college, and then, for my MBA, I focused on management.”
He continued: “But that’s not why I asked you to come back,” he said. “I want you to see another way that monitoring and advanced technology improve teaching and learning.”
Go on, I said.
To get the inside scoop on “insect-based teacher training,” this is a must-read.
In case you wondered, the first time I ever heard of the bug-in-your-ear approach to teaching, it was in the description of the methodology of Bridge International Academies, the private sector effort to take over schooling in certain African nations. The BIA approach was to give each teacher an iPad (or similar device) with a curriculum written by TFA teachers located in Boston. Then each teacher got a bug-in-the-ear to make sure that they were delivering the curriculum precisely as directed by the device. BIA charges a fee and was engaged in trying to turn a profit by enrolling hundreds of thousands of students in the world’s poorest countries. Its investors included Bill Gates, Pearson, Mark Zuckerberg, Pearson, and the World Bank. The problem with its approach was that it had the effect of discouraging the government from taking responsibility for building a universal, free public education system. Furthermore, if students couldn’t pay the fees, they were kicked out. BIA says it gets higher scores, which is not surprising since it accepts students only if they can pay. Strange that BIA’s methods crossed the ocean back to where it was started.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
INSANITY reigns for PROFITS … KaCHING.
Race to Nowhere can be viewed for free until the end of January. Pass this on and sign up to view. I saw this at CU Boulder and also last night.
https://beyondmeasure.formstack.com/forms/racetonowhere
“A bug in the ear” is an affront to professional teachers everywhere. This is another brain child of the clueless business community that has inserted itself into education. While I consider myself someone that was a very responsive teacher, I enjoyed giving students instant feedback to students, not because I wore an earpiece. but because I was a well trained and experienced professional that knew how to offer appropriate instruction.
I can think of nothing more distracting and annoying than wearing an earpiece while teaching in order to micro-manage instruction. It is an idiotic idea doomed to fail! How many professional men are made to wear these demeaning earpieces designed micro-manage teachers’ every move? Do lawyers, doctors or plumbers wear them? Or is this particular insult reserved for a profession largely staffed by women? Clearly, this absurdity reflects the misogyny of the so-called reform movement.
These deformers are NUTS.
It’s obviously they are the ones who need a bug in their ear telling them to “SHUT UP and GO AWAY,”
Wonder if the dump wears a bug in his ear?
In a way, of course, Trump does. On the other end of his earpiece is Vladimir Putin.
There is a speaker inside Donald Trump’s empty braincase and the only voice issuing from that speaker is Putin giving Toxic Trumpty Dumpty his daily Tweeting orders.
Yup. The bug in his ear, as described in another recent post by Diane.
The Putin bugs crawled in Toxic Dumpster’s ears, ate through bone and tissues to reach the brainpan and devoured the rancid, decaying neural tissue the bug found therein until nothing was left but a hollowed-out space. Then the Putin bug wired that empty skull-cave directly to the puppet master in Moscow.
But you do realize that what I wrote was satire, right? “Bug in the Ear” is real and practiced in 14 states, but I made up what I wrote, hoping to show how stupid and unprofessional and humiliating it is.
Thanks for that clarification, John!
And sometimes satire is very hard to distinguish from reality. For instance:
“One enthusiastic superintendent, who requested anonymity, said that the system would pay for itself in higher scores on standardized tests.”
That bit of satire is amazingly real!
I taught many years ago, then had a career in publishing, and then went back to teaching. It really was breathtaking how much teaching had changed during the interim. For example, teachers now have almost no autonomy, are highly scripted, and attend department meetings where they don’t make decisions but, rather, learn what the latest mandates are.
Here’s another of the BIGGEST changes. Professional development wasn’t unheard of back then (though it has gone through an enormous boom in recent years), but there’s a big difference now. IN THE PAST, ENGLISH TEACHERS WOULD ATTEND PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT IN WHICH THEY ACTUALLY LEARNED CONTENT!!! So, there might be professional development sessions for English teachers about topics like
West-African Oral Poetic Traditions and Their Influence on American Song and Poetry
Transcendentalist Philosophy and Its Roots in Hindu Scripture
Sentence Combining and Expansion
Rhythm versus Meter: Issues in Prosody
Growth Archetypes in Storytelling: from the Hero’s Journey to the Bildungsroman
Mary Shelley and the Romantic Critique of Technological Development
Personal Narrative as Self Creation
Popular Science in the Poetry of Robert Frost
The Wasteland Motif in Greek Tragedy, European Folktales, Modernist Poetry, and Dystopian Science Fiction
Imagine thinking that it might actually be valuable to hold professional development sessions in which teachers actually INCREASED THEIR KNOWLEDGE OF THEIR SUBJECT!!!
