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Education Official Says Bad Teachers Can Be Good For Students
Zenna Atkins, the chairman of the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted), has raised some eyebrows by saying that, "every school should have a useless teacher." She stresses that schools shouldn't seek out or tolerate bad teaching, but thinks bad teachers provide a valuable life-lesson. From the article: "... on Sunday Ms Atkins told the BBC that schools needed to reflect society, especially at primary level. 'In society there are people you don't like, there are people who are incompetent and there are often people above you in authority who you think are incompetent, and learning that ability to deal with that and, actually surviving that environment can be an advantage.'"
I think that's a lesson better reserved for on the job training. Any kid who has a crappy minimum wage job during school, or shortly thereafter, will learn it quickly enough.
In real life, if things are bad enough in a job you can leave.
A kid can't leave a classroom no matter how much the teacher sucks, unless the parents are really well off. But even then the parents have to decide to take the kid out, and the parents may have no idea how bad things really are.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
My daughter had a bad English teacher this year. She was a disorganized mess, who lost most of the assignments, did no follow up, placed random weights on assigned grades, and unlike ALL other teachers she had this year, NEVER had midterm grades ready for Parent-Teacher conferences. She used the excuse that she was working on her advanced degrees, and didn't have a lot of time to spare this year. We moved to this school district and believed her. Come to find out she's one of those teachers the veteran parents of kids know to avoid. Up to this year, my daughter was gung-ho about writing, now she claims to hate it. She used to enjoy discussing literature, now she only reads what's safe. I've got a lot of un-teaching to do, as a result. Perhaps there's a valuable life lesson burried under the pile of lost assignments this teacher never graded, but I'm not putting up with this sort of walking trainwreck of a teacher ever again. All in all, this is what comes of professional educators attempting to rationalize mediocrity. It's all theoretical, and no one is ever affected because it's safely academic.
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The teacher does have a point, in that bad teachers can indeed provide a valuable lesson. The problem is, they're supposed to be teaching something else, and that subject suffers even while students get this other type of learning. I find the idea that this is a worthwhile trade to be questionable at best.
This person clearly doesn't know what it's like to be on the brunt end of a truly terrible teacher/authority figure and have no power. I got a BUNCH of rejection letters from colleges in late January/early February due to "Incomplete applications". In short, the high school had never sent my transcripts/secondary school report to any of the universities I applied to. I only got into one school, and it was the school where I had forged the secondary school report myself. (I was truthful, and I at that point I had my suspicions about the guidance office doing their job...)
I had a guidance counselor tell me to "cry her a river" when I told her taking night classes at a local college and a full schedule at high school and working two jobs was too much for me, and I wanted to only go to high school only half day (a program fully supported by the school district, or at least supposedly so...) This is to say nothing of the quality of some of the teachers and classes I had to take. The school did everything they could to sabotage my academic career at every turn. I found out some years later after some academic success that they have been using my name as an example of the caliber of student that they could produce. Did I learn some sort of life lesson? I guess so. But it wasn't worth it, and I wouldn't wish that kind of nonsense on anyone. It was years ago, but my blood still boils thinking about it.
Are you just troling, or hoping nobody notices that the same criteria we use to distinguish ID from science (lack of testable predictions) thus far applies to string theory as well?
That's not really true. String theory makes a great many testable predictions, in that it devolves down to quantum mechanics and quantum field theory. Every test of quantum mechanics tests part of string theory, and those tests pass with flying colors.
People speak of string theory as if it were some sort of wild guess, but that's simply untrue. It's an extension of existing, well-founded work in quantum field theory. It is very much unlike intelligent design, which fails what few tests it does have, and is not built on top of any other cogent theory.
What string theory lacks is a set of tests for distinguishing it from other solutions to the problems of quantum mechanics. That is indeed a serious fault with it, and it means it may be premature to be putting much effort into string theory, especially at the cost of other theories. All of them, however, have only guesses as to their practical value, since the other theories also lack testable predictions. We pursue any of them only in the pure-science sense that good things sometimes come in unexpected places.
Nobody would give two hoots about string theory if it weren't for the philosophical ramifications: they're working on origin-of-the-universe stuff, which is of tremendous interest but little value since it's a state of the world we can't actually reproduce. It may yet prove to have practical value in unexpected ways, as quantum mechanics did, but to the general public it's all (literally) Greek except for the "how did we get here" question. Which causes a lot of people to express strong opinions about a field in which, curiously, they have essentially zero experience.