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Khan Academy: the Teachers Strike Back
theodp writes "With his Khan Academy: The Hype and the Reality screed in the Washington Post, Mathalicious founder Karim Kai Ani — a former middle school teacher and math coach — throws some cold water on the Summer of Khan Love hippies, starting with U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. From the article: 'When asked why so many teachers have such adverse reactions to Khan Academy, Khan suggests it's because they're jealous. "It'd piss me off, too, if I had been teaching for 30 years and suddenly this ex-hedge-fund guy is hailed as the world's teacher." Of course, teachers aren't "pissed off" because Sal Khan is the world's teacher. They're concerned that he's a bad teacher who people think is great; that the guy who's delivered over 170 million lessons to students around the world openly brags about being unprepared and considers the precise explanation of mathematical concepts to be mere "nitpicking." Experienced educators are concerned that when bad teaching happens in the classroom, it's a crisis; but that when it happens on YouTube, it's a "revolution."'"
Online education is in its infancy. This is an area where many ideas are being tried. Some will work better than others. Probably nothing currently available is "the answer", but rather all are those little baby steps toward what will eventually emerge. It's a normal and pretty universally unavoidable process.
WALSTIB!
Yeah, because holy shit that teacher pay rate is out of control.
Seriously, since when did the abysmally low rate of pay teachers receive become a point of contention?
If the teaching is going to be bad either way, then Kahn costs a heck of a lot less to get the same result.
If Kahn and a unionized teacher are both bad, for Kahn the solution is for someone to upload a new lesson that's better. For the teacher, the solution is to suck it up because teacher unions demand that seniority trumps all other considerations.
I have no idea if Kahn or classroom teachers are ultimately the better choice. But the teachers unions better cobble together some damn good arguments for why they deserve the compensation and job protections they get, if Kahn offers way better bang for the buck.
My personal thought is, who cares? You get what you pay for, right? Services like Khan Academy are great if they're helping people learn things they wouldn't otherwise take an interest in learning about, or if it enables learning they were interested in but couldn't afford traditional methods of education.
If you're already IN a traditional classroom environment, then no - I'm not sure Khan Academy lessons are so great. I mean, you have to ask, as a paying student, why you're paying your hard-earned money to get a personal classroom experience with supposed educational professionals, who turn around and ask you to sit through canned Khan presentations instead of presenting the material themselves.
As for the "precise explanation of mathematical concepts to be mere nitpicking"? Maybe it is, really? By that, I mean, most people are really only interested in learning math as long as it allows them to accomplish something. The minority who find the theory itself fascinating and want to learn more math for the sake of learning it are the ones who will probably move beyond whatever Khan Academy teaches, and consult other sources.
If you know enough math to get correct answers to the problem you encounter as part of your daily life or job, then that's likely ALL the math you really need to know.
Show me a teacher who's willing to give me a random, informative, 5-minute lecture, for free, with a 30-second lead time in my own bathroom and we can talk.
This is article deriding free on-line math education written by a person who develops paid on-line math education.
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
If the complaint about how "rise of run isn't a formal definition of slope" is indicative of the kinds of errors in his lectures, then I'd say Khan is right that the naysayers are just being picky. Yah, it's not perfectly accurate or a formal definition, but it's an excellent start to understanding a deeper understanding.
An educators job should be to get people excited about a subject, not to present the most perfect, gods honest truth answers to everything. Anyone interested in a subject will go on to learn more, and find out the more nuanced and correct answers. If you've ever become an expert in any field, you know that everyone (including the best teachers) don't always have time or knowledge to give the best possible answers. That's OK, since education doesn't stop once the class stops.
If your ultimate (and final) response when asked why you believe something is "because my teacher told me", then you really don't understand the subject matter very well at all.
AccountKiller
If the teaching is going to be bad either way, then Kahn [sic] costs a heck of a lot less to get the same result.
I think I should point out that I haven't found any place where Khan suggests that his youtube videos replace public education.
Khan's made a few mistakes. The first that is the worst is that the article mentions he was corrected about multiplying negative numbers and instead of praising the people for making a new video correcting him, he apparently just took his video down and replaced it. And then made some little remark about why people put up such a big fuss about this concept. His second and less grievous mistake was to engage talking heads and accept praise from politicians. I think if he had just focused on making videos, ignored the praise and let Bill Gates or some other public figure pitch the video, he wouldn't find himself the target in this back and forth. We need to stop looking at online education as a replacement and instead as an augmenting force in our children's learning.
My work here is dung.
yep... because they all put in carbonite for those two months off and don't have to eat...right?
Khaaaaan!