Bizarrely, now, such professional development is almost nonexistent, and even suggesting that it might be done is considered crazy. This is how far we have fallen–that we now seem to think that what teachers actually KNOW about their subjects is irrelevant to teacher improvement.
A case in point. In my last teaching job, it became clear to me that my colleagues, to a person, had almost know knowledge of contemporary scientific models of English syntax. They were all working from the folk model known as “traditional grammar.” So, I suggested to my Principal, who was insisting that we have lots of professional development, that I might give my colleagues a couple introductory sessions on this topic. She looked at me as though I had three heads. First, the idea that a teacher might know enough to teach other teachers sounded crazy to her. That was clearly the province of Reading Coaches and outside consultants. LOL. I attended innumerable sessions given by these people. They were completely moronic. Second, and the greater part of her reaction, it sounded to her as though I didn’t understand the purpose of professional development at all, which was to teach technique, not content.
Because we have now embraced, de facto, the notion that it’s best to have the blind lead the blind.
cx: almost no knowledge of contemporary scientific models of English syntax
In my past few years of teaching, I attended innumerable “trainings” (roll over, up, sit, good boy). Neither I nor anyone else I knew left any of these knowing anything that we didn’t know going in or that couldn’t be put on a half-page handout (e.g., Here’s how to use ZIPGrade). AN UTTER WASTE of enormous amounts of time. But very lucrative for EduPundit consultants.
The BIA is using exploitation of the poorest to drum up sales in wealthy countries. If BIA can raise those test scores in a poor nation, they can certainly sell this crap in the USA to tax starved inner city school districts. C’mon…..we can show ya the data to prove it. Makes my skin crawl!
My experience with “Big Brother” was an administrator suggesting to me how to group my students based on computer quizzes. Each quiz had ten questions with two for each topic. He told me I should have pullout small groups of students who missed the same questions. At first, I was surprised that he had access to all my students computer data, but then I was just annoyed. He was not at all interested in the students or what they most needed or how it should be delivered. The computer said small group of these students/widgets, so that was it. It made me wonder why I was spending hours writing IEPs when a computer could overrule them and my professional judgement. Incidentally, this administrator had taught biology, for how long I don’t know, but he clearly knew nothing about special education and had no business supervising reading teachers.
Every teacher will relate to this. It’s typical.
This story plays into the narrative I have heard from reactionary conservatives that the established government, the deep state, or what ever else happens to be the buzz word of the day is trying to control thought. If teachers allow themselves to be treated this way, they are complicit in the authoritarianization (what other word can I use) of America. The irony of all of this is that those who will spout streams uttered by the latest far right wacko will point to these actions as proof that we are in danger of being brainwashed.Their antidote? The free-thinking right wing.
If this is not the definition of irony, what is?
Well, a bug in the ear is better than a bug in the ass — Michelle Rhee’s approach, which Merrow just loved (at least to begin with)
Types of Teacher “Trainings” (roll over, up, sit, good boy)
The one in which teachers are treated like four-year-olds and told what everyone already knows (blood can carry diseases, children can be paired up to critique one another’s work)
The one in which the latest Deformer magic cure-all is touted (Flipped classrooms! Teaching students to have True Grit! Using Data Walls as motivational tools!)
The one explaining how to carry out the latest stupid district- or school-wide mandate (how to fill out your data chat data progress forms)
The one in which utter nonsense is peddled (Activate your students’ prior knowledge!–as though if they have the knowledge, it would need to be activated, or if they don’t have it, any amount of talking about what they already know would be relevant)
The one in which a pedagogical technique of some very limited use, already known to everyone, is heralded as a great breakthrough (Improving vocabulary with word part analysis!–of some very limited value because almost none of the vocabulary known by an educated adult was learned in this way)
The one in which a pedagogical technique for which there isn’t sufficient time is touted as a cure-all (Differentiate your instruction!–Great idea, as though you have time to make 27 lesson plans for your 27 students and to work with each individually, giving each the unique, specialized attention necessary; if you are not doing this, it’s not, of course, because there isn’t enough time; it’s because you haven’t learned the MAGICAL TECHNIQUES)
A few off the top of my head
cx: was not learned in this way
All of which leaves the caring teacher wistful at best. A good idea is good only if it is possible, otherwise it just highlights perceived failure.
