Monday, June 20, 2011
Clarification (This is NOT Week 3's posting!)
Thank you for your comments on my last posting, the one on sharks! Despite my aggressive rhetoric, I am not unsympathetic to ill-prepared students or underpaid teachers. It never ceases to amaze me that those teaching our children, our future decision-makers, make a salary of "x", while a guy that dunks a basketball well makes a salary of "y". For the Geico guy living under a rock, "x" and "y" are not the same! The point of my theatrics was to dramatize the dangerous situation that our children must face. Love, kindness, coddling, threats, testing, talking, and pats-on-the-back have not fixed our adolescent educational systems, and after seeing that Shaughnessy's criticism (c. 1970) is still witnessed today, I have little hope for substantial change. The sad news is that the "triage method" WILL occur, because if educational faculty does not solve this dilemma on their own, then outside, non-teaching, MBA-holding, consulting types WILL! It's really sad, "What do you think the money from 10 years in Iraq could have done for our internal educational system instead?????
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Let me chime in one more time. I absolutely agree school should be tougher--much tougher--than it currently is. We should ask much more and we should not pass those students whose work doesn't merit it. I think splitting into semesters, or even quarters, would help this; retaking one quarter would be much less crushing and likely as much a lesson as having to retake an entire year. My only real point is that I don't think getting tough alone will solve the problem. In fact, getting tough combined with poor instruction (sentence diagramming, etc) might actually make the problem much worse.
ReplyDeleteAnd I too hold a mortal fear of the MBA types. I'm happy with the market determining wages (so I'm not bothered that an NBA center makes more than a teacher; that's supply/demand), but I wish those MBA folks would understand a bit of basic economics and realize that teaching should be a hard job to get and should be rewarded in kind. That's how we'll get great teachers. Then we just need great students, great parents, great administrators....