Khan Academy is the greatest supplemental education resource I have ever seen. But, one thing it can't do is force you to sit down, block off an hour a day, and learn a subject. Let's face is, 95% of us do not have that motivation, especially where one tab away awaits an entire internet of distractions.
Having a physical obligation, to an in-face person in a physical location to show up and learn something is an exceptionally powerful psychological motivational force and something that online education simply can't replace.
But man, would have I killed to have Khan available when it came to exam time in high school and college.
But bad teachers who have been around forever are very highly paid. Good teachers that have not been there for 20 years are the under paid ones. And that is the problem.
There is so much of accessible math theory locked behind the wall of algebra. Mathematics is BORING until you can show people WHY they are learning this. Most math classes i have taken are just total wrote calculation with no rhyme or reason. Its 'do it this way, you'll figure why out later'. When the 'later' is 2 years of math classes down the road, Khan's kinda got a point.
Good-bye
Automatic pay raises based on seniority, and not merit... I am all for paying good teachers a lot more.
His lessons are too slow. It's like getting a lesson from Grandpa Simpson. He only teaches one tiny basic concept per video and it takes him at least five minutes to get there and another five repeating, and repeating, and repeating. I can't watch more than half a video before I can't take it anymore.
I don't think there is anything preventing them from working in the off season. Just another form of seasonal worker like lifegaurd or Mr Plow.
So a working professional with a Masters degree should have to get a "summer job" as a lifeguard or in retail in order to survive the summer? Does any other line of work that requires a college degree require a summer job like they are a high school student? Give me break!
We need to be wary of Kahn Academy, but we have to be wary of "experts" that are condemning Kahn Academy as well.
A lot of times the "experts" doing on the complaining in popular media are just as worthless as listening to your fat neighbor who is bitching over his beer on his porch. Most of the talking heads on TV are like this and more and more even the people that are high ranking in governmental and professional organizations are well is well. It's because they're better at bullshit then their "expert" subject.
So.. as far as Kahn Academy, it's likely a little bit of both sides are right and both sides are wrong. You have "educators" that don't want to absorb different ideas and you have Kahn who is also a bit of an ass himself.
Look at this like Wikipedia. There are obvious quality problems, but Wikipedia keeps improving and getting larger, and if you're Microsoft Encarta, there's just no market for you any longer (thus, the first MS product actually killed by Open Source).
The guild apprenticeship system really hated book-learning. Copyists really hated printing. Both of these were previous means to commoditize education. This is just more of the same.
There will be tremendous economic repercussions from the further commoditization of education.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
People decrying this are the teachers who are in fear of change. Nobody said his solution has to be the final one but guess what - do you see any of these teachers who are complaining doing anything to create online teaching methods?
If anything, Khan should be commended for apparently doing what some teachers have not - and for free, no less.
This is article deriding free on-line math education written by a person who develops paid on-line math education.
That sounds like an ad hominem. Motives aside, is the argument valid? One part of the article stood out to me:
As a result, experienced educators have begun to push back against what they see as fundamental problems with Khan’s approach to teaching. In June, two professors from Grand Valley State University created their own video in which they pointed out errors in Khan’s lesson on negative numbers: not things they disagreed with, but things he got plain wrong. To his credit, Khan did replace the video. However, instead of using this as an opportunity to engage educators and improve his teaching, he dismissed the criticism.
“It’s kind of weird,” Khan explained, “when people are nitpicking about multiplying negative numbers.”
When asked why so many teachers have such adverse reactions to Khan Academy, Khan suggests it’s because they’re jealous. “It’d piss me off, too, if I had been teaching for 30 years and suddenly this ex-hedge-fund guy is hailed as the world’s teacher.”
Why isn't Khan embracing criticism and review/removal/replacement of his videos by knowledgeable folks? I would be rewarding people proofing my many videos and trying to get more people doing that instead of dismissing it as "nitpicking."
My work here is dung.
There should be exactly one goal in online education: to improve the quality of education. There is nothing else to discuss until that matter is settled, and it is nowhere near settled. "Transforming education" is only good if the transformation yields better education.
Here in the USA, education has become almost exclusively a matter of vocational training. That has been extremely destructive to education and to the society that education serves (and make no mistake, what is bad for education is bad for society). We spend all our time teaching people formulaic approaches to problems, and almost never take the time to help students develop their intellect or their ability to develop new approaches to the problems they need to solve. If the Kahn academy is not addressing that problem, then it is not addressing the most important issue that faces education here.
