Bullshit. I know that accusing someone of being an Ayn Rand admirer (I'm not) is the height of insult among your set, but the fact is there's no evidence that increased funding results in increased educational benefit, teachers-union-funded 'studies' be damned. Here in Michigan, the state provides basic funding for schools, based on enrollment, and the communities may elect to provide more money through local property tax assessments, subject to 'millage' votes. There's no unbiased evidence I'm aware of that proves such additional funding results in increased educational result. It's mostly about good (or bad) teachers.
I feel I should restate, Ayn Rand was not an anarchist - but she didn't believe the government should involve itself in anything other than civil defence and dealing with legal activity between people to protect rights. She would have been against spending any money on schools in any form of centralized, tax-based economy wise. Mind you, I don't remember reading her having a very interesting opinion on education anyway. She really wasn't someone interested in children - at all. In fact, I don't remember a child being in any of her novels outside of the backgrounds of major characters like Dagney Taggert, Francisco D'anconia and that lot.
I value your mother's wisdom and experience and you're right about what these people can tell about their lives to others but much as I tried - and I HAVE tried - they don't seem to listen. Futility seems to be the symbol of teaching, or so it seems after a year of teaching. I have reached out to them. Many times, that is. I have really tried, but they don't seem to care. Least about ne, they don't care about life in general. The thing is, the lesson I got from life is not...educative enough for their development and education purposes. Hell, I even have hard time opening up to my gf, let alone students.
She also does seem to be a bit pissed off at the prospect of sacrificing one's own good for the cause of greater good.
Yeah sometimes teenagers are a pain in the butt. I was one of them - I was convinced that I knew everything there was to know about English Literature because I got an A in my AS-Levels (despite not having read the novel the exam was on except for snippets in class), and then threw a fit cus my teacher wouldn't predict me an A grade for the following year. I wouldn't be so sure that the lessons you learnt aren't enough for their development though. Well, I send you dancing pom poms to cheer you on They don't really help you but I hope it makes you smile a little
She did. I mean, to be fair to her, she did have a hell of a time in communist Russia when she was young. But still, she was all 'Gurrrghh! Altruism! Crush, smash!'
Can we kinda go easy on the discussion of Ayn Rand in this thread? It didn't start being about her, so why not stay on topic? This is not in the Debate Room. Oh - here's an idea: Someone who really wants to discuss Ayn Rand and Objectivism should just start a thread for that in the Debate Room. That'll keep all that stuff in one place, where it should be, and moderators will be much happier!
America has the highest Education Costs world wide, and yet our education system doesn't have much to show for all that cash. Wanted to note: this is relating to the quality of education and what Teachers can do, as well as what anyone can do to about improving our Education System to make it easier for people like @Hwaigon who interact with lazy/bright kids who aren't achieving their full potential. To that end I'm just proving information about how cost is mostly unrelated to this.
Thank you, @Mckk for the cheer-up Being in a moody, spleeny state of mind, my previous posts must have seemed a bit apocalyptic " I was convinced that I knew everything there was to know about English Literature because I got an A in my AS-Levels (despite not having read the novel the exam was on except for snippets in class)" That is exactly what I was talking about. I ace my most talented students by miles and still they sometimes implicitly imply that they match up to me. They got As, right?
I wouldn't even be so sure on that side of the scale either. Nobody pays attention in my classes at all..It's so disappointing. The United States has a lousy education system.
Like they don't give a damn what's being discussed or nobody pays attention to your class and its needs? I've found the latter so tremendously difficult - to attend to everybody's needs. Mostly, if I attend to at least half of the classes' needs, I'm happy. As for (not) paying attention, I've never understood it. I've always tried to focus on the lessons, even if they were boring.
I quit teaching many years ago (43, to be precise.) However, I have close friends who have remained in the profession (both in the UK and in the USA.) They say the biggest change is the amount of distraction that comes from students being tied to the internet night and day. The ubiquitous mobile/cell phone problem has become nearly insurmountable. Ban them, and the PARENTS complain. It's a huge issue, and a huge bar to teaching. Remember back when chewing gum was the 'issue of the day?' Now it's those danged phones. My best friend is a school librarian (in Michigan) who teaches the occasional class in using library resources, including online ones. She said the problems she has trying to get the students to pay attention for more than a few seconds at a time are massive. As soon as they have a computer in front of them, they're off on tangents of their own. She works very hard on getting them to become discriminating users of the medium, and she said they are incredibly naieve about what's behind what they read. They read it and 'wow,' it's true. It has to be. It's on the internet! My friend, by the way, has always been a fan of computers and the internet, so she's not a Luddite trying to teach kids to forget computers. But she's noticed the difference in students' attention span since the internet became universally available. I'm afraid that this particular generation of kids has become unable to think for itself. It just consumes what it gets fed. Scary, when you consider what organizations are doing the feeding.