Which is the point. This is a particularly useful mandate because it can be lorded over a teacher an administrator happens not to like. Oh, he or she was a bad teacher. Didn’t differentiate enough.
Really good point. I hadn’t thought of teacher training on each new fad/insight as basically providing administrators with new sticks with which to beat teachers.
“The one in which a pedagogical technique for which there isn’t sufficient time is touted as a cure-all ((Differentiate your instruction!–Great idea, as though you have time to make 27 lesson plans for your 27 students and to work with each individually,…”
This is exactly why calls for IEPs for all students used to send terror through my heart. A well written IEP takes hours and hours of observation, researching, and writing that then allows you to differentiate your instruction so that it suits that particular student. I don’t know what hoops special ed teachers have to jump through now since I am retired, but I can’t imagine that it has gotten easier. It really is well past time for teachers to put the bean counters in their place. I am real tired of business managers assuming that their training prepares them to manage any and every enterprise they so choose. Ridiculous!
In my last school, more than a quarter of my students had an IEP or a 504 plan! The paperwork and meetings alone took breathtaking amounts of time. I had five preps, and for each day of each, I had to prepare a two-page lesson plan that was supposed to include individuation for each of these students. Many teachers simply ignored this. Some, like me, crafted some vague language to tack onto every lesson plan for each of these students. (Sit at front of class; be given a written copy of the assignment. Etc.) What rubbish! It’s as though no one in charge every bothered to calculate the time involved to carry out the stupid mandates. But this left teachers, of course, vulnerable, for they could never meet the requirements, even the best of them. So, if an insecure administrator decided that he or she wanted to get that teacher, there was always a means available for him or her to use to serve up low evaluations. And, ofc, the evaluations were constant.
I used to write “preferential seating” as one of these accommodations quite frequently. Since the “preference” was left to the teacher, no one was left with the task of trying to seat ten students at the front. 🙂
Yes, I resorted to this, too!!! LOL
Yikes! A bureaucratic stranglehold on teachers is another way to undermine morale and the hard work teachers do.
Bob Shepherd: “It’s as though no one in charge ever bothered to calculate the time involved to carry out the stupid mandates.”
Yup. Says it all about ed-reform in general. I find a certain irony in this. The edumetrics bent from which this crap flows derives its general approach from Skinnerian et al century-old assembly-line production-efficiency measurement. But those guys at least (judging from my puny economic background & reading “Cheaper by the Dozen”) carefully measured worker-time input…. Could that maybe be because they were paying them BY THE HOUR WORKED?
Hey. Lawyers charge (last time I looked) in 6-min increments, including not just arguing in court, but every blasted moment of research, meeting, phone call, email, & data-entry.
OECD reports teachers in US earn 60% less than OECD peers, spend 40% more time in front of classes [2017] – time that teachers on Singapore & Finland e.g. spend collaborating w/other teachers, admins, students, parents… And that doesn’t even address the addl time US teachers spend on data-entry et al admin of cockamamie accountability testing et al ed-reform systems that no other OECD country would dream of wasting their [ample] ed tax-dollars on…
“It was great fun following her for three years on the News Hour” — John Merrow
3:44 in this video
These teachers just aren’t scripted enough. Let’s cut to the chase and replace them all with SOFTWARE that will do precisely what it is told to do!!!
SDP: His assertion that what Rhee did was revolutionary seems almost quaint in light of our understanding of her mess she left. Thanks for this posting.
Rhee was one of the most misguided education administrators in US history. She ranks up there with those who ran the Native American Boarding Schools. My lord, the damage that woman did!!! And the lies she told!
I don’t know about revolutionary, but Rhee sure was Rheevulsionary.
Still is.
By the way, that video is disturbing on many different levels.
The close-ups of Merrows eyebrows are particularly unnerving.
You’d think the fellow would actually know something about filming after all the work he did at PBS. But then you would be wrong.
Command. Control. Coercion. Because, of course, it’s under conditions of ZERO AUTONOMY that people perform best.