To put it another way, look at the state of computer education in schools. Students are taught how to use the prepackaged solutions that their school districts buy, and those students who dare to go beyond "here is how you make the font bigger" are often punished (you know, because they are dangerous hackers who know how to get a terminal opened on a system that is programmed to stop them from writing their own software). Even when we do bother to teach people to write software, we give them formulaic approaches to solving programming problems -- when I TA'd a CS101 course, the students were required to have their programs formatted in a specific way, to write their programs in a specific language, and my personal favorite rule, they were forbidden to use language features that they had not been taught about.
I do not want to discredit online education, since it may very well enable a better approach in some topics (I doubt all -- one cannot really judge a sculpture without being able to see it first hand). However, given that I have not heard anyone express any alternative philosophy on education (it's purpose or how best to carry it out), I have doubts. If someone believes that education is about training people for a job, they are not likely to develop anything other than a vocational training program.
Palm trees and 8
I think a debate about Khan's specific videos is beside the point. For years, people have been talking about online education and we got these dreadful videos of a professor lecturing, shot from the back of the room. Khan shows us a realistic vision of how online education can happen at reasonable cost. It will not necessarily replace the teachers, but it will replace a teacher who repeats the same material multiple times a day. And it will help to level the playing field.
People in universities are talking a lot about is the "flipped classroom", which means the lecture is online and clarification and working of problems occur in the classroom. This model is most obviously applicable to STEM classes, and if you haven't been following the developments, this site at NC State offers an overview of what's going on with one kind of flipped classroom and where it's happening. The University of Minnesota has recently made a huge investment in this kind of classroom.
Whatever happens with Khan specifically, he's energized a process of transformation that everyone knew had to happen eventually. Kudos to him.
I dunno, teachers are paid pretty well for the months they actually work. Often near $25-30+ an hour.
Isn't that something to work towards though, instead of something to deride?
Why does it always have to be a race to the bottom?
Not when you factor in the fact that they have to spend significant parts of those summers preparing updated curricula based on new test criteria, new versions of the books, etc. Not when you realize that they need to rework their tests over the summer, or else the students cheat. And so on.
Besides, $25 per hour is not being "paid pretty well". It's three times minimum wage, but a pharmacist makes double that with only about two more years of education. A tech sector employee makes double that on a bachelor's degree. Supervisors in Ford factories make double that, often with no degree at all. And for this, the teachers attended four years of college, plus at least a couple of years to get their teaching credentials, plus additional classes (CPE/CPD) every few years to maintain those credentials.
Teachers have what is, without a doubt, one of the most important jobs in the world. Without education, society would not move forward. Yet somehow we as a society feel that they deserve no more pay (on average) than a 7-11 store manager or a construction worker. And those same people wonder why our education system has problems. Please tell me you don't seriously consider such low salaries to be reasonable.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
I've used Khan Academy in the classroom a few times for Algebra 1 when doing my student teaching. While the video was playing my mentor says to me "it's so boring" and I said "I know, but they're addicted to TV so they're watching it." For one lesson I came up with what I thought was a great way to teach multiplying polynomials and I said to myself, if Khan doesn't teach it this was, I'm not showing the video. Turns out, he had the same idea so I showed the video. The students got it. But not without me running through a few examples and reiterating the prior knowledge that makes it "nothing new" to them. The video is nice way to introduce the material the first time, but it needs to be repeated by the teacher to make sure everyone in the class gets it.
At one point the video says "I'm going to use magenta because it shows up well." The students in the room were about to yell out "NO STOP IT!" because magenta does not show up when using a video projector in a classroom. Khan also makes jokes to which I pointed out "as a teacher I'm responding to you and making adjustments in response to your feedback, Khan is talking to himself and has no idea what's going on."
I now do tutoring and for my student I have him using Khan Academy. I can see what the site can't. For example, the student is decent at math but his handwriting sucks which is normal. Khan Academy can't see that. I can, so now I have the student work problems using 1/2" grid paper with one number per box. His handwriting is improving and silly mistakes are going down dramatically.
At best, Khan is a supplement to the classroom. It's not a replacement. My goal as a tutor is to get students to understand how to use it to improve their remedial math skills so I can focus on teaching them the new things. When school gets back in session I'll be tutoring a lot more students and working with them using Khan Academy to guide the material as well as working with their current material assigned by their teachers when available.
When I start teaching full time, most likely next fall, I'll be pushing Khan Academy but will not use it in the classroom. It's great for remedial work. It's not for classrooms. And it's certainly no substitute for a teacher.
Work Safe Porn
Bullshit. Ever seen the requirements to stay certified as a teachers? 9, sometimes 12 hours of study per year that they have to shell out and attend for college courses just to "stay certified." It's a small wonder most of them eventually get multiple Masters degrees or a Doctorate, there's no point in not for the amount of "continuing education" courses they are required to take just to stay employed.
