And now for something completely different....

[donkeyjon.livejournal.com]

See Cartoons by Cartoon by Jim Day - Courtesy of Politicalcartoons.com - Email this Cartoon

Comments

[udoswald.livejournal.com]

If you were a teacher, or had any knowledge of what some schools are like, you might better understand why the teacher would feel that way.

[ice-hesitant.livejournal.com]

If this is about standardized tests, the teacher does not choose the students and there's a lot of very crappy parenting out there.

If this is about year-to-year improvements, do you really want to reward teachers for arbitrarily giving more As?

Kids get evaluated relative to other kids in the class. Teachers can't really be compared, because everyone is teaching a different set of kids. Yeah, there are some/many crappy teachers out there, but this is not easy to fix.

[redheadrat.livejournal.com]

kids should not be evaluated relative to other kids in class

[redheadrat.livejournal.com]

This is showing two extremes that reflect overall attitudes, but the problems tend to arise from lack of basic parenting on one side and lack of interest stemmed by creating more and more bureaucracy on the other.

[iamraffiki.livejournal.com]

Then who should they be evaluated relative to? Unfortunately it's REALLY hard to fire parents.

[redheadrat.livejournal.com]

Kids grades should be evaluated per uniform standards.

[donkeyjon.livejournal.com]

I'd agree that poor parenting is the root problem. But I also think that teaching (due to external forces such as pay, expectations, work hours, etc.) no longer attracts intelligent, motivated, and interesting candidates. Put simply, if you're an intelligent, motivated person, you can find a job that pays more for less work elsewhere.

[i.livejournal.com]

got kids?

[deadpansev.livejournal.com]

Why is it that I often see bumper stickers that say "If you can read this thank a teacher", but whenever a kid is failing and cannot read after going to school for 12 years, the teachers always claim they are not to blame. I think it is funny that they want the credit but never the blame.

[spaz-own-joo.livejournal.com]

Ha. Anyone can whip this little conversation-ender out at any time during a discussion of education.

I generally approve of what you do here, but if you've got a point to make about kids then state it explicitly, yeah? Everyone's been a kid and that's expertise enough to convince me of the value of their perspective.

[i.livejournal.com]

if i get an answer, i'll follow up, ok?

[i.livejournal.com]

yeah, fucking teachers. what a bunch of leeches, living off tax dollars and only working 9 months out of the year. we should send them all to iraq to look for IEDs.

[spaz-own-joo.livejournal.com]

Fair enough.

[xforge.livejournal.com]

A teacher can only do what he or she can do. And incidentally, learning does not occur exclusively in schools. My granddaughter learned to read and write over summer vacation; heck yeah the school helped a lot but she knew ABC backward and forward before she showed up for kindergarten.

[deadpansev.livejournal.com]

Considering nearly everyone in my family is a teacher and since I am completely anti-war, I don't think your idea of sending teachers to Iraq is a very good one.

[deadpansev.livejournal.com]

I would argue that most learning occurs despite of school not because of it.

[i.livejournal.com]

of course the teachers in your family are the good ones. no 12 years of school can't read there.

[i.livejournal.com]

so most of your family chose a superfluous profession with little or no value. cool.

[xforge.livejournal.com]

There is a strong case for that. Hell, look at it this way - up until 5th or 6th grade, all you are really learning is how to learn, and specifically how to learn in a public-school environment. It's not 'til middle school that you actually start real learning of actual learning stuff.

[edgar-suit.livejournal.com]

When kids get out of school, they're going to be evaluated against each other for job positions. Why not prep them for that kind of .. uh.. rat race?

[redheadrat.livejournal.com]

Yes, but by gauging students' performance by statistics in his or her own class, you set the student up to under perform when compared to actual national and international standards.

I don't care if the person who I am hiring was number one in his school if he still spells worse than I do.

[redheadrat.livejournal.com]

got clue?

[redheadrat.livejournal.com]

That has been the case for ages now. I come from a family of teachers and was really thinking of undertaking that profession myself.

Two kinds of people generally went to teach. First and most numerous kind is comprised of people who don't care for much except what they thing is an easy and steady paycheck and position of some power. Second kind is rare and it consists of people who go to teach, because they want to teach regardless of low pay and emotional hurdles.

The problem is that current bureaucratic system does not care for teachers' personal qualifications, ability to teach and willingness to go that extra step. It's union dominated contract structure benefits mediocrity by virtues of tenure and seniority.

[anfalicious.livejournal.com]

Merit pay leads to two things: 1) lower performing schools wind up with the worst teachers, perpetuating their low performance (and socio-economic conditions are the single most important factor when looking at school achievement) and 2) kids learning nothing but how to pass a standardised test.