“All your base are belong to us.” –Motto of the Disrupter/Deformer Movement
https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2019/05/11/he-sees-you-when-youre-sleeping-2/
Here’s ed reform selling more gimmicky ed tech to public schools:
“Technology has taken over the century, creating a rapidly changing landscape that has dramatically touched nearly every aspect of social interaction, business and entertainment. Education, though, has proved slow in experiencing the digital disruption, says Michal Borkowski, CEO and co-founder of Brainly, an online peer-to-peer learning community. He views the 2020s as technology’s time to shine in education.
“While many new ed tech tools are emerging and helping to democratize education, the next decade will bring an even greater emergence of diverse platforms and resources for learners worldwide,” he says. “I expect that in the next few years we’ll see the education world opening up to these advances in new ways.”
These stories are advertisements for products. If you run a school and you are relying on these folks for advice you are doing a disservice to the public who pay you.
Stop buying what they’re selling. Public school parents will thank you.
https://www.the74million.org/article/from-artificial-intelligence-to-augmented-reality-to-peer-to-peer-learning-7-ed-tech-trends-to-watch-in-2020/
I have a comment, above, about teacher “training” then and now, awaiting moderation. WordPress. Alas.
As you know, Diane, I have embarked on a private project, as my grandson traveled, to become his 7th grade English teacher. Back in the US, and going to the home school academy one more, he asked me to do the same for his 8th grade learnings.
The ‘bug’ in my ear, is my OWN education and ‘experience in the classroom Ipractice* — facilitating and enabling learning. As I put together the objectives for him (based on what he already can do) and as I create the curriculum activities and materials that I need to use in order to reach the objectives, I draw on what I the teacher already know.
The ‘bug’ in MY brain is from the take-away from Harvard and Pew’s observations of me for 2Years They didn’t observe one lesson. or interrupt me to tell me what I was doing wrong.
By observing my classroom practice, they helped me to grasp why my methods were so successful, how I met all the PRINCIPLES OF LEARNING..which was the thesis being researched by Pew for the New Standards research.
I mention this, because I am very nervous about the responsibility of ‘teaching’ my grandson. I want to do it well, so I am replicating the activities and classroom practices that I once did with 130 kids, to improve their literacy skills.
I remember, when I was in my classroom, how little assistance I received from any principal or supervisor… and I recall how one principal, (at the beginning of my tenure in that school where I became celebrated) took the chalk from my hand, and took over my lesson. At the end, she asked to see my lesson plans– I replied . “But, my dear, you must have known what I was ‘teaching’, when you usurped my role.” She tried to have me removed, the DOE took her ass out of that school, where my students were a the top of all city and state writing exams.
That school had four more principals in the 8 years that I was there, not one of them adept at grasping WLLL… what learning looks like which was the crux of the Pew.research.
My point… I am TEACHER. I may not be perfect in all my lessons, but I am the professional who grasps the fundamentals of LEARNING
* . I give clear expectations to the child and the parents…whic his the FIRST principle of learning.
* I endure that there are intrinsic rewards for learning, for doing the work…the 2nd principle of learning.
* I am an expert in my discipline/subject , as I have the education and experience required
* I use authentic, genuine methods to evaluate and assess PERFORMANCE… and tests are NOT one of them…portfolio is the genuine tool that I use.
At the end of his 7th grade with me, across the oceans and the world… my boy Brant, can show his September writing, and his June writing. He has learned the process of drafting and editing for an audience… which is at the core of 7th grade, where once upon a time, ‘grammar’ was central.
Now, with no bugs in my ear to tele why to do or use, we are reading together ” 1984″ and a plethora of current articles chronicling the activities of Trump, the executive office and the senate. The final product will be Brant’s essay, suing the things he writes in his journal and his letters to me.
We are also reading together the book I used with my class, “21 great stories” so he can discover not only the great dramatic elements and wonderful characters in stories that last through time, but we can discover how Poe Twain. Joyce, Steinbeck etc used lyrical language to engage the reader with images –and of course there are all those examples of punctuation, which he is still learning.
I gotta go…he just sent me a Telegram message, so we can talk now.
There is joy in focusing on one student, so glad you are getting this experience.