And when do you think they're taking those courses, hmmm?
I hate right wing shitbag morons like you who misrepresent teachers and think they're "doing nothing" all summer.
Can you link to a "9" credit hour requirement in any public school system in the US? Otherwise, I find your assertion extremely difficult to swallow.
And? To be a teacher you need to have a bachelors degree. I train computer scientists for a living, 12 months after graduation (or if they did a co-op, straight out of graduation) they are in the 70-90k a year range with a BSc. If they were teaching they wouldn't get to that point for at least 15 years. Starting teacher salaries are more like 25-40k and creep up from there.
Teachers do get good benefits, government jobs are like that, they get actual pension plans, which is more an indication that everyone else is getting fucked than one that teachers are getting an unfairly awesome deal, and they get health care. They also get the benefit of all of the right time off (march break, summers, chrismas etc. ) so they don't have to pay babysitters for those times like everyone else. But it's not really better paying than any decent job for someone with a bachelors. In fact it's far far far worse pay to be a teacher than to go into the private sector if you are trained in any of the 'STEM' areas.
Now I'll be up front and say I think the biggest problem with teaching salaries (and professor salaries most places) is that everyone is in the same pay bracket regardless of what you were trained in. The market for BA's in English is a LOT worse than the market for BSc's in Computer science, but you get paid the same in both teaching and professorship.
Having standardized teacher pay for a large area is really important because you don't want all of the good teachers to go to big cities in rich neighbourhoods and all of the bad teachers in the poor neighbourhoods and so on.
http://www.teacherportal.com/teacher-salaries-by-state/ actually gives a good look at teacher salaries in the US. The highest are just under 60k average, and I hate to break it to you, but finding someone with a BSc in math/chemistry/physics/comp sci/engineering who will get out of bed for you at 60k with 15 years experience is going to be tough in a lot of places.
It's not like teachers who can get full time gigs are destitute, nor should they be, but it's not some spectacular awesome paying job either. If your area happens to be full of people who scrape by on minimum wage well then maybe you need some better teachers so people will be capable of doing work that warrants more than 35k a year? Maybe you need something to attract people to the area that have decent incomes, so they could have a worthwhile lifestyle and attract and retain more people like that?
Oh and if you compare the link I just gave to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_income, on average teachers are paid about well, average, and actually a little less than average. Admittedly, that doesn't count the benefits package, which is nice, but well, you'd think teachers are supposed to be in the top half of wage earners considering they're required to be in the top 40% of education attainment (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_United_States).
And yes, teachers get summers off. I'm not sure if you've ever tried to plan lessons for 5 hours a day for 10 months, but that takes a LOT of work the first few times you do it. During those 10 months you are marking and adjusting and improvising and trying to actually get the shit together for the class, so you have time 'off' where you're expected to independently figure out how to manage things for the 10 months you are at the front of the room, and that is your vacation time, baring some exceptional circumstances you don't get any other time off for a holiday (which is a fair tradeoff, but one should be clear that teachers don't get 4 weeks paid leave on top of the time they already get).
Okay, I have to interject here . . . I am currently teacher. Yes, my annual salary is $50,000. During the school year, I arrive at my building at 6:00 am and I do not leave until 4:30 pm. On a good day (all of my students are caught up on their work lol), I get a thirty minute lunch. I get exactly three 5 minute breaks throughout the day to use the bathroom, etc. I am told that at some of the other schools in my district that teachers are expected to be at their door monitoring/greeting students. They are only allowed to use the restroom if an administrator comes to fill in for them. Unfortunately, I am not able to accomplish all that is expected of me at school, so I spend an additional 5 to 10 hours working in the evenings or over the weekend. I do not get the summer off, but I do have a great deal of flexibility from mid-June to mid-August. I get to choose which workshops and trainings to attend during those two months in addition to all of the preparation I am expected to do for the year's upcoming classes. Oh, and of that $50,000 salary, I easily spend $2000 or more of that purchasing supplies that the district hasn't approved or hasn't approved in a timely manner. As far as teachers doing a "shitty" job, just like any other profession there are good teachers and bad teachers. Unfortunately, a lot of good teachers are discouraged by all of the stupid policies put in place to prevent the shitty teachers from doing too much harm. Anybody know of any entry level Software Development jobs in java looking to hire a slightly rusty Software Engineer!?
Does any other line of work that can be performed with a masters degree get the summer off?
Give *me* a break! No seriously, I'd love the summer off for 70 percent of my annual pay.
~Working Stiff :)
Let’s talk real world. My school district in Arizona is one of the highest paying in the state (Mesa Public Schools). Straight out of college I would make $36352 a year with a bachelors. With a masters it goes up to $39289 and with a PhD/EdD it is $44322. Remember these amounts are all before Uncle Sam takes out his cut for taxes, social security, etc.