The cartoonist obviously has no idea about how education works.

[donkeyjon.livejournal.com]

While I agree wholeheartedly with point 1, point 2 only occurs if ratings of teaching effectiveness are based solely on test scores. In a proper rating system, peer and administrator ratings of effectiveness, student scores evaluated in relation to peer school norms, and number of extracurricular activities should all play a part.

Now, to do this, first we have to dump No Child Left Behind....

[xforge.livejournal.com]

Heh, I useta room with a bunch of guys in a 5-bedroom house one had this recurring friend, a real weirdo (and this is me talking) whose Dad was the only honest lawyer there was. Mmhmm. Same bizarre little comparison, could never figure that out.

[xforge.livejournal.com]

Missed an "and" there...

[kadaria.livejournal.com]

The teacher is correct and the cartoonist is mistaken as to how children learn. Parents play a big role in their offspring's life whether they want to or not, and affect how a child learns. A lot of the homework being sent home at the elementary level is as much for the parents/guardians as it is for the kids and when you have parents who either can't or won't participate it reflects in both the child's approach to learning (reading is for sissy boys) and the rate at which they learn (practice makes permanent).

Unfortunately for the dear cartoonist, teaching is not something everyone can do but it is something that everyone must participate in for it to work.

[kadaria.livejournal.com]

Using the tools is a part of almost all learning processes. You are right that the lower grades teach skills that are used later but I can argue that if you can't read, you can't interpret Walden for me. Or if you can't do basic math such as factoring, you will never master calculus.

[i.livejournal.com]

and everyone's incumbent is the only one that should be re-elected

[deadpansev.livejournal.com]

I never said that. In fact I actually had my own grandfather as my 8th grade math teacher and I don't believe he was any better or worse than any other teacher. He followed the plan and gave us assignments everyday, which most cheated on, graded them and then pushed the kids through to the next level. My uncle works in the high school library and is also the schools computer guy (small school) he used to teach regular classes and I get the feeling even he knew he wasn't good at it so he went back to college to become a librarian. My aunt got sick of the PS BS when she taught high school journalism and then went back to school to get her doctorate and now she teaches at KU (university of Kansas) and I assume is much more effective of a teacher because of the less restrictive college structure, and half of her time is spent getting her students internships at magazines and newspapers where the kids probably learn more each day than they do in a semester of classes. My other aunt taught mentally challenged kids and it is hard to know how effective she was at it, I know parents of these kids enjoy giving their kids to a free babysitter everyday and have very little expectation of seeing any real educational success, now she has been promoted and does very little classwork and is just some bureaucrat paper pusher mostly in charge of hiring teachers for special needs kids.

The experience from the teachers in my family seem to indicate that once they get into the system the become frustrated with the bureaucracy and the hurdles placed in front of them and with the exception of my grandfather who taught for 40 years (and by the end he was frustrated with the bureaucracy that did not exist earlier in his career and all of the “new” teaching methods they were pushing him to teach) they have all only taught for a few years in the public school system before moving up or dropping out (one of my aunts who I didn't mention here got let go from her teaching position for reason unknown to me and is doing customer service for a cell phone company).

[i.livejournal.com]

from what you write, your relatives wouldn't take the blame either. they would blame the beaurocracy, the new methods, and the restrictions.

i don't necessarily disagree with them, which is why your original comment pissed me off.

[i.livejournal.com]

i like this answer, although i don't think the cartoonist was taking sides.

[mylaptopisevil.livejournal.com]

it's funny because if teachers were rated based on how well their students perform, teachers would gravitate toward schools with students who already perform well.

[donkeyjon.livejournal.com]

There ARE bad teachers, though. Now, I'd agree that their effect is far less than the public gives them credit for, but they do exist. One of the problems with the system is that the bad teachers can't be objectively separated from the good teachers and punished or fired.

Now, I do agree with the assertion that the system itself is a far greater problem, and that the real root cause is that parents simply don't care.

[deadpansev.livejournal.com]

I am sure you are right, the teachers in my family would not say "yeah its my fault", but if they are being honest they won't take credit for the good students either. My original comment was meant more to point out that if you want the credit then you also have to accept the blame, personally I don't really believe teachers deserve much of either. Most teachers simply make the information available to students, some student learn that info, some don't.

[i.livejournal.com]

i give some of my teachers a *lot* of credit and would thank them if i could.

[telemann.livejournal.com]

lol

[kadaria.livejournal.com]

I'm honestly not sure what the cartoonist was trying to say with this, but I got a negative vibe from it initially.