I am just a part-time PreK world-lang enrichment teacher, been doing it for 20 yrs. It’s long been all Spanish (due to changes in sch/ parent preference), but I started w/Fr students too – my major & particular pleasure. One of them, who started French enrichment w/me at an employee daycare age 2.5-6, talked his Mom into hiring me as a Fr tutor in 4thgr, when his pub elemsch dropped for-langs. (Mom was always included in our lessons – she had hisch Span & some Fr, wanted to improve Fr). He’s now a sr in hisch. At the end of 11th gr he was awarded a bilingual ‘notation’ on his hisch diploma, & just this wk I got to view him on youtube inducting new members to his hisch Fr Honors Soc in beautifully-accented, rapid French. All that from just an hr/wk, 30 wks/ yr. Currently, he his Mom & I are working on Camus’ L’Étranger. At this point he feels like, if not a son, maybe a nephew… What a pleasure it must be to do this for your own grandson!
The pressure on our young is harmful to their sanity and physical health.
It really is. By the end of the school year, having spent 165 days going from one class to the next with a 3-minute break in between and dealing with an endless barrage of test prep and high-stakes test practice tests and benchmark tests, and then facing those end-of-the-year tests on top of their finals, kids are at the ends of their ropes. We are subjecting them to insane environments.
3-minutes!!!
At least the schools where I taught for thirty years offered us 7-minute passing periods.
Mos public schools in the US have a 5-minute passing period. Mine was extreme. 3 minutes.
Did they allow bathroom breaks?
We were told that students were to go to the bathroom during passing periods or lunch. We could issue hall passes, but these were discouraged. Now here’s the thing: we had two buildings, and students coming from PE would have to cross the length of two of them and an open space in between just to get to their next class, if it happened to be at the end of the other building. INSANE.
The high school where I taught sat on forty acres and had more than 3,000 students and a hundred classrooms. Three minutes would have never worked. The seven minutes we had were negotiated. Teachers and admins walked the longest distances to prove that 7 minutes was enough but not a second less. If we hadn’t done that, the admins would have forced a passing period of 5 minutes. The teachers in the district where I worked had to fight for everything, and most of the teachers I knew were very combative.
On Adderall-addicted adolescent who needs indefinite detention: Donald Trump
I think indefinite isolation in a padded room after a frontal lobotomy is a better solution to deal with Donald Trump.
If Trump had a lobotomy, how could you tell?
Good point. Maybe someone already gave him the lobotomy a long time ago.
Bob, That’s a good one. Have you been reading the news stories about the new book by New York Times journalists called “A Very Stable Genius”?
When he went to a ceremony to mark Pearl Harbor, he asked his then chief of staff John Kelly what happened at Pearl Harbor.
Trump “asked his then chief of staff John Kelly what happened at Pearl Harbor”
My first reaction, “Oh, my God!” Donald Trump is a new definition for dumb, dumber and dumbest all in one absent brain.
I would be surprised if he didn’t ask that question. Trump is a profoundly ignorant man. As you know, as any of his former staffers can tell you.
Trump is he of very little brain but with a wicked heart. Sort of like the evil version of Winnie the Pooh. But the Repugnican Senators LOVE THIS. It means they can railroad through their rapacious policies for the benefit of their fat cat donors. What a freaking farce. It’s time reporters started asking him a lot of questions he can’t answer. What is the Belt and Road Initiative? What’s the purpose of the General Accounting Office? What is posse comitatus? Who were our allies in the Second World War? Where is Sri Lanka? Bolivia? What is an amortization? Name six nuclear powers. That kind of thing. IF THEY HAD ASKED SUCH QUESTIONS DURING THE PRESIDENTIAL DEBATES, THIS UTTER MORON WOULD NEVER HAVE BECOME PRESIDENT.
Apparently he told the President of India that he could relax because he didn’t share a border with China. According to the reporters, the Indian President’s eyes bulged and he realized that he didn’t have to take Trump seriously about anything. This is a seriously ignorant man.
ROFLMAO!!!!!!!
Oh my Lord.
Jacques Chirac tells in his memoir about GW calling him up to say that Saddam Hussein was the Gog and Iraq the Maggog in Revelations in the Bible. Chirac had to send one of his people to talk to a religion scholar to figure out what the hell Bush was talking about. Reagan regularly consulted an astrologer. We’ve had some doozies. And Reagan, the old Cold Warrior, was smart enough to listen to people who knew more than he did.
