Waiting for Superman

New Source 1:        

         The movie, Waiting for Superman, spoke a lot to the problems in the school system today. While following the lives of 5 children, the movie showed the options, albeit hard to achieve options, of children in low-income, segregated schools. One of the education reformers was Geoffrey Canada. His Harlem Children’s Zone school is a great success, but my question is how can it be applied to all of the children in America. I don’t think any children should be disadvantaged in their education. We have public education so that everyone can be educated, so I think that should be a more important issue than it is. I’d like to see a model of education that is affordable and practical. I started researching online how other countries did it, and didn’t find all that much quality information except in an RSA rendition of a TED talk. I found this English view on education reform to be very interesting from a number of different points of view. One of the most interesting parts to me was the reference to standardized testing. We talked a lot in class about the advantages and disadvantages to standardized testing in regards to No Child Left Behind and the new reforms that are coming out. I thought that the reported correspondence between ADHD diagnoses and standardized testing in the YouTube video was interesting. In a way, it is criticizing poor teaching around the world. I agree with the speaker, Sir Ken Robinson, that education should be more than rote memorization and learning of facts. Education should be about knowing how to operate within the society of the world effectively. That should include business and career knowledge, but also knowledge on how to interact socially with others and oneself. There are so many different forms of intelligence and creativity that I feel our current system is limiting. What Sir Ken Robinson advises is a complete rehash of the education system. He wants people to change their minds about the correct way to educate. It shocked me when he drew so many parallels between factories and schools. Yet like both Waiting for Superman and Shame of the Nation, this RSA video does not really give solutions. It just illustrates the problems.

New Source 2: Fixing Teacher Tenure Without a Pass-Fail Grade

         One of the main problems that we discussed in class was tenure for grade school teachers. We focused mainly on the problems with teachers having tenure, and a little on coming up with ideas to fix it. We aren’t the only ones who are thinking about alternative ways to deal with teacher tenure, though. A Time Magazine article, Fixing Teacher Tenure Without a Pass-Fail Grade, from the 27^th of January brings up the same issues. One of their points is that tenure protects both good and bad teachers from poor administrators all too frequently. School administration has been littered with poor management for a while now, and teachers still fear losing their job without good reason despite the effort that the government has been putting into raising the standard for classroom instruction. I think that bad teachers are there, and that there are good administrations that are trying to get rid of them, but I do not feel like it is as common as a lot of people make it out to be. This article referenced “a 2009 report by the New Teacher Project [that] looked at teacher evaluation across the country and found that less than 1% of teachers were rated unsatisfactory.” It is interesting to find that while bad teachers seem to be monopolizing education reform talks, they are not actually that common. This article reported on some new ideas about how states can fix the education system. It said that Florida and a few other states are working towards changing the teacher contract so that it is more similar to other professional contracts in that it does not give a lifetime guaranteed job. I think it is a good idea to get rid of tenure as we know it as long as it is replaced with something else to protect the workers. Still, it is not and should not be too easy to take a teacher’s credentials. I think there needs to be solid proof to verify that the teacher did indeed do something wrong. The problem is that there are so many restrictions that it is virtually impossible to get rid of a bad teacher. These progressive states don’t yet offer a change in the contract so that good behavior may be rewarded and bad behavior punished, but I feel that is what will come next in this process. It may be a small step in comparison with the ideal, but at least it is a solid step in the right direction.

I used some of the techniques I learned in the math tutoring training this Thursday. One student at IHAD did not come home with any written homework, so they gave him an order of operations worksheet. As he was working out loud, I noticed that he did not know the order of operations and I tried to explain it to him. I tried to just give him the Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally mnemonic device, but he was in such a hurry to be done that it didn’t work very well. So, after I allowed him to do it his way, I corrected it by writing out my work like I expected him to do to show him how to avoid mistakes. The great thing about this exercise was that I made mistakes along the way (they weren’t on purpose, but I am so glad that I made them). When I had him walk me through the steps I took, he really seemed to get it, and it was a priceless learning moment for him when he caught my mistakes and knew they were mistakes. I feel like I could use this process again, but maybe I could start the thinking out loud at the beginning. I feel like our time could have been better spent if I had him start off by writing out all of his work and thinking out loud as he went along, but I can try that next time and see.