Yes, and for every union like yours there are hundreds which protect teachers from abusive parents and administrators.
Take a moment to actually think about the situation.
I have heard of one teacher who came to school drunk. He was fired. But we can at least agree that such things aren't impossible.
Again, you're implying that these things happen all over the place. If you can toss about anecdotes as if they mean something, so can I. In just my high school, the parents called for four teachers to be fired during my four years there.
They said one of them harassed the girls he coached on the basketball team. Of course, the girls on the team showed up to defend him. The real reason they were upset? He refused to excuse homework and quizzes for people who were in the school play and church events.
One teacher was accused of being unqualified and repeatedly refusing to take a more active role in the school. She was more qualified than most teachers and ran two clubs as well as managing the prom each year. The real reason people wanted to fire her? She had started dating the ex-husband of the local hospital administrator.
The math teacher (a very good one) was brought before the school board on allegations of stealing school property and being a poor teacher. He was the best math teacher the district had, but he had just started coaching the boys basketball team after the previous coach retired. The parents wanted him fired because after two years he hadn't managed a winning season and he refused to step down despite lots of support from the school and the students he coached.
The last one was genuinely a mediocre teacher. She didn't really do anything wrong, but she wasn't really doing anything spectacular either. It was, however, her first year teaching after 18 years in another career. She was as disorganized and disillusioned as all new teachers but without the youthful flexibility and ability to live without sleep. The parents wanted her fired after the first six months. The school refused. After just two years, she settled into a pattern and has become a good, productive teacher.
Should I continue? Sure, you've got your one drunk teacher. I've got mine, too. However, I've also got the stories of dozens of other teachers who have been attacked, driven away, and on occasion, fired for looking too young, being homosexual, not being Christian enough, being Jewish, dating someone too publicly, angering local politicians, standing up for other teachers, refusing to give "aristocrat" kids special treatment, or (and this is one of my favorites) refusing to give a student two extra days to hand in a honor society application because they had forgotten to do it for the last two months.
Can you actually say that you think the number of drunk teachers protected by unions is greater than the number of teachers who are harassed and abused by parents who want exactly what you want: to be able to fire teachers for whatever reason they can find. Do you think that there are more teachers who skip out of work early than spend 2 or more hours after school, working unpaid hours to keep up with the school schedule? Do you think that most school boards would give teachers raises to keep them competitive with other professions that require bachelor's degrees and continuing college credits throughout their careers?
If you do, then I sure wish I lived in your world, because in the real world, the things that unions do to protect good teachers vastly outnumber the things they do to protect bad teachers.
Because a teacher is essentially a public service job and parents are hypersensitive about them. Politicians who were impeached and acquitted still generally have a tough time moving on in their careers. If a teacher is fired, school districts assume it is because they did something totally unacceptable such as inappropriate behavior with a student, a conviction, coming to school drunk, or misusing school funds.
Teaching will never be like other professions until parents allow it to be like other professions. Even then, it is a public service job and they have to keep a public image.
Also, please quit trying to act like its common for unions to defend teachers who show up drunk. If you think that is a common occurrence then there isn't much point discussing this any further. The union wants fair treatment and in more cases than the contrary, they want to ditch their worst members because it reflects badly on them.
So, either quit picking your worst case scenario and pretending that it happens all the time or start talking about who is going to protect teachers from being shot by angry parents, because that happens too.
Not so, I'm all for hair-trigger firing and simply upping the pay being offered till the positions are filled with competent people.
That would almost work except for the fact that fired teachers have a very difficult time getting hired. This is due to school boards and parents, not really administration. Once you have that on your employment record, its poison. You're immediately passed over by all but the most desperate schools.
As for the rest, you can find plenty of counterexamples and it's not that it can't happen, but that it's risky to allow it to be public. For the most part, parents understand that teachers are allowed to have actual lives. But not all of them. Remember, you're advocating hair trigger firings. All it would take is one red-state parent who doesn't like the idea that Johnny's teacher is living with someone out of wedlock to come up with some reason to file a lawsuit and you're done.
And we're not that far from that right now. The unions are the things that keep these stupid lawsuits in check because, despite many people's beliefs, teachers aren't paid well and generally can't afford to defend themselves against lawsuits. A teacher might be able to get away with the things you mentioned for a while, but they're risking their job by doing it. If you think this an exaggeration, just talk to a teacher in any of the less liberal areas of the country.
...and the voucher system is often just another way of making public schools act like private schools. Rich parents will choose to move their kid to the school of their choice and effectively steal money from the local school.
It sounds like a good idea, and it would be in an idealistic world, but in the real world it ends up becoming a tool to segregate wealthy students from everyone else.
You forgot one difference between public and private school:
3: Private schools can turn people away.
Why do private schools have higher test scores? Because they kick out anyone who gets low scores. It's easy for them. Just let the public schools take the chaff.
Why do private schools have lower cost/student? Because they can just refuse to admit students with language problems, learning disabilities, special needs, or non-standard education plans. You know, all the things that really drive up the costs in public schools.
Oh, and let's not forget that private schools don't need to have accredited teachers. But why bring up that point when 90% of people think that teaching is nothing more than reading out of a book to students. Why break a moron's view of the world?
What is the real problem with private schools? The Aristocracy Problem. The school system is created to try and provide a way for everyone to have a shot at success. A fully privatized school system guarantees that rich, powerful people will get the very best education while the poorest will get only what they can scrape by with.
It's a great way to keep the poor as poor as possible. Can't let those uppity bastards think they might be as good as you, right? I mean, the last thing we need is to force rich kids to actually compete with some poor kid based on merit instead of something mommy and daddy can buy for them. That is, in fact, the core of capitalist America.
In most districts, schools have a mandatory 165-180 day school year. With holidays and spring break, this makes for a school year of at least 9 months and often closer to 10. I know of no teacher that gets 4 months off for summer vacation. I have to believe you're just totally lying. Add to this, the fact that most teachers require a couple weeks to prepare for the start of the school year.
However, that doesn't really count here, since in most cases they're not paid for it.
I also knew a teacher who taught three classes and a study hall. He was getting paid $18K a year. Most teachers have a mandatory 7 hour work day with a 30 minute lunch. However, its common for teachers to spend 2-4 hours of time after the end of the school day preparing for the next.
I know a few teachers who'd love to show you where to put your head for implying that they were too lazy to try and get a second job to fill out those last four hours of spare time they have a day.
I suspect the real problem here is that you simply don't have a clue what you're talking about. You cherry picked an example which made you bitter and never used another neuron to think about it.
I know these things occur, but lets be a little honest here. There are a lot more teachers than most people realize. Yes, there are some losers in the bunch, but are you really willing to put your own profession under so much scrutiny?