So if we say the average teacher works only 9 months out of the year that equals out to the following: $4039/month with a BA, $4365/month with a MA and $4925/month for a PhD/EdD. An average teacher I would say works between 40-60 hours a week between grading, writing lesson plans, parent teacher conferences and all the other work outside of teaching time. That seems like a decent amount of pay, at least livable (granted what I view as decent pay is a lot lower than most).
Now let’s look at that same salary divided out to 12 months assuming they get “summers off” as you say. Those values go to $3029/month with a BA, $3274/month with a MA and $3694/month with a PhD/EdD. Remember once again those values are BEFORE TAXES. That might give you a better view at how little teachers really make compared to other working professionals with the same level of education.
Oh and FYI those “summers off” usually consist of taking development courses that the teachers pay for out of pocket. The source of these figures is on the Mesa Public School district website http://www.mpsaz.org/hr/general/salary/
Wrong. Classroom PLUS Khan
Yes, and there are examples that the Classroom + Khan is an effective model. The Economist has an article describing how the Los Altos school district is using Khan's videos to provide the "dry lecture" which is assigned for homework while classroom time is used for supervised problem solving with the teacher roving about helping any struggling students. That model makes complete sense to me especially since we keep hearing stories about how parent's can't do their kids homework (I've been called in to help my little cousin with her math homework at times when her parents were thoroughly confused).
It's not hard to Google something. Of course parent had is almost right, to renew your teaching certification you do have to have 12 college hours or 180 hours of professional development activities. The certificate is good for 6 years in Arizona although this varies from state to state.
Many teachers will also tutor in the summer months, this is also why a lot of teachers starting out are also in the service industry. I don't understand all the hate towards teachers. They aren't paid a lot for all the bullshit they have to deal with. I have to deal with a lot of bullshit too but I'm paid in relation to how much I have to deal with.
I'm hoping you're being sarcastic and don't really have the idea that there are just all these "real" professional-wage paying jobs that are available for just three months that are being held open for teachers.
Who would rather have teach you physics, someone with a degree in Education or someone with a degree in Physics?
I'm going with "sarcastic".
You are welcome on my lawn.
So if there aren't any fires, firefighters shouldn't be paid? And if there aren't any crimes, police shouldn't be paid?
Wow, are you off-base. You don't really know anything about it do you?
...and still be elected governor of New Jersey?
You're getting all your information about teachers and teaching from talk radio, aren't you? That statement is not true, even here in Chicago, which is ground zero for the "thugs in the teachers' union.
You are welcome on my lawn.
And I think you have a skewed perception of a real teacher's work day and a skewed perception of actual pay rates.
11.5 hours/day is the norm.
(http://www.scholastic.com/primarysources/pdfs/Gates2012_full_noapp.pdf)
The school year for students is 180 days. Teachers must be there a week early and leave a week later. They also have work days throughout the year that the students are not there for. This gives about 200 days per year of work.
200 days * 11.5 hours/day = 2300 hours per year.
The 40-hour work week gives 2088 hours per year.
The pay schedule for teachers in my area ranges from $30,943 for a BA, first year to $60250 for a BA+100 (or MA+60; A JD from George Mason requires a BA+89 hours) and 22 years experience.
$30,943/2300 = $13.45 per hour.
$60250/2300 = $25.56 per hour.
These include benefits, so the take-home is significantly less than this.
His lessons are too slow. It's like getting a lesson from Grandpa Simpson. He only teaches one tiny basic concept per video and it takes him at least five minutes to get there and another five repeating, and repeating, and repeating. I can't watch more than half a video before I can't take it anymore.
Wow, I'm not the only one!
When I first heard of Khan Academy, I thought it was a great concept. I visited the website, saw a great deal many subjects and thought this was probably the greatest thing ever. And then I tried watching the videos...
Very small amount of content, presented in the most uninteresting way possible, in an extremely repetitive way. I couldn't make it through a full video.
His lessons are too slow.
it's a shame he doesn't have a lesson on using Youtube, or you could learn about the slider that allows you to fast forward as required.
how many pairs of boxer shorts should you own?
I second that. My solution was to download the videos, then use mplayer to play them back at 1.5 times the speed.
It's fine, as long as you don't mind being taught by Alvin the Chipmunk.
I was similarly dissappointed. Not that I don't appreciate the value for what is there, just that it could be so much more.
Like for example, math is confusing enough to some, why make it more confusing by leaving errors in the videos, and then watching the prof go back and correct them. I realize this is all "pro bono" work, but take a few minutes and edit that crap out.