Reagan –> Bush –> Trump —> The Pile of Dog**t on My Lawn
Dumb –> Dumber –> Dumbest —> Completely lacking any cognitive functioning.
However, note that the pile on my lawn is not nearly as dangerous. This fool, in his utter ignorance, almost started a World War recently. Oops.
And he told the “Prince of Whales” that climate change was “just weather.” It’s a daily thing with him. Utter idiocy.
Lev Parnas and his friends: http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/01/lev-parnas-and-powerful-republican-friends-a-photo-album.html
LOL!!!!
Parnas? Don’t know the guy. Epstein? Yeah, I met him a couple times. Not my kinda guy.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/youre-a-bunch-of-dopes-and-babies-inside-trumps-stunning-tirade-against-generals/ar-BBZ3qsx?ocid=sf
Trump may well be the least informed, dumbest man in the history of politics. And that’s saying a lot.
I believe he wouldn’t be throwing temper tantrums anymore.
Yes, this would be a good thing.
Why bother with insects in the ear when you can do some direct taps into the brains of the students you are teaching.
Brain-based teaching is IN.
Betsy Devos has a much simpler method than you can see pictured in the link below but kids have to pay a fee and go to one of her NEUROCORE franchises.
Brain-based teaching is IN. Put on your special cap and figure out how to raise your test scores and manage your dyslexia.
http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/inside-school-research/2020/01/brain_scans_in_the_classroom.html?cmp=eml-enl-tl-news2&M=59022030&U=1003774&UUID=1979c1baa26b57866b98b762641ad3a5
Students can “train” the poverty, neglect and trauma out their brains. It makes as much sense as “praying away the gay.” It’s a quick, easy money maker for the queen of scamway.
We will ever be vulnerable to the next IN potential $-maker, as long as we persist in our neoliberal anti-public-goods-tax-support, leaning on corporations/ hedge-funders to fill the funding gap w/ their faux, pseudo-ed products & social-impact investments in monetized imitations of ed “progress.” And the pedagogical methods imposed will always be cheap tech-y imitations of human-to-human education, as long as we grade the economy “good” for # of products sold & $corp profits made, instead of % humans employed in liv-wage, humanly rewarding jobs.
If I had been forced to teach with a “bug in my ear” sooner or later, I would have yanked it out, tossed it on the floor, and crushed it.
And after school, the administrator that forced that “bug in my ear”, would have gone into hiding out of fear for his safety.
You would have ACTUALLY done it???? That would have been the day I quit teaching! I can’t believe people really submit to this stuff!!
I do not know if I would have done it. Probably not since I often ignored and protested every stupid thing that came along like the Whole Language Approach to teaching English and the Self Esteem movement. Those were both pushed and supported from the district office admins and site admins were often replaced if they didn’t play ball with the top of the dung heap.
In fact, I was told by more than one person that the district administration had me on a blacklist and wanted to fire me because I was always a poison thorn in their butts when it came to all the crap that flowed down from the top threatening to drown us teachers in the classroom.
Thanks, Lloyd. How could I forget the self-esteem movement. Of all the things cooked up in the meth-house of educational entrepenuership, this one was the most cock-eyed.
and some of the early wrecking balls of public education wrote books about the importance of programming children with faux self-esteem — ruined most of a generation with that one.
My kids walked around with their AirPods in their ears when they were home for Xmas break. I was annoyed, but then I got an earpod from Jabra (much better than the AirPod, imo), and started listening to Harry Potter audio books. I walked around the house wearing these pods, and first my kids started to worry about me and snatched the pods out of my ear whenever I was about to drive with them. Then they became thoroughly annoyed with the whole thing, and forced me to make a rule that nobody (including me) will wear pods while eating, driving or watch TV. Interestingly, I was the only one who sneakily tried to brake the rules a few times, the kids never did. The kids got me the picture edition of Harry Potter books with the obvious hint that I should read books instead of listening to them.
How could teachers pay attention to the students in class and take instructions from a coach is beyond me.
Wow, when you put those earbuds in your ears, you woke you kids up, they saw the light, and acted. It was like you were modeling what they were doing and they figured it out on their own.
Your kids deserve a trophy of some kind.
I taught many years ago, then had a career in publishing, and then went back to teaching. It really was breathtaking how much teaching had changed during the interim. For example, teachers now have almost no autonomy, are highly scripted, and attend department meetings where they don’t make decisions but, rather, learn what the latest mandates are.