I'm closer to the education field than most people here. I've seen bad teachers. I've seen them committing crimes and breaking their contracts. Some of them still have jobs, but you know what? Most of them don't. Whether they "retire" or "get transferred" or even moved to an "administrative" position, most of them are pushed out of teaching. For every bad teacher who still has their job, I've seen three effectively fired.
More importantly, I've seen some really good teachers. I've seen how much time they spend getting called incompetent because Johnny got a C, or Suzie deserves extra special attention she isn't getting. In my area, the good teachers can be expected to be called into a meeting with a parents lawyer two or three times a year. They can expect to be sued once every four years.
In most places, teachers can't be seen drinking in front of students after work. They can't have boyfriends or girlfriends. They can't wear sexy clothing outside of work. They can't have political views. Now, none of these are in the contract, but just try to be a teacher and violate one of these unwritten rules. Sure, you might get away with it, but usually you're going to find yourself with a mob of parents trying to get you fired.
Does this excuse bad teachers? Of course not. But I would hope it might give you a clue why unions exist and protect the employment of their members. When a teacher is fired, they are usually fired from the profession. Other schools will only pick them up if there are no other options. If teachers were fired as easily as people like you would like, then we simply wouldn't have any.
Actually, despite the media's reporting to the contrary, a low voter turn out is usually the sign of a stable government that generally matches the desires of the citizens. Unless you're in Australia (or any other place with mandatory voting) a democracy usually only generates high voter turn out when the voters are upset.
So, do whatever you like (freedom is great), but know that not voting is sending conflicting messages. The media might report one thing, but to all the intelligent people analyzing the results, your failure to vote is essentially a vote for "Yup, everything is going just fine".
Er... Most of the polls for Indiana show it as a toss up, with the trend leaning slightly towards Obama and the historical expectation leaning slightly toward McCain. The expected margin is very small and this is actually one of the cases where your vote actually could matter.
By writing in some other joker, all you're doing is handing your vote to everyone else around you, which, by your tone, sounds like McCain. So, if you want McCain to win, by all means, vote for Big Bird. If you think Obama is a better choice, then you might consider actually expressing a real opinion instead of trying to make some stupid point by tossing your vote to someone who cannot possibly win.
You know, I might support you in other times, but this sort of naive optimism can cause much bigger problems than many people think about.
We're supposed to be geeks here and it's expected that we understand math, or at the very least, logic. In a winner-takes-all voting system, a vote for the third-place candidate is effectively a vote for the first-place candidate. I know it might make you feel all elitist to say "Vote your conscience!" but in reality, you need to vote for the candidate with the best chance to win and deliver the policies you support.
If you live in California or Maryland or Kansas and want to vote for Ron Paul to send a message, then go for it. It's not really going to matter. However, if you're in one of the swing states like Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania or Virginia and you vote for Paul or Nader, understand that you are essentially saying that you don't care who wins and you're willing to let everyone around you make the decision for you. If that's true, then go do your thing and good luck. If you're not comfortable with everyone else making your decision, then use your head and vote for one of the people who has a chance to win.
Yes, it's voting for the lesser of two evils, but the lesser of two evils is still better than the greater of the two. I wasn't excited about Gore at all, but he was less evil than Bush. All those Nader-voters out there apparently disagreed. Sure, they got to feel superior for adhering to their pure morals, but in the end, they didn't get what they wanted.
I live in Virginia. As much as I'd like to see a 3 or 4 party system in the US, I'm not willing to risk the next four years based on my pipe dream.
Because that's one of the things that I love about Batman -- he's human, and he's not even particularly special as a human, beyond having trained very hard.
Well, it's more than that. Batman's superpower has always been "being rich". In the end, all of his abilities came back to that. As someone who grew up in the lower middle class, I guess that just doesn't thrill me. Sure, it was a rich guy who (for once) was interested in doing more than just being selfish and voting Republican, but there really just wasn't much there for me to find inspiring. It wasn't even that he worked really hard. He had the money to buy the toys that made the difference between "hard-working dead guy" and "superhero".
You still wouldn't be as good a Jedi, and it would still take a lot of training and discipline.
That's not so far from the way it is, just with a much lower ceiling than you'd probably like. The implication from the very start was that the Force was everywhere and in everything and everyone had it to some small degree, but that there were special people who were able to control it enough to get stuff done.
See also: "The Force is strong in your family." (Which, in retrospect, was an utter lie.)
Everyone else around Luke accepted his abilities and there was even some implied envy, though of the "you have powers I could never have" sort of way.
I don't know. Why isn't everyone a Kung-Fu Master?
Because the benefits of being a Kung-Fu Master wouldn't make much of a difference in people's lives. The abilities of the Jedi would. The two aren't really comparable. Being (strongly) Force sensitive was always treated more like being a prodigy. No matter how much you'd like to be one, you either are or you aren't. You can train all you like and you might actually get really good, but you'll never really reach prodigy-level.
I'm not really saying your foolish or wrong, I was just pointing out that even during Episode IV, it was strongly implied that using the Force wasn't something anyone could do, even with oodles of training.
In the Star Wars universe, having a high enough midichlorian count to be Force-sensitive is rare, and if yours is low, you're SOL, you'll never be a Jedi.
When did you ever think this wasn't the case? Even as a five year old this was what I assumed to be true. There are even loads of scenes and lines to support the belief.
The mitochondria, er... midichlorians were a bit lame, but they don't really change this fact. It's been quite clear since the very first movie that the force was something that some people just had and everyone else didn't.
I guess I would have found it to be much more lame if everyone could get to be a Jedi if they just worked really hard. Way to take all the mysticism away. Want to be a Jedi? No talent? Well if you're rich you can buy your way in by getting the best tutors.
Having the only requirement to being a Jedi be "working hard" would effectively kill the mysticism of it. Why isn't everyone a Jedi? Why aren't they all waving their hands about? Why doesn't the Empire train all Stormtroopers as Jedi (or Sith, as the case may be)?
If you want to nitpick, then fine, but I'm not going to waste much more time trying to explain this to you since you're not looking at any context at all. When commenting on slashdot, I try to avoid making my comments spiny messes of caveats and clarifications because most people prefer shorter, concise comments and are willing to take a few seconds to at least glance at the thread history.