This is something that comes up in teachers' news outlets all the time. The short attention span of today's kids and attempts to engage them in "their" way to facilitate at least some learning. Teachers are allowed to take the phone away if it's distracting the student or class, but e.g. a "phone parking lot" is something that might help with this problem. Students have to drop their phone there at the beginning of every class and pick it up when they leave. Every student has their own "parking space", so the phones don't get mixed up. I'm sure there are other solutions too... and sometimes none of them work.
I work in a college, so I don't get around mobile phones so much as tell him if they don't do the work then I don't want to teach them. That might sound amazingly unprofessional if you are used to classrooms were students need to be there, but you get a lot of respect doing that from the students who actually want to be there. Even if they don't act like it. For the students who want to be there, I give them a lot of leyway too. In my experience, if you let them chat and have music on, and tell them exactly what you want to do, then they'll happily do it. You just also need to be friendly and join in the conversation, but always (too) steer it back to the lesson. You give them something, they give you something, that seems fair to me.
@jannert - interesting that you mention short attention spans. I remember once I tried to show these 6-7-year-olds Disney's Peter Pan. They found it extremely boring because it spent ages building atmosphere, doing zoom-ins of houses and the jokes were very innocent, like the father banging his head or something. On the other hand, the Japanese kids have a lot more patience in this sense. The parents still show them classics like Totoro from the 80s. Their attention spans are still short, for sure, and you still have behavioural problems (children are more or less the same around the world lol). I honestly don't know if it's because in the Japanese school, there was usually a Japanese teacher who could translate if the need arises, whereas in Czech schools I never had that sort of help, but in the Japanese school, I can spend 5-10min explaining how to play a game in English, demonstrate it, and the kids would play. They would pay attention even though they probably didn't quite understand half of what I said, and they would watch you. When it becomes obvious the instructions are too complex or the kids just don't get it after a few attempts, I get the assistant to translate. But the Czechs? Oh my word. The same age, but they couldn't sit still long enough for me to get through 2 sentences. By the time I'm done explaining, half the class had gone off to run around the classroom and simply wasn't mentally there at all. Out of 13 children, I think 5 participated in the game. But I've explained the same game before to the Japanese, whose English aren't much better than the Czechs in some classes, and the Japanese have understood and played happily. But the Czechs were a nightmare. I do think the Czechs would have been much better if only they could understand me - they're not bad kids - but they've just come from lunch or their after school club and it's actually end of the school day for them, and it's simply a very bad time to be jabbering at them in a foreign language they can't understand. I honestly don't know if it's culture, attention span, or the fact that in the Japanese environment I had a second teacher helping... Or another time when I asked this 7-year-old Czech kid (who speaks fluent English already) to write me 3 sentences. Good grief what a battle that was. He managed 1-2 but definitely not 3. He could do it, but he just really really didn't want to, and I'm like, goodness me it's 3 sentences - that's honestly not much work. (I was honestly just asking for short ones like "It was nice.") Amongst the Czechs they don't teach proper writing till they're 7 I think, in 2nd grade, and some parents still hold the belief that it's somehow detrimental to the child's development to teach them any earlier. I'm still baffled by this. I've been writing - Chinese - since the age of 3! Spelling tests in 2 Chinese and English from the age of 6. And then I come to a 7-year-old who takes a good 10 seconds just to write one single English letter... It's not about being smart - it's just the system has only just started teaching him writing now. Anyway, you guys should see the entrance and graduation ceremony for the Japanese school. It's like watching the military - children standing at assigned times to make a public speech as an entire grade together, finishing each other's sentences according to script. And this included the first graders! Then they're made to sit in silence through a bunch of Japanese speeches made by the principal and various sponsors. They teach public speaking pretty well amongst the Japanese - even the quietest girl who normally would shut up like a clamp would belt out her voice during these performances.