Someone had to do it.
Let's do that, then!
Teachers work about 200 days per year.
Teachers work about 11.5 hours/day (http://www.scholastic.com/primarysources/pdfs/Gates2012_full_noapp.pdf)
200 days * 11.5 hours/day = 2300 hours per year.
A typical job with a 40-hour/week nets 2088 hours/year.
So, already your myth is busted, but let's continue.
The pay schedule for teachers in my area ranges from:
$30,943 for a BA first year teacher
to
$60250 for a BA+100 and 22 years experience.
(or MA+60; A JD from George Mason requires a BA+89 hours)
$30,943/2300 = $13.45 per hour.
$60250/2300 = $25.56 per hour.
These include benefits, and is before taxes, so the take-home is significantly less than this.
So, let's talk about equal pay for equal work.
In my area, A Senior Software Engineer with a BS+5 can expect to make between $65k and $131k/year.
65,000/2088 = $31.13/hour
131,000/2088= $62.74/hour
And this software engineer isn't at a gaming company with 80-hour work weeks, this is a 9-5+occasional hours job.
Your link is...creative. It takes the length of Illinois' school day (300 minutes) and says that this is equivalent to the length of the teacher's work day, and then multiplies this work day by the number of days in the school session (176) to get the total hours worked. Add in daily preparation time, daily after school activity supervision (how few teachers don't have a sport or activity assigned to them?), grading, calling parents about low performing/absent students, lesson development, etc. and you will double that per day number. Add in mandatory meetings that take place outside of school days, teacher development classes, additional education, and you will probably add an entire month or more to their actual days worked. The pension plan is a filthy little bit of creativeness too: teachers don't get social security (save that from hours worked outside the teaching profession) and that pension is their replacement. So by the time we cut away all of Mr. Carter's creativity he's overstated teacher compensation by a factor of two at a minimum, and a factor of three would not be surprising.
Really the only commentary worth reading on that link of yours is in the responses to Mr. Carter and I suppose the humor value of his desperate flailing.
Who would rather have teach you physics, someone with a degree in Education or someone with a degree in Physics?
Having a teacher with a degree in education is negatively correlated with student performance. Our schools could be improved if they refused to hire anyone with an education degree.
On the bright side, the damage is limited, since a teacher with a masters degree in education is no worse than someone with just a bachelors degree (but no better either).
When will America wake up and realize that just one good teacher is worth more than both the Koch brothers
Maybe voters will be willing to pay good teachers more when we stop paying bad teachers the exact same salaries.
If teaching was really so easy and so well paid, then you (yes - YOU) could use your superior skills and abilities to make a real difference in the world and a substantial contribution to society by quitting your bit-twiddling, script-reading, Windoze-hating, printer cartridge-changing job and start teaching. So why don't you?
Teachers are becoming the targets of the new skinheads, with pogroms just around the corner. Wisconsin and Florida are leading the way.
Actually, I did just that... for six years.
As an associate CompSci prof, I pulled in around 80% of what sysadmins made in the area (near Ogden, UT), not counting the massive benefits*, and the additional pay for teaching a couple of night classes each week. Out of three CompSci profs on the campus, I was the only one who set up his own in-class network, did his own imaging, ran his own servers, etc.
I originally took the job in 1999 as a means to duck out of the dot-bust, but damn... it was a fine way to do it. I finally left when budget cuts meant low faculty on the various departmental totem poles had to be laid off. By then, IT hiring in the real world was back up in a massive way, so it took very little time to find what I wanted.
I can easily admit that this is not a typical case, but I will say that it is more common than the NEA will ever let on. Take a gander at what the fine faculty in Portland, OR (my current home)'s district will pull in: http://www.patpdx.org/salary . A fresh-out-of-school BA holder with 0 CE/credit hours gets an entry-level salary of $36k, which is kinda typical for most entry-level BA/BS jobs. Now here's the fun part: It's laughably easy to rack up the hours and get the raises. Most of these courses are usually some pet project of some prof somewhere, an easy "A", and I spent most of the required ones getting real work done on the laptop (seriously - I was even required to take early childhood literacy courses in spite of teaching at a collegiate level. Welcome to the Utah State Office of Education...)
The best part of it all was, my weekends and holidays were all mine. Name me a decent IT position that has that one carved in stone...
I won't say it was all cotton candy and unicorns, but compared to being a sysadmin out here in the real world? Shit, it was a relative vacation.