My statement, fully qualified is this: An individual who has obtained a PhD degree with one or more implied master's and bachelor's degrees in which none of the said degrees are in a education or education-related field is not, by definition, either qualified to become a teacher in a primary, secondary, or pre-secondary public school distict within the United States of America at this time. Said individual, were they allowed to try to take on a teaching position without obtaining the required teaching license and therefore also requiring the completion of an accredited degree in education along with at least one semester of internship and the completion of one or more standardized content knowledge test, they would, on average, not provide a lower quality of educational experience to elementary, secondary, or pre-secondary student. This is due primarily to the lack of knowledge of teaching methods, which, while rarely needed in a university setting, are nearly essential in primary, secondary and pre-secondary settings. Furthermore, topics such as child psychology, child development, and sociology are necessary in handling and identifying children whose needs fall outside the normal range. While these things are commonly cast aside by university professors, teachers in primary, secondary, and pre-secondary education must deal with them in order to provide high quality education to students. On the topic of a PhD actually decreasing the quality of said unqualified teacher, it is important to note that exceptions always exist, however, on average an unqualified and uncertified person in a teaching position who has a PhD in their field of expertise is more likely to be noticeably less effective than a teacher than an unqualified and uncertified person in a teaching position who has a Masters degree in their field of expertise than noticeably more effective. The most likely outcome will be that both unqualified and uncertified people will equally effective, though they will most likely be less effective than a qualified and certified individual. This discrepancy would most likely be due to a greater detachment with primary and secondary education due to the amount of time needed to obtain said PhD. It is common, even in qualified and certified people in teaching positions, to see newly hired individuals with only a bachelor's degree performing, on average, at an equal or higher effectiveness to those who obtain a PhD before beginning a teaching career. Again, this is due to the period of time required to obtain the degree and a detachment from the actual performance of their position.
Is that better?
As for why I believe this? Anecdotal experience and the statements of a number of school administrators. I spend a lot of time around teachers. I've been paying attention to the things they say for about twenty years now. I've watched a number of teachers start their careers and I've watched a few of them end their careers only a few years later, some because they didn't enjoy it, some because they were told they weren't good enough at it. Some of the consistently worst teachers I've encountered are the ones who had advanced degrees and thought that made them qualified to teach high school. While none of them were poor in their field, most of them had absolutely no clue how to teach high school children. Some switched to university positions and enjoyed them much more.
So, tell me. What is your basis for thinking that a PhD would make you a good teacher? How much time have you spent around teachers? How many classes have you taught to children? Do you have any knowledge about the topic except
A PhD doesn't make a good teacher. It is much more likely to make a really bad teacher.
Citation? I had a lot of great university teachers.
Let's stop there. Teaching at the K-12 level is vastly different than teaching at the university level. It's also vastly off topic. This thread was dealing with the primary and secondary public school system in the US.
I've yet to see a law firm give a job to a person who doesn't pass the bar. Should we start blasting lawyers, too?
Law firms hire paralegals, legal secretaries, custodians, and many others without law degrees.
Oh dear god. Please try to read the thread first and use a little common sense. Primary and secondary schools hire loads of people without teaching licenses, too: secretaries, lawyers, IT staff, janitors, teaching aides.
The point, which you missed, is that a teaching license is required to teach. The poster I was responding too was upset because his PhD friend wasn't allowed to teach a high school course without one. I was pointing out that the license is necessary, partially for the reasons stated above, namely, that teaching a high school class is not the same as teaching a university class and you need to actually learn how to do it. Hence the license.
I'm sorry I didn't fully research all the intricate ways you could become a real lawyer without passing the bar. I guess I'll stick to the car analogies, then? Let's imagine I said that it's silly that people aren't allowed to drive without a license.
Oh, wait, but you can! You could have a learner's permit! Or you could be on private property! Or you could just do it illegally! Let's not let the actual topic at hand stop us from nitpicking the analogy.
That doesn't fix the problem. Testing doesn't show the quality of a teacher. Improvements in test scores don't show the quality of a teacher.
Basically, your last paragraph is you admitting that you don't know how to measure the quality of a teacher. And since the old way of measuring the quality of teachers (administrators) is inconsistent, you'd prefer the consistently bad solution over the inconsistently good solution.
That is where we'll have to differ. I prefer to trust people who have degrees and training. You want to trust a standardized test prepared by politicians.
No, it doesn't. It doesn't even measure the students. Life isn't a multiple choice test. Intelligence is more than spewing facts. The fact that you can't see a difference, suggests that's all you're really able to do.
Measuring students by tests can only measure how well they spew memorized facts. Measuring teachers by tests only measures how well they know what is on the test and how good they are at forcing kids to memorize it. That is exactly what NCLB has done. Millions of students are being forced to memorize test questions, making thousands of good teachers act like horrible teachers.
All because idiots like you, who haven't got a single clue what education is about, think they can measure the effectiveness of a teacher with a single number.
You want to know how this is working already? The best teachers are moving to the schools with the most money and highest scores, because they won't risk letting an idiot like you blame them for trying to help the kids who really need help. Problem children? Poor families without strong education background? Keep them away. Problem families breed low scores and you don't want to get stuck with that.
Idiocy like this punishes the children who are in the greatest need. No matter what sort of improvement the greatest teacher might make with them, if they don't match up with that school of rich WASPs a thousand miles away, we blame the teacher. This is like breaking the legs of the second place horse to encourage it to do better next time.
Which Linux distro is the best? Please fully express your opinion as a number. Or better yet, lets select the best distro by the lowest number of mistakes made by the users per capita. Because the quality of a linux distro is totally dependant on the quality of people using it.
Wait... you said before that elementary teachers should have minors in the things they're teaching. Now you're saying that having a background in English qualifies you to teach History?
Or a minor in science? I don't remember seeing that at my university. Chemistry, yes. Biology, sure. Science? No.
You know.. this actually sounds less like a plan for improving teachers and more like punishment for people who aren't you.
I sense that you are one of those high school teachers who has developed some form of superiority complex based on the fact that because your subject matter is more complex that you're somehow smarter than elementary school teachers. In my experience, the people who feel this way are usually pretty poor teachers because they are stuck in the old way of doing things, unable to imagine that someone else might have found a way better than theirs.
Because "Education" is an entrenched elitist program. I know a gentleman who retired from IBM after 30 years of doing chip design, with a PhD in electrical engineering, and a BS in Physics. He tried to get a HS science job, and after two months of utter bullshit was essentially told by all involved that without a teaching degree, he couldn't teach.
A PhD doesn't make a good teacher. It is much more likely to make a really bad teacher. There is more to teaching than sitting in front of a class and telling them stuff. I know several programming languages and enough math to teach AP classes in high school, but I'd never try to teach because I know that without the training of a real education program, I wouldn't be able to transfer that knowledge as well as I should to be a teacher.
But, you should know this already. Unless you're one of the crappy "old-school" teachers who thinks reading the chapter and assigning the questions at the end equals quality teaching.