A few of my GCSE teachers employed that method. I remember my graphics teacher just sat there the entire lesson, every lesson, for the whole year, doing marking and his own work. He just told the class to "carry on doing your coursework" every time and the entire class just chatted with each other, walked around the class, didn't do the work - like a free period. Teacher didn't care, just head down, carried on doing his own work. I was the only one who sat at my desk, every single lesson, and actually carried on doing my coursework. Of course when time came to hand in my coursework, I was one of very, very few who didn't even think about it because I was done. Whereas 99% of the class panicked cus they didn't have anything. History teacher was the same. Gave us an essay question every lesson, then the teacher did his own thing. Half the time he wasn't in the classroom! My A-Level Chemistry teacher talked about his chickens 90% of the time. When time came for our A-Level exams, our second Chem teacher asked what we'd like to revise on, and the whole class basically said, "Everything that other teacher taught us." Cus the chicken-loving Chem guy was that bad. My A-Level Bio teacher really tried - she spent all her time typing out text word for word from the textbook onto a powerpoint slide, then read the slides to us. When I realised it was word for word, I stopped going to her classes cus I was like, screw this I can just read the book. She actually got so fed up with people not doing the homework she said anyone without their homework is not allowed to come to class. Guess what I did? Talk about a terrible way to motivate your students. Doesn't sound like I had terribly good teachers either lol. (I wasn't the model student either, I know. Something changed when I moved onto A-Levels, like a flip switch, I don't even know what or why or how. I went from being every teacher's favourite with good grades, perfect attendance and doing all the work assigned to me, to basically skipping class and not giving a damn. Wonder if my deluded thinking of studying Neuroscience when I hated science had something to do with it...)
See, stories like that really grind my gears. I hate it when teachers don't care, it's like they are just being paid to sit on their arses, twiddling their thumbs and looking like an authority on something. I have no interest or patience in someone who does that. My teaching style I like to call democratic - or 'give and take'. If the students at least do the work, I don't care if they enjoy it, I'll still give them all the help I possibly can. And I try to motivate them, get the subject to relate to their interests too. I remember a class when I was teaching A-level I was able to relate Wilfred Owen to Call of Duty, and then showed them a graphic video I found on YouTube of WW1. As soon as they got that, my god did they enjoy the work. That's what I love about teaching, inspiring the same passion I have for the subject. Myself, I've found some of the time I've learned more from my students than I would have ever suspected, and that thrills me about teaching. But if I've worked hard on the class, making and preparing resources and all that, and a student is still sitting in the corner on their phone - on Facebook or YouTube or whatever. I'll try to egg the student to do the work, but after so long of me trying and trying to get something from them and clear they don't even want to do it, I don't want them to be there. I care. My problem is I have no time for time wasters, which is why I don't think I'd do well with a hostile class. But, then again, who does?
I suppose one good thing with the phone/internet obsession is that if they're not paying attention to the teacher they are at least doing something relatively quiet. When I was teaching, the ones who didn't want to pay attention started creating havoc. I'm not a person who reacts well to that. I just tend to shrug and walk away. If you want to be an asshole, that's not my problem. I quit teaching because I recognised I didn't have the kind of outlook that would have turned these kids around, and I didn't have the patience to put up with that. I have infinite patience with people who try, but very little for people who don't. I just reckon they'll come up against the brick wall sooner or later, and only THEN will their attitude change.
Your classes sound like so much fun One of my Eng Lit teachers read Shakespeare and Chaucer out to us, tried to explain the language a little, and that was it lol. I remember as a teen, I came up with this theory: you'll know what subject you love if by the end of school, your teachers haven't managed to completely crush the joy and light out of it for you. Even art class was a disaster - teachers just told us to get on with our projects, didn't teach a thing. They gave guidance only when asked, and they did mention we could do things beyond draw and paint, except they never told us what was available. Half of our A-Level class found out their projects didn't meet the curriculum criteria to pass only 2 or 3 months before the exams! I am beginning to wonder why I seem to maintain the opinion that English education is actually of good quality... My good Chemistry teacher was a bit like you - he let us set fire to soap bubbles and just had a knack for making things interesting. I actually enjoyed and took Chem onto A-Level cus of him. I don't think I'll ever be good at it or care much about it, but I remember Chem with fondness and certainly don't think of it as a subject I necessarily dislike.