Here’s another of the BIGGEST changes. Professional development wasn’t unheard of back then (though it has gone through an enormous boom in recent years), but there’s a big difference now. IN THE PAST, ENGLISH TEACHERS WOULD ATTEND PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT IN WHICH THEY ACTUALLY LEARNED CONTENT!!! So, there might be professional development sessions for English teachers about topics like
West-African Oral Poetic Traditions and Their Influence on American Song and Poetry
Transcendentalist Philosophy and Its Roots in Hindu Scripture
Sentence Combining and Expansion
Rhythm versus Meter: Issues in Prosody
Growth Archetypes in Storytelling: from the Hero’s Journey to the Bildungsroman
Mary Shelley and the Romantic Critique of Technological Development
Personal Narrative as Self Creation
Popular Science in the Poetry of Robert Frost
The Wasteland Motif in Greek Tragedy, European Folktales, Modernist Poetry, and Dystopian Science Fiction
Imagine thinking that it might actually be valuable to hold professional development sessions in which teachers actually INCREASED THEIR KNOWLEDGE OF THEIR SUBJECT!!!
You should write a book .
You have a unique perspective on the teaching profession.
I’m sure you could probably make a book just out of what you post here and on your own site.
What you write is very valuable because it provides a intellectual underpinning for what many people just feel.
Most people can see that there is something the matter with stuff like Common Core, but they can’t put their finger on it — or their foot, which is really what they should put on it (on David Coleman’s behind)
Content indeed. This has been my chief complaint against Inservice since I have been teaching. I can count the number of times I have been exposed to general, stultifying lectures about the dangers of lecture.
ROFLMAO!
There’s a pervasive, deep anti-intellectualism in, of all places, US education. The very idea of someone who knows something imparting what he or she knows to those who don’t yet is considered stultifying because knowledge, and the understanding that comes with it, isn’t valued by people who are not themselves knowledgeable. I have met far too many French teachers who could not read and converse in French, reading coaches who didn’t read, language arts coordinators who didn’t know Yeats from plates, terza rima from tiddlywinks. The very idea that the content of a subject is fascinating in and of itself is foreign to those who have never been fascinated by a subject. Years ago, when I was doing my student teaching, I used to ride back and forth to the school with another teacher candidate. Here, a conversation with that guy:
ME: So what do you teach?
GUY: Science.
ME: Ah. What science or sciences are you particularly interested in?
GUY: Interested in?
ME: Yeah, like for pleasure. When you are just reading on your own.
GUY: I’m not really interested in science.
ME: So why on Earth would you want to teach it?
GUY: You gotta have a job.
ME: There must be some science that interests you more than others. Biology? Astronomy? Chemistry? Geology?
GUY: Not really.
A perfect candidate for an Educational Leadership degree, that one. He might even work at the state or federal level and develop lists of “science skills”–you know, “21st century standards.”
In my experience, no single teacher (not even me) is good for everyone. From later feedback (often years or decades later) I know that I was good for some. However, I also know that for some others, I was a failure.
Part of this dilemma involves ‘intangibles’, personal chemistry. Some of it involves ‘technique’, a range of didactic vs. exploratory methods. A professional teacher understands that students have different ways of processing information, and a well informed teacher can deliver a ‘lesson’ in several modes to accommodate that. However, no teacher is ‘perfect’ for everybody.
And, so, the ideal for a student is to experience a wide range of teachers and learn to glean what they can from each. Sometimes the teacher a student initially ‘hates’ can turn out to be the one they learn from the most. Not always, of course. The key is diversity (with a boundary, of course, at teacher child abuse or pedophilia). The student may not ‘ace’ a standardized test, but life isn’t a standardized and, after all, the purpose of education is ‘education, (drawing out from within the potential of the student).
“I was a failure.”
I’d argue that it is a flawed subjective observation. Most of the time, teachers do not fail a student. The student and his/ her parents and or guardians fail the teacher by not making any effort to learn what the teacher teaches.
When a child doesn’t learn, there are many more factors at work than the teacher.
These are very perceptive comments. Aside from the truth of Lloyd’s comments about effort on the part of the student, the chemistry of the relationships in the classroom is vital to producing a good educational experience for all students.