However, I've yet to see a school kick someone out of a teaching program for being unable to teach
I have. Twice last year. Well, by that I mean teachers who were fired for bad performance. I can think of about 4 from my time in school who were "let go" because they didn't do their jobs well. As for people in education degree programs, the education program at my university had a final dropout rate of about 70% (Compare: CS: 77%, Architecture: 40%, Electrical Eng.: 90%, Business: 30%, Sociology: 20%)
same as I've yet to see a school give someone a license to teach without all the bullshit inherent in an education program.
I've yet to see a law firm give a job to a person who doesn't pass the bar. Should we start blasting lawyers, too?
1) Elementary teachers need to have a minor in every subject they are to teach. No more monoculture of a million English teachers teaching elementary school. 2) Elementary school education remains largely the same. But by 9th grade we begin to organize students by trade. By "trade" I mean: College bound, military bound, trade school/certification bound, unskilled trade bound. By 10th grade all base education is done, and students are able to move to wherever they want (and are qualified) to go: College Prep school, military school, trade school, regional apprentice program, dropout. If students want to switch path, they may until age 20. Each of these is a 2 year program. (Except the dropout program.) 3) Reestablish the tried and true apprentice program used for thousands of years. Set up local tradesmen as masters, with the ability to give certification to students. Students would work for 2 years, then graduate with their apprenticeship done. Over time, the reputation of the master among other business owners (their hires from him) would determine how many students (if any) he would get. Pay him for his time, and he also gets free (albeit unskilled) labor.
I can see the merit in this, but I can guarantee you that Joe Average won't care. You want Elementary teachers to have a degree in Elementary Education with minors in English, Math, Biology, Physics, Geology, History, Geography, and Literature. How much are you going to pay them for those 7 years of school they've got to take? That's more school than most lawyers. You plan on paying them $80k a year to start?
I agree that teachers shouldn't teach things they don't know, but the point of having a professional degree is not that you know everything, but that you can teach yourself whatever else you need to know. A math minor from a university is going to require calculus and quite frankly, that's a complete waste of time for an elementary school teacher. A minor in geography is going to teach them vastly more than any high school kid is ever going to learn.
Education for teachers is never a bad thing, but the demands you just made only prove that you're not an elementary school teacher. They're unrealistic and demanding that without giving them unrealistic pay increases is downright insulting. You've called for them to be one of the most highly educated professions in the country, while leaving them with some of the lowest salaries. Kudos.
Teachers (all of them) are already more educated than the majority of people in the world, yet they get treated as if they were one step above Wal-Mart greeter. I'm convinced the problem lies not with the teachers, but with everyone else who thinks that teaching is easy and that anyone can do it. They're wrong and every time society reinforces the idea that teachers don't know anything, it only hurts them all as a group.
This is already the case, thanks to the one worthwhile part of No Child Left Behind (aka: No Child Gets Ahead, Every Politician Gets Reelected). Other than some older teachers who got grandfathered in, all teachers in middle and high school must have degrees in their subjects. Not minors, a bachelor's degree at a minimum.
However, this didn't have all that much of an effect, because most of them already did. Even 15 years ago when I entered high school, my history teacher was working on his MS in History, my chemistry teacher had a chemistry degree with a minor in mathematics. My tech teacher had an engineering degree with a minor in physics.
And they were all being paid less than $30k a year.
That doesn't mean lazy people don't exist. They exist everywhere. Don't tell me you've never seen lazy people with MBAs. Or lawyers. Or lawmakers. I can pick out many more programmers who suck than teachers who do.
In countries like the US, Australia and the UK, where many teachers are 3-4 year qualified
False (in the US)
Teachers in the US require a Bachelor's Degree. Elementary school teachers must have a degree in Elementary Education. Middle and high school teachers must have a degree matching their subject matter. Furthermore, most teachers are required to continue to educate themselves, taking between 3 and 12 credits of coursework every 3-5 years. Master's degrees are becoming more common, between 10-40% of teachers at most decently funded schools.
...unless we're talking about private schools, where unqualified and under-educated teachers are much more common.
...and where many teachers have adopted the profession as an occupation of last resort
There are many more teachers who leave the career than switch to it. Low pay and getting treated like crap by everyone who thinks they know what teaching is like play a big part in this. Most people who switch to teaching are taking a cut in both pay and respect to do it.
...where teacher salaries are low with respect to the average income of tertiary educated people, and where politicians and not educators dictate curriculum, there is a low quality of education.
Agreed. I don't know why people find this shocking. Do they second guess their surgeons? Do they ask their lawmakers to legislate how airplanes get designed? Teachers get both of these because people (wrongly) believe that they are so much smarter than a lowly, idiot teacher who couldn't get a real job. As if an MBA can't be obtained by 50% of the morons on the planet.
Only the best and brightest get the chance to excel, unless students are lucky enough to get a truly vocational teacher who is sufficiently trusted by administration to run the class the way they know works.
Again, I agree. Living in a place known for excellent public schools, I can see two things that make this happen where it doesn't other places: The parents here actually care, and the teachers are actually treated like professionals who know more about teaching than lawyers and engineers.
Though I assume "head" is the answer, I'm having trouble constructing arguments why "emperor" and "king" are wrong.
Five teenagers are of various heights. Alex is taller than Dennis, who is shorter than Eunice. Chris is shorter than Bob, but taller than Alex. Who among them is the third tallest?
Chris, Alex, Dennis, Eunice
As noted elsewhere: Bob > Chris > Alex > Dennis and Eunice > Dennis. There's no way to tell if the third tallest is Eunice or Alex.
Globe is to sphere as dice is to...
square, pyramid, cube, rectangle
Three dimensional primitives, I got it, but it should be "cubes" not "cube".
If we fold this cube, which one will we get?
(Four colored options)
Stupidly, three of the four are possible. Apparently, the question is so hard that even the person who wrote it can't get it right.
Library is to books as...
hospital is to doctor, trees is to forest, cemetery is to the dead, students is to classroom
Again, the morbid corpses option seems to be the intended answer, but the similarity doesn't exclude doctors. Is the intended relation "A stores B" or "A makes B available to public"?
Of the six vanished Wonders of the Ancient World, which was the last to disappear?
The Hanging Gardens of Babylon, The Lighthouse of Alexandria, The Statue of Zeus at Olympia, The Colossus of Rhodes
Alright, reportedly Zeus was dismantled in the 5th century. The Colossus only lasted until 226 BCE. The Lighthouse made it to 1480. However, the facts behind the Hanging Gardens are muddled. No one knows where it existed or even when it was first made. While it certainly wasn't very garden-like at 1480, it's likely that the remains of the Hanging Gardens are still around, unlike any of the other three.
Similarly:
What is the only one of Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, which still exists?
