[geeks] This makes me sick

[Joshua D. Boyd]

Teachers might just be undervalued as a group because many of them (at
least the teachers in training that I know) are really stupid.

For instance, at my school, which is dominated by their teaching program,
there is a math competancy test that must be passed to be able to take
Math105, which is math for teachers.  This competancy test includeds such
challenging math problems such as long division, fractions, addition,
subtraction, and multiplication, and big scary little word problems.  Now,
people have three chances to pass this test before they are forced to drop
out of the class.  A shockingly large number of people, who want to be
elementry school teachers, FAIL the test three times in a ROW ?!?

Hard to think of teachers as valuable when they are that bad at basic
skills.

On an interesting note, there is a company with a name something like
Edison schools.  They work under the charter school laws that different
schools states have to subcontract out schools from the puplic school
system.  Now, this company charges the school district (varies of course
from district to district) something like $4200 a student.  The district
(at least in San Fransico and New York) gets $7000 a student.  Now, this
Edison company has a sucess rate where 85% of the schools they take over
raise their average verbal and reading skills at least 5% and their
average math skills 16%.  The majority of the schools that this Edison
company take over are in poor minority areas.

So, in several cities, people are protesting this Edison company.  Why?
Because the Edison company is for profit.  It doesn't matter if they get
better results for less money.  They fact that some stock holders
somewhere might get rich at the same time causes people to protest these
improved schools.

This, and other school related things, remind me of a comment in the
movie Romeo Must Die.  If you have a barrel full of crabs, one of the
crabs may be able to reach up and pull himself out of the barrel.  But as
soon as he starts to rise above the others, they are reach up and drag him
back down.

--
Joshua Boyd

On Fri, 15 Jun 2001, Kurt Mosiejczuk wrote:

> On Fri, 15 Jun 2001, David Cantrell wrote:
> 
> > [aside: why is it that teachers are so undervalued in western
> > civilisations? why is France the only possible exception? - answers
> > on a postcard to geeks :-) ]
> 
> I suspect it has to do (at least in the US) with the various
> ways schools are broken.  Everyone can probably remeber the
> one teacher who really inspired them.  The question is, why
> does it tend to be only one?  Why are the rest uninspiring?
> 
> And if so many were uninspiring... why would people coming out
> of that education system want to go work in it?
> 
> --Kurt
> 
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