I wonder how you came to teach Czech kids, but to tell you the truth I'm a Czech teaching English and just as you say, you can't spend 5-10 minutes explaining a game or an exercise! I'm pleased to hear I'm not the only one who sees it as a nightmare though. I celebrate when there's five minutes of silence. It's so uncommon for the kids that there ALWAYS has to be somebody to say "Phew, how quiet is it in here!" Due to our communist regime and its strenuous limitations, we've grown rampant. Our kids especially. And it's getting worse. Once you introduce discipline, you're the embodiment of evil, the devil himself.
I live in Prague actually and my husband's Czech - it'll have been 5 years in August that I've been here! You don't happen to be in Prague, too?? Or are you teaching English abroad? Yeah there was one third grade Czech class - I just had them work from the book every lesson because it's more productive than trying to shout them down. And sometimes you can tell the kids just can't be bothered cus they'll open the book, look at it for literally 2 seconds, look up and whine, "Nechapuuuuu!" (I don't actually speak Czech but I do know that that means "I don't understaaaaaaand!") And I wanna smack them and say, "Oh for goodness' sake, think!" But *sigh* - I kinda wish parents had more common sense. When the teacher doesn't speak almost any Czech, for such a class to work with kids who equally don't speak a word of English, you need very, very small groups. 4-5 max, I'd say. But no, that class I had had 13-15 children in it. I know that's small by state school's standards but it's frigging huge when you can't communicate with them! Your child won't magically start speaking English by virtue of being exposed to a native speaker once a week for 45min! Some Czech teachers can be downright scary though They have quite a bit of presence - you can feel it just by looking at them. I'm of the impression though that the Czechs still have more authority over the kids than English teachers in the UK I think. Sometimes I feel like there's much more common sense amongst the Czechs, but then other times their very traditional thinking sorta clashes with mine lol. (however, the same traditional mindset has put my husband in extremely good stead with my Chinese parents! The cultures mesh together better than English culture does with Chinese) So is there anything from the communist regime you'd like to see a return to? Within Prague they're very anti-communism but I *think* Zemen got voted in precisely cus the rest of the country was actually rather nostalgic for those times. Can't say I'm too clear on this as it's my husband who follows the politics lol.
No. High school (primary or elementary for you non-US citizens) is different. It teaches the basics. College is where you'll gain more detailed knowledge. It's always been the case that college is exponentially more difficult and detail orientated than high school.
@Mckk " And sometimes you can tell the kids just can't be bothered cus they'll open the book, look at it for literally 2 seconds, look up and whine, "Nechapuuuuu!" (I don't actually speak Czech but I do know that that means "I don't understaaaaaaand!") And I wanna smack them and say, "Oh for goodness' sake, think!" Aye aye, and a proper answer would verily be "You're so f*****************cked!" Your greatest advantage was that you could brandish around with the fact that you're a foreigner. I also sometimes rant on in high-level English just for the pleasure of seeing them completely puzzled as to what in the living hell am I talking about. Meh. I'm east of Prague, on the other end of the country. "But no, that class I had had 13-15 children in it." Drives me nuts, too. "Your child won't magically start speaking English by virtue of being exposed to a native speaker once a week for 45min!" Ignorant crackpots. If I had you - an English speaking foreigner - in MY elementary school, I'd be all heated up and speak all the time with you. These kids take everything for granted, not to mention appreciating the teacher for his knowledge. "Some Czech teachers can be downright scary though They have quite a bit of presence - you can feel it just by looking at them. I'm of the impression though that the Czechs still have more authority over the kids than English teachers in the UK I think." Well, I seem to lack that lovely characteristic. Maybe after I've taught these darlings thirty years, then maybe I'll develop the authoritative arm. "So is there anything from the communist regime you'd like to see a return to? Within Prague they're very anti-communism but I *think* Zemen got voted in precisely cus the rest of the country was actually rather nostalgic for those times. Can't say I'm too clear on this as it's my husband who follows the politics lol." I'm not a communist but on the tip of the iceberg of atrocities committed in our very country there resided a very fine quality: Discipline. Discipline with bad roots and backstory, but still. Discipline is totally lacking these days in school.
...yes...and what I was saying is that some of the talented get a faulty impression that by knowing all the basics they know all.