The Statue of Zeus at Olympia, The Great Pyramid at Giza, The Hanging Gardens of Babylon, The Lighthouse of Alexandria
I should pick the Pyramids because they are "more intact" than the Hanging Gardens, right? I mean, the fact that the Pyramids are damaged and incomplete and missing their presumed paint and outer casing stones doesn't keep them from existing, but the Hanging Gardens stopped existing the moment the plants died.
Mental note: Make your monuments only out of rock, then you can claim they exist on a tectonic time scale.
What animal is the largest ever to have existed on the planet Earth?
Brontosaurus, Blue whale,Ultrasaurus, Megalosaurus
This is dated conjecture. We simply cannot declare with certainty which animal is the largest. Sure this is being a bit literal, but this is a horrible question. It should be reworded: "As of 2008, which of these animals was believed to be the largest?" Of course, that wording makes it sound like you're admitting you don't know all that much.
Which, in this case, is true.
I'm sure there are others... these were the ones that stuck out to me. I really hate people who make tests without actually thinking.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, that and Orlando, FL.
Yes, and for every union like yours there are hundreds which protect teachers from abusive parents and administrators.
Take a moment to actually think about the situation.
I have heard of one teacher who came to school drunk. He was fired. But we can at least agree that such things aren't impossible.
Again, you're implying that these things happen all over the place. If you can toss about anecdotes as if they mean something, so can I. In just my high school, the parents called for four teachers to be fired during my four years there.
They said one of them harassed the girls he coached on the basketball team. Of course, the girls on the team showed up to defend him. The real reason they were upset? He refused to excuse homework and quizzes for people who were in the school play and church events.
One teacher was accused of being unqualified and repeatedly refusing to take a more active role in the school. She was more qualified than most teachers and ran two clubs as well as managing the prom each year. The real reason people wanted to fire her? She had started dating the ex-husband of the local hospital administrator.
The math teacher (a very good one) was brought before the school board on allegations of stealing school property and being a poor teacher. He was the best math teacher the district had, but he had just started coaching the boys basketball team after the previous coach retired. The parents wanted him fired because after two years he hadn't managed a winning season and he refused to step down despite lots of support from the school and the students he coached.
The last one was genuinely a mediocre teacher. She didn't really do anything wrong, but she wasn't really doing anything spectacular either. It was, however, her first year teaching after 18 years in another career. She was as disorganized and disillusioned as all new teachers but without the youthful flexibility and ability to live without sleep. The parents wanted her fired after the first six months. The school refused. After just two years, she settled into a pattern and has become a good, productive teacher.
Should I continue? Sure, you've got your one drunk teacher. I've got mine, too. However, I've also got the stories of dozens of other teachers who have been attacked, driven away, and on occasion, fired for looking too young, being homosexual, not being Christian enough, being Jewish, dating someone too publicly, angering local politicians, standing up for other teachers, refusing to give "aristocrat" kids special treatment, or (and this is one of my favorites) refusing to give a student two extra days to hand in a honor society application because they had forgotten to do it for the last two months.
Can you actually say that you think the number of drunk teachers protected by unions is greater than the number of teachers who are harassed and abused by parents who want exactly what you want: to be able to fire teachers for whatever reason they can find. Do you think that there are more teachers who skip out of work early than spend 2 or more hours after school, working unpaid hours to keep up with the school schedule? Do you think that most school boards would give teachers raises to keep them competitive with other professions that require bachelor's degrees and continuing college credits throughout their careers?
If you do, then I sure wish I lived in your world, because in the real world, the things that unions do to protect good teachers vastly outnumber the things they do to protect bad teachers.
Because a teacher is essentially a public service job and parents are hypersensitive about them. Politicians who were impeached and acquitted still generally have a tough time moving on in their careers. If a teacher is fired, school districts assume it is because they did something totally unacceptable such as inappropriate behavior with a student, a conviction, coming to school drunk, or misusing school funds.
Teaching will never be like other professions until parents allow it to be like other professions. Even then, it is a public service job and they have to keep a public image.
Also, please quit trying to act like its common for unions to defend teachers who show up drunk. If you think that is a common occurrence then there isn't much point discussing this any further. The union wants fair treatment and in more cases than the contrary, they want to ditch their worst members because it reflects badly on them.
So, either quit picking your worst case scenario and pretending that it happens all the time or start talking about who is going to protect teachers from being shot by angry parents, because that happens too.
Like. All the time.
Not so, I'm all for hair-trigger firing and simply upping the pay being offered till the positions are filled with competent people.
That would almost work except for the fact that fired teachers have a very difficult time getting hired. This is due to school boards and parents, not really administration. Once you have that on your employment record, its poison. You're immediately passed over by all but the most desperate schools.
As for the rest, you can find plenty of counterexamples and it's not that it can't happen, but that it's risky to allow it to be public. For the most part, parents understand that teachers are allowed to have actual lives. But not all of them. Remember, you're advocating hair trigger firings. All it would take is one red-state parent who doesn't like the idea that Johnny's teacher is living with someone out of wedlock to come up with some reason to file a lawsuit and you're done.
And we're not that far from that right now. The unions are the things that keep these stupid lawsuits in check because, despite many people's beliefs, teachers aren't paid well and generally can't afford to defend themselves against lawsuits. A teacher might be able to get away with the things you mentioned for a while, but they're risking their job by doing it. If you think this an exaggeration, just talk to a teacher in any of the less liberal areas of the country.
...and the voucher system is often just another way of making public schools act like private schools. Rich parents will choose to move their kid to the school of their choice and effectively steal money from the local school.
It sounds like a good idea, and it would be in an idealistic world, but in the real world it ends up becoming a tool to segregate wealthy students from everyone else.
You forgot one difference between public and private school:
3: Private schools can turn people away.
Why do private schools have higher test scores? Because they kick out anyone who gets low scores. It's easy for them. Just let the public schools take the chaff.
Why do private schools have lower cost/student? Because they can just refuse to admit students with language problems, learning disabilities, special needs, or non-standard education plans. You know, all the things that really drive up the costs in public schools.
Oh, and let's not forget that private schools don't need to have accredited teachers. But why bring up that point when 90% of people think that teaching is nothing more than reading out of a book to students. Why break a moron's view of the world?
What is the real problem with private schools? The Aristocracy Problem. The school system is created to try and provide a way for everyone to have a shot at success. A fully privatized school system guarantees that rich, powerful people will get the very best education while the poorest will get only what they can scrape by with.
It's a great way to keep the poor as poor as possible. Can't let those uppity bastards think they might be as good as you, right? I mean, the last thing we need is to force rich kids to actually compete with some poor kid based on merit instead of something mommy and daddy can buy for them. That is, in fact, the core of capitalist America.