We can guess but cannot really know our long-term effect on a student, or what they actually learned from us. This has to do with the chemistry of the relationship you noted. There are teachers I had whose courses I may have done barely so-so in, but who struck me with their passion for their subject – or perhaps tirelessly worked with me after school – which inspired in me respect for the subject, & to persevere in gaining more knowledge in it in adulthood. There were others in my fave subjects who weren’t terrific at pedagogy & could barely engage most of the class, but I could glean plenty from them. And I observed with my own kids, especially in early grades, that certain teachers they “loved” & performed like seals for, they were actually afraid of, & just trying mightily for held-back approval. As a teacher, I was more than once shocked to receive feedback later on proving they’d gotten more out of my class than I ever imagined.
” “It just makes sense,” said Mary Catherine Scheeler, who spearheaded this line of research in education starting in 2002 and is an associate professor of special education at Penn State’s College of Education. “It’s more efficient because we’re correcting behaviors on the spot. I like to say practice makes permanent. If people are practicing things incorrectly, they become part of the repertoire.” ”
Quote from the education Week article cited in Merrow’s satire (?). I am making the assumption that the person above is dead serious. The idea that the prospective teacher can be taught to teach by someone who is not there might stand as the most ridiculous concept since Bloom started making lists of behaviors. These folks need to get a job.
Reading the teachers’ descriptions of the bug in the ear interactions was hair raising, gut wrenching, and blood boiling. I double dog dare my superintendent to bring this vulgarity to my ear. Bring it! Watch my union and the city that supports us tear it down along with the careers of everyone involved in the dystopian scheme.
(By the way, I have plenty of vulgar language to describe this topic, but the vulgarity of teacher language is usually not really all that vulgar. Don’t be afraid to read the whole post. There’s only a non-graphic use of a word that is also Richard Nixon’s nickname.)
Deformers love this Orwellian stuff. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for the Depersonalization and Computerization of U.S. Schools paid the Arne Duncan Department for the Privatization and Coring of U.S. Education to conduct experiments on using retinal monitors, galvanic skin response wrist bracelet monitors, and other devices for real-time tracking of students’ gritful attention to task. I wish I were making this up. The Department PROUDLY published a report about this. A vision for the future. Workers with little GPS buttons with cameras that follow their every move and report their “data” in real time to ubiquitous workplace drones. All overseen by a Gates company database management and stack ranking system like the new Chinese Social Credit system but more omnipresent and invasive.
More reasons to follow Thomas Jefferson’s advice for watering the tree of liberty with blood.
“Workers with little GPS buttons with cameras that follow their every move and report their “data” in real time to ubiquitous workplace drones.”
That’s Jeff Bezos’ vision.
Bezos is worse than Gates in the regard.
Amazon has even applied for several parents on work monitoring gizmos so they will “own” not only their own employees but everyone else’s as well.
Bezos is yet another ivy league grad (Princeton) whole thinks he is smarter and better than everyone else.
“Every student deserves to be taught the same material in the same way.” (Common Core lie)That comment would only be voiced by a deformer ;someone who has never worked with children ; and hates teachers. I taught for 30 years as an elementary, special ed and reading specialist with 40 professional credits above my MS . Since teaching was my life long career , and teaching at-risk learners was my passion I attended so many conferences and workshops at my own expense, not to mention the hundreds of books I bought , in order to be able to have as much knowledge to reach all kinds of students with different issues. There is no one way, or one program for everyone.
Joanne,
Thank you for that wise comment. Only spectators and amateurs think there is one way to teach and one way to learn. Sadly, they wrote and funded the Common Core.
Oh. My. Lord. Amen. Amen to this. To both parts.
Guys, Diane 5 years ago reported on a leaked note from an edu-disruptor who already had found the perfect insect method to achieve the highest possible testscores, regardless of subject, gender, race, or social status.
https://dianeravitch.net/2014/12/31/the-ultimate-reform-method-guaranteed-to-produce-100-proficiency/
The link there to the note doesn’t work anymore but this one works
http://wd369.csi.hu/apu/earbud_method.html
I am proud to say that the whole insect thing seems to have been originated in Memphis, TN
https://dianeravitch.net/2015/07/29/memphis-teaching-by-remote-controlled-earbuds/
As you can see, all this cutting edge insectology involves the best legendary disruptors, TFA, TNTP, Gates, and, as is often the case, they converge in Memphis to help out the city with the highest poverty rate in the Nation. You’ve got to love these people. ❤