* this included 95% paid healthcare in-or-out of network for $0 premium w/ no limits, a very generous 401k matching program, a metric ton of days off in spite of teaching year-round, and a pension system that allows me, even now, to draw an extra $4k/year at age 65, in spite of only being in it for six years. Oh, and then there was the customary 50-60% off of std. tuition costs for most collegiate-level courses. Oh - and at a time when most folks were lucky to get 2 weeks vacation, I accrued 5 weeks per year, with no carryover limits... on top of all those days off. When I finally left, my severance check (3 months vacation backed up) was frickin' massive.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
So are garbage men. So are programmers.
Being in the "top 50%" of earners really doesn't mean shit any more. It just means their rations haven't been cut as much as yours.
You are welcome on my lawn.
That's my point. Education is the worst academic discipline after Economics. Even psychology degrees require more rigor than Econ.
The university where I taught closed it's Education department several years ago, much to my delight. It's one of the top 3 schools in the US. They wouldn't listen to me and close the Econ school though.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Use VLC - it will speed up and correct pitch
Never look back at the carnage.
Or when we stop spending more money on administration and pointless toys like "Smart Boards" than on teachers.
e. Are we saying that every single other profession is able to measure performance, except for teaching? Seriously, can we not spend a few months on identifying a way to do some type of qualitative 360 degree review?
No, I mean seriously, how do you evaluate good teachers? Suggesting there *should* be a measure of a good teacher, and knowing what it one actually is is the problem - this is a problem people have been wondering about for decades, and a few months long study isn't likely to solve it. Philosophically there should be some way to gauge teacher effectiveness that isn't easy to game, but unfortunately, no one has come up with one yet. So we're kind of stuck with trying the common approach of ask kids, ask parents, have the principle sit in on classes, that sort of thing. Whether or not my mother filed her lesson plans properly doesn't make her a good or bad teacher, I'm not sure which she was - but using things like that to benchmark doesn't help.
You *could* have a situation where classrooms are bigger but you have multiple teachers, when I was a graduate student teaching assistant we had labs with 100 or so students and 3 or 4 TA's and everyone just went wherever, there wasn't a 'Sir_sri's rows' so when we had 1 really good TA (we used to call him "The Egyptian" until we discovered that was Al Zawahiri's nickname, so this is a while ago) and one really bad TA (a chinese guy who didn't ever seem to actually try and help anyone) you kind of mitigated the damage. But that format would require significantly changing how schools are laid out, and I'm not sure it doesn't tend to just reduce everyone to 'well at least you're not that chinese guy'.
The latest theory is to use standardized testing every year, and then you identify good teachers by when their students perform better than they did in the past (so if every year they score an average of 70 on standardized tests, and then after this teacher they start scoring 80 while the average of everyone else is still 70 then you're onto something), and that's not bad, but you waste a huge amount of time on standardized testing, and you're showing the teacher is good at prepping kids for standardized tests, not necessarily good at teaching connections beyond standardized tests.
every single other profession is able to measure performance,
How do you measure the performance of a programmer? Quantitatively, and accurately. Lines of code is notoriously bad. It's not like teaching is the only profession to have the problem of 'there are metrics we use that aren't really very good', every other profession has the same problem, just teaching is relatively rare in that you are mostly alone and unobserved when working.
In contrast, my mother has taught high school french, italian, and spanish for at least a decade now. Her workload is insane. Not only does she have the normal hours of the day where she has to be on campus directly dealing with kids, she then gets to spend time reading and grading papers, as well as evaluate how well her lesson plans worked, and update them for the next time she teaches (or to adjust for faster/slower class progress). The net result is that she works at least twelve hours a day, often more, and regularly gets about four hours of sleep.
If you're teaching a class that requires grading of papers or has handouts. you get to create the material, make enough copies, teach it in class, read/grade all of the responses, and then repeat. God help you if you want to actually challenge your students with more than multiple choice, and have them write real sentences or prose. 30 students times 5 classes is 150 students' worth of papers to READ every day. How long would you spend on each? My teachers in high school, like my mother now, read their students' papers closely enough to be able to write corrections, and even write feedback on them. I imagine it's more than a minute per student spent correcting, and more than ten minutes spent per class evaluating the effectiveness of your curriculum and planning how best to ensure your students actually _learn_. So, that's another four hours on top of your "eight hour" day right there.
So, while teachers bring in some decent sounding dough, the amount of time they put into it depends a lot on the subject matter they teach and the degree to which they invest themselves in teaching well. (It's probably still a lot easier than being a sysadmin, though.)
His lessons are too slow. It's like getting a lesson from Grandpa Simpson. He only teaches one tiny basic concept per video and it takes him at least five minutes to get there and another five repeating, and repeating, and repeating. I can't watch more than half a video before I can't take it anymore.
Not all students can learn as quickly and easily as most /. readers.