(Note my restraint)
In most districts, schools have a mandatory 165-180 day school year. With holidays and spring break, this makes for a school year of at least 9 months and often closer to 10. I know of no teacher that gets 4 months off for summer vacation. I have to believe you're just totally lying. Add to this, the fact that most teachers require a couple weeks to prepare for the start of the school year.
However, that doesn't really count here, since in most cases they're not paid for it.
I also knew a teacher who taught three classes and a study hall. He was getting paid $18K a year. Most teachers have a mandatory 7 hour work day with a 30 minute lunch. However, its common for teachers to spend 2-4 hours of time after the end of the school day preparing for the next.
I know a few teachers who'd love to show you where to put your head for implying that they were too lazy to try and get a second job to fill out those last four hours of spare time they have a day.
I suspect the real problem here is that you simply don't have a clue what you're talking about. You cherry picked an example which made you bitter and never used another neuron to think about it.
I know these things occur, but lets be a little honest here. There are a lot more teachers than most people realize. Yes, there are some losers in the bunch, but are you really willing to put your own profession under so much scrutiny?
I'm closer to the education field than most people here. I've seen bad teachers. I've seen them committing crimes and breaking their contracts. Some of them still have jobs, but you know what? Most of them don't. Whether they "retire" or "get transferred" or even moved to an "administrative" position, most of them are pushed out of teaching. For every bad teacher who still has their job, I've seen three effectively fired.
More importantly, I've seen some really good teachers. I've seen how much time they spend getting called incompetent because Johnny got a C, or Suzie deserves extra special attention she isn't getting. In my area, the good teachers can be expected to be called into a meeting with a parents lawyer two or three times a year. They can expect to be sued once every four years.
In most places, teachers can't be seen drinking in front of students after work. They can't have boyfriends or girlfriends. They can't wear sexy clothing outside of work. They can't have political views. Now, none of these are in the contract, but just try to be a teacher and violate one of these unwritten rules. Sure, you might get away with it, but usually you're going to find yourself with a mob of parents trying to get you fired.
Does this excuse bad teachers? Of course not. But I would hope it might give you a clue why unions exist and protect the employment of their members. When a teacher is fired, they are usually fired from the profession. Other schools will only pick them up if there are no other options. If teachers were fired as easily as people like you would like, then we simply wouldn't have any.
Actually, despite the media's reporting to the contrary, a low voter turn out is usually the sign of a stable government that generally matches the desires of the citizens. Unless you're in Australia (or any other place with mandatory voting) a democracy usually only generates high voter turn out when the voters are upset.
So, do whatever you like (freedom is great), but know that not voting is sending conflicting messages. The media might report one thing, but to all the intelligent people analyzing the results, your failure to vote is essentially a vote for "Yup, everything is going just fine".
Er... Most of the polls for Indiana show it as a toss up, with the trend leaning slightly towards Obama and the historical expectation leaning slightly toward McCain. The expected margin is very small and this is actually one of the cases where your vote actually could matter.
By writing in some other joker, all you're doing is handing your vote to everyone else around you, which, by your tone, sounds like McCain. So, if you want McCain to win, by all means, vote for Big Bird. If you think Obama is a better choice, then you might consider actually expressing a real opinion instead of trying to make some stupid point by tossing your vote to someone who cannot possibly win.
You know, I might support you in other times, but this sort of naive optimism can cause much bigger problems than many people think about.
We're supposed to be geeks here and it's expected that we understand math, or at the very least, logic. In a winner-takes-all voting system, a vote for the third-place candidate is effectively a vote for the first-place candidate. I know it might make you feel all elitist to say "Vote your conscience!" but in reality, you need to vote for the candidate with the best chance to win and deliver the policies you support.
If you live in California or Maryland or Kansas and want to vote for Ron Paul to send a message, then go for it. It's not really going to matter. However, if you're in one of the swing states like Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania or Virginia and you vote for Paul or Nader, understand that you are essentially saying that you don't care who wins and you're willing to let everyone around you make the decision for you. If that's true, then go do your thing and good luck. If you're not comfortable with everyone else making your decision, then use your head and vote for one of the people who has a chance to win.
Yes, it's voting for the lesser of two evils, but the lesser of two evils is still better than the greater of the two. I wasn't excited about Gore at all, but he was less evil than Bush. All those Nader-voters out there apparently disagreed. Sure, they got to feel superior for adhering to their pure morals, but in the end, they didn't get what they wanted.
I live in Virginia. As much as I'd like to see a 3 or 4 party system in the US, I'm not willing to risk the next four years based on my pipe dream.
Out of curiosity, do you like Batman?
Batman isn't bad.
Because that's one of the things that I love about Batman -- he's human, and he's not even particularly special as a human, beyond having trained very hard.
Well, it's more than that. Batman's superpower has always been "being rich". In the end, all of his abilities came back to that. As someone who grew up in the lower middle class, I guess that just doesn't thrill me. Sure, it was a rich guy who (for once) was interested in doing more than just being selfish and voting Republican, but there really just wasn't much there for me to find inspiring. It wasn't even that he worked really hard. He had the money to buy the toys that made the difference between "hard-working dead guy" and "superhero".
You still wouldn't be as good a Jedi, and it would still take a lot of training and discipline.
That's not so far from the way it is, just with a much lower ceiling than you'd probably like. The implication from the very start was that the Force was everywhere and in everything and everyone had it to some small degree, but that there were special people who were able to control it enough to get stuff done.
See also: "The Force is strong in your family." (Which, in retrospect, was an utter lie.)
Everyone else around Luke accepted his abilities and there was even some implied envy, though of the "you have powers I could never have" sort of way.
I don't know. Why isn't everyone a Kung-Fu Master?
Because the benefits of being a Kung-Fu Master wouldn't make much of a difference in people's lives. The abilities of the Jedi would. The two aren't really comparable. Being (strongly) Force sensitive was always treated more like being a prodigy. No matter how much you'd like to be one, you either are or you aren't. You can train all you like and you might actually get really good, but you'll never really reach prodigy-level.
I'm not really saying your foolish or wrong, I was just pointing out that even during Episode IV, it was strongly implied that using the Force wasn't something anyone could do, even with oodles of training.
In the Star Wars universe, having a high enough midichlorian count to be Force-sensitive is rare, and if yours is low, you're SOL, you'll never be a Jedi.
When did you ever think this wasn't the case? Even as a five year old this was what I assumed to be true. There are even loads of scenes and lines to support the belief.
The mitochondria, er... midichlorians were a bit lame, but they don't really change this fact. It's been quite clear since the very first movie that the force was something that some people just had and everyone else didn't.
I guess I would have found it to be much more lame if everyone could get to be a Jedi if they just worked really hard. Way to take all the mysticism away. Want to be a Jedi? No talent? Well if you're rich you can buy your way in by getting the best tutors.
Having the only requirement to being a Jedi be "working hard" would effectively kill the mysticism of it. Why isn't everyone a Jedi? Why aren't they all waving their hands about? Why doesn't the Empire train all Stormtroopers as Jedi (or Sith, as the case may be)?
If you want to nitpick, then fine, but I'm not going to waste much more time trying to explain this to you since you're not looking at any context at all.
When commenting on slashdot, I try to avoid making my comments spiny messes of caveats and clarifications because most people prefer shorter, concise comments and are willing to take a few seconds to at least glance at the thread history.
My statement, fully qualified is this: An individual who has obtained a PhD degree with one or more implied master's and bachelor's degrees in which none of the said degrees are in a education or education-related field is not, by definition, either qualified to become a teacher in a primary, secondary, or pre-secondary public school distict within the United States of America at this time. Said individual, were they allowed to try to take on a teaching position without obtaining the required teaching license and therefore also requiring the completion of an accredited degree in education along with at least one semester of internship and the completion of one or more standardized content knowledge test, they would, on average, not provide a lower quality of educational experience to elementary, secondary, or pre-secondary student. This is due primarily to the lack of knowledge of teaching methods, which, while rarely needed in a university setting, are nearly essential in primary, secondary and pre-secondary settings. Furthermore, topics such as child psychology, child development, and sociology are necessary in handling and identifying children whose needs fall outside the normal range. While these things are commonly cast aside by university professors, teachers in primary, secondary, and pre-secondary education must deal with them in order to provide high quality education to students. On the topic of a PhD actually decreasing the quality of said unqualified teacher, it is important to note that exceptions always exist, however, on average an unqualified and uncertified person in a teaching position who has a PhD in their field of expertise is more likely to be noticeably less effective than a teacher than an unqualified and uncertified person in a teaching position who has a Masters degree in their field of expertise than noticeably more effective. The most likely outcome will be that both unqualified and uncertified people will equally effective, though they will most likely be less effective than a qualified and certified individual. This discrepancy would most likely be due to a greater detachment with primary and secondary education due to the amount of time needed to obtain said PhD. It is common, even in qualified and certified people in teaching positions, to see newly hired individuals with only a bachelor's degree performing, on average, at an equal or higher effectiveness to those who obtain a PhD before beginning a teaching career. Again, this is due to the period of time required to obtain the degree and a detachment from the actual performance of their position.
Is that better?
As for why I believe this? Anecdotal experience and the statements of a number of school administrators. I spend a lot of time around teachers. I've been paying attention to the things they say for about twenty years now. I've watched a number of teachers start their careers and I've watched a few of them end their careers only a few years later, some because they didn't enjoy it, some because they were told they weren't good enough at it. Some of the consistently worst teachers I've encountered are the ones who had advanced degrees and thought that made them qualified to teach high school. While none of them were poor in their field, most of them had absolutely no clue how to teach high school children. Some switched to university positions and enjoyed them much more.
So, tell me. What is your basis for thinking that a PhD would make you a good teacher? How much time have you spent around teachers? How many classes have you taught to children? Do you have any knowledge about the topic except
A PhD doesn't make a good teacher. It is much more likely to make a really bad teacher.
Citation? I had a lot of great university teachers.
Let's stop there. Teaching at the K-12 level is vastly different than teaching at the university level. It's also vastly off topic. This thread was dealing with the primary and secondary public school system in the US.
I've yet to see a law firm give a job to a person who doesn't pass the bar. Should we start blasting lawyers, too?
Law firms hire paralegals, legal secretaries, custodians, and many others without law degrees.
Oh dear god. Please try to read the thread first and use a little common sense. Primary and secondary schools hire loads of people without teaching licenses, too: secretaries, lawyers, IT staff, janitors, teaching aides.
The point, which you missed, is that a teaching license is required to teach. The poster I was responding too was upset because his PhD friend wasn't allowed to teach a high school course without one. I was pointing out that the license is necessary, partially for the reasons stated above, namely, that teaching a high school class is not the same as teaching a university class and you need to actually learn how to do it. Hence the license.
I'm sorry I didn't fully research all the intricate ways you could become a real lawyer without passing the bar. I guess I'll stick to the car analogies, then? Let's imagine I said that it's silly that people aren't allowed to drive without a license.
Oh, wait, but you can! You could have a learner's permit! Or you could be on private property! Or you could just do it illegally! Let's not let the actual topic at hand stop us from nitpicking the analogy.
No.
That doesn't fix the problem. Testing doesn't show the quality of a teacher. Improvements in test scores don't show the quality of a teacher.
Basically, your last paragraph is you admitting that you don't know how to measure the quality of a teacher. And since the old way of measuring the quality of teachers (administrators) is inconsistent, you'd prefer the consistently bad solution over the inconsistently good solution.
That is where we'll have to differ. I prefer to trust people who have degrees and training. You want to trust a standardized test prepared by politicians.
Mod: -1 Moron
No, it doesn't. It doesn't even measure the students. Life isn't a multiple choice test. Intelligence is more than spewing facts. The fact that you can't see a difference, suggests that's all you're really able to do.
Measuring students by tests can only measure how well they spew memorized facts. Measuring teachers by tests only measures how well they know what is on the test and how good they are at forcing kids to memorize it. That is exactly what NCLB has done. Millions of students are being forced to memorize test questions, making thousands of good teachers act like horrible teachers.
All because idiots like you, who haven't got a single clue what education is about, think they can measure the effectiveness of a teacher with a single number.
You want to know how this is working already? The best teachers are moving to the schools with the most money and highest scores, because they won't risk letting an idiot like you blame them for trying to help the kids who really need help. Problem children? Poor families without strong education background? Keep them away. Problem families breed low scores and you don't want to get stuck with that.
Idiocy like this punishes the children who are in the greatest need. No matter what sort of improvement the greatest teacher might make with them, if they don't match up with that school of rich WASPs a thousand miles away, we blame the teacher. This is like breaking the legs of the second place horse to encourage it to do better next time.
Which Linux distro is the best? Please fully express your opinion as a number. Or better yet, lets select the best distro by the lowest number of mistakes made by the users per capita. Because the quality of a linux distro is totally dependant on the quality of people using it.
Next time, take a moment to think first.
Wait... you said before that elementary teachers should have minors in the things they're teaching. Now you're saying that having a background in English qualifies you to teach History?
Or a minor in science? I don't remember seeing that at my university. Chemistry, yes. Biology, sure. Science? No.
You know.. this actually sounds less like a plan for improving teachers and more like punishment for people who aren't you.