Indeed. In fact /.ers are so smart that most of them don't even have to read an article to know all the answers!
About the only teachers that work any significant about beyond the 6-7 hour school day are teachers that must grade essays. So, your myth is already busted.
I teach physics. There are some problems with the statement I put in italics above. I recognize that the facts vary from district to district, but I have also never met a teacher in any district that had a regular 6 or 7 hour day.
Our contracted day is 8.5 hours long, which includes one 22 minute lunch. Technically, I'm finished at 3:45. Almost every day of the week, I am there at least one hour late, often two. There are labs to plan and setup, students who need help, and meetings to attend. If I average an hour and a half of extra time at school, that's already 10 hours per day. I also take work home if I can't get it done after school because, for example, students come in needing help or reassessment. Perhaps on average an extra half hour per night.
If I average 10 hours a day at work and a half hour a day at home, that's about 1880 hours per academic year. That's 90% of the 2080 hours a normal 8 hr/day full time job.
There are also the other professional activities and duties I participate in, such as continuing education, networking with other science teachers and scientists, and keeping current on research in physics and education. I take classes and attend workshops and conferences during the summers. For example, I have spent about four hours per week researching and planning, plus five full days on-site at workshops this summer.
I'm not complaining, I just prefer that people take a more factual look at teaching careers, not the mythical "6 hour day part time job" that many people would have you believe.
Both of you are idiots. All you are really complaining about is having to sit through the entire video just so you can get the green check mark next to the video and earn your badges.
I come from a background of collaborative editing of documents and content, so perhaps I'm biased here. By that I'm talking open source programming projects and stuff like Wikipedia.
A huge problem with Sal Kahn is that he presumes he is the font of all knowledge and the one and only who can produce the videos for his site. The central control over the content is part of what will eventually kill the site, even though the basic concept is fine. I'm even OK with an editorial review process that would fact check videos, but when Sal goes beyond mathematics he really doesn't know as much as he thinks he knows.
Eventually somebody is going to come up with a real collaborative and interactive way to bump up against Khan Academy, sort of like You Tube but for instruction. There were earlier attempts to do stuff like that such as Diversity University that pre-date even the development of the web. There have been other similar projects over the years, so to say that Sal Kahn even came up with the concept of an on-line school is really stretching the truth too.
There are some things that Sal Kahn is doing that are original and innovative, so I don't want to completely diss the guy either. I have my reservations that the badges are as important as some people think they are, but the instant reward aspect of the learning that happens on the site is appealing to a base instinct of people when they visit the site. The mathematical exercises are in particular quite interesting. Still, the comments above that suggest the videos are lacking has some merit. There are ways that such content could be improved over time as well.
How sure are you of the statistics behind that factoid? I've heard that among majors of students taking the MCAT, philosophy is often at the top of the list, with "pre-med" being average. That doesn't imply though that a philosophy degree will prepare you for med school better. It's more likely that only very exceptional people major in philosophy and then decide to take the MCAT, while the average or below people who want to go med school major in pre-med.
I'd guess a similar thing is going on there. The people who have no greater interest than teaching take the safe approach, while people who may be more interested in physics but decide to abandon it and go into teaching are more likely to be interesting people with active brains on their necks.
I guess the two explanations are not mutually exclusive, there could be some indoctrination in education degrees that encourages thinking inside the box too.
Nor will Salman Khan's idea that he is going to build Charter schools where students watch and hour of his videos a day to learn all the math they need to know and spend the rest of the day playing guitar or making paintings.
You completely missed the point of Khan Academy. The point is not to reduce education to watching an hour of videos and it's not to remove teachers from educational process. To the contrary - it's to use the teachers more effectively.
Here are the important points:
1)Teacher's time
At the moment, teachers spend 50% or more of their classroom time delivering a lecture. This is a complete waste of their talent. Instead, kids can look at the lecture themselves online - they cannot interrupt the teacher to ask a question, but they don't do that during a lesson anyway - with a video they can at least rewind it and listen to it again. Then, they can spend the time in the classes doing creative work, discussions and exercises with the teacher's assistance.
2)Student's speed
At the moment we require that all students go through the material at the same speed. This is terribly inefficient as it results with most students either underachieving and getting bored or moving on through the material without learning what's needed. With Khan's approach you can let students go through the material at their own speed. You can still challenge them to do better but you don't need to abandon the slower students because the class has to move on
3)Tracking
The teacher can track each student's development in a comprehensive way - he'll be able to easier identify who has what kind of problems or strengths and use this information to develop the kids to their best possibilities.
Yes, the education process has been developing a long time but if Khan's approach catches on, it will be a pretty big step forward.