I sense that you are one of those high school teachers who has developed some form of superiority complex based on the fact that because your subject matter is more complex that you're somehow smarter than elementary school teachers. In my experience, the people who feel this way are usually pretty poor teachers because they are stuck in the old way of doing things, unable to imagine that someone else might have found a way better than theirs.
Because "Education" is an entrenched elitist program. I know a gentleman who retired from IBM after 30 years of doing chip design, with a PhD in electrical engineering, and a BS in Physics. He tried to get a HS science job, and after two months of utter bullshit was essentially told by all involved that without a teaching degree, he couldn't teach.
A PhD doesn't make a good teacher. It is much more likely to make a really bad teacher. There is more to teaching than sitting in front of a class and telling them stuff. I know several programming languages and enough math to teach AP classes in high school, but I'd never try to teach because I know that without the training of a real education program, I wouldn't be able to transfer that knowledge as well as I should to be a teacher.
But, you should know this already. Unless you're one of the crappy "old-school" teachers who thinks reading the chapter and assigning the questions at the end equals quality teaching.
However, I've yet to see a school kick someone out of a teaching program for being unable to teach
I have. Twice last year. Well, by that I mean teachers who were fired for bad performance. I can think of about 4 from my time in school who were "let go" because they didn't do their jobs well. As for people in education degree programs, the education program at my university had a final dropout rate of about 70% (Compare: CS: 77%, Architecture: 40%, Electrical Eng.: 90%, Business: 30%, Sociology: 20%)
same as I've yet to see a school give someone a license to teach without all the bullshit inherent in an education program.
I've yet to see a law firm give a job to a person who doesn't pass the bar. Should we start blasting lawyers, too?
1) Elementary teachers need to have a minor in every subject they are to teach. No more monoculture of a million English teachers teaching elementary school.
2) Elementary school education remains largely the same. But by 9th grade we begin to organize students by trade. By "trade" I mean: College bound, military bound, trade school/certification bound, unskilled trade bound. By 10th grade all base education is done, and students are able to move to wherever they want (and are qualified) to go: College Prep school, military school, trade school, regional apprentice program, dropout. If students want to switch path, they may until age 20. Each of these is a 2 year program. (Except the dropout program.)
3) Reestablish the tried and true apprentice program used for thousands of years. Set up local tradesmen as masters, with the ability to give certification to students. Students would work for 2 years, then graduate with their apprenticeship done. Over time, the reputation of the master among other business owners (their hires from him) would determine how many students (if any) he would get. Pay him for his time, and he also gets free (albeit unskilled) labor.
I can see the merit in this, but I can guarantee you that Joe Average won't care. You want Elementary teachers to have a degree in Elementary Education with minors in English, Math, Biology, Physics, Geology, History, Geography, and Literature. How much are you going to pay them for those 7 years of school they've got to take? That's more school than most lawyers. You plan on paying them $80k a year to start?
I agree that teachers shouldn't teach things they don't know, but the point of having a professional degree is not that you know everything, but that you can teach yourself whatever else you need to know. A math minor from a university is going to require calculus and quite frankly, that's a complete waste of time for an elementary school teacher. A minor in geography is going to teach them vastly more than any high school kid is ever going to learn.
Education for teachers is never a bad thing, but the demands you just made only prove that you're not an elementary school teacher. They're unrealistic and demanding that without giving them unrealistic pay increases is downright insulting. You've called for them to be one of the most highly educated professions in the country, while leaving them with some of the lowest salaries. Kudos.
Teachers (all of them) are already more educated than the majority of people in the world, yet they get treated as if they were one step above Wal-Mart greeter. I'm convinced the problem lies not with the teachers, but with everyone else who thinks that teaching is easy and that anyone can do it. They're wrong and every time society reinforces the idea that teachers don't know anything, it only hurts them all as a group.
This is already the case, thanks to the one worthwhile part of No Child Left Behind (aka: No Child Gets Ahead, Every Politician Gets Reelected). Other than some older teachers who got grandfathered in, all teachers in middle and high school must have degrees in their subjects. Not minors, a bachelor's degree at a minimum.
However, this didn't have all that much of an effect, because most of them already did. Even 15 years ago when I entered high school, my history teacher was working on his MS in History, my chemistry teacher had a chemistry degree with a minor in mathematics. My tech teacher had an engineering degree with a minor in physics.
And they were all being paid less than $30k a year.
That doesn't mean lazy people don't exist. They exist everywhere. Don't tell me you've never seen lazy people with MBAs. Or lawyers. Or lawmakers. I can pick out many more programmers who suck than teachers who do.
In countries like the US, Australia and the UK, where many teachers are 3-4 year qualified
False (in the US)
Teachers in the US require a Bachelor's Degree. Elementary school teachers must have a degree in Elementary Education. Middle and high school teachers must have a degree matching their subject matter. Furthermore, most teachers are required to continue to educate themselves, taking between 3 and 12 credits of coursework every 3-5 years. Master's degrees are becoming more common, between 10-40% of teachers at most decently funded schools.
...unless we're talking about private schools, where unqualified and under-educated teachers are much more common.
...and where many teachers have adopted the profession as an occupation of last resort
There are many more teachers who leave the career than switch to it. Low pay and getting treated like crap by everyone who thinks they know what teaching is like play a big part in this. Most people who switch to teaching are taking a cut in both pay and respect to do it.
...where teacher salaries are low with respect to the average income of tertiary educated people, and where politicians and not educators dictate curriculum, there is a low quality of education.
Agreed. I don't know why people find this shocking. Do they second guess their surgeons? Do they ask their lawmakers to legislate how airplanes get designed? Teachers get both of these because people (wrongly) believe that they are so much smarter than a lowly, idiot teacher who couldn't get a real job. As if an MBA can't be obtained by 50% of the morons on the planet.
Only the best and brightest get the chance to excel, unless students are lucky enough to get a truly vocational teacher who is sufficiently trusted by administration to run the class the way they know works.
Again, I agree. Living in a place known for excellent public schools, I can see two things that make this happen where it doesn't other places: The parents here actually care, and the teachers are actually treated like professionals who know more about teaching than lawyers and engineers.
However, I'm completely okay when people mangle the subject of an internet post...
Note: "Horribly questions" should be "Horribly Written Questions"
Though I assume "head" is the answer, I'm having trouble constructing arguments why "emperor" and "king" are wrong.
Five teenagers are of various heights. Alex is taller than Dennis, who is shorter than Eunice. Chris is shorter than Bob, but taller than Alex. Who among them is the third tallest?
As noted elsewhere: Bob > Chris > Alex > Dennis and Eunice > Dennis. There's no way to tell if the third tallest is Eunice or Alex.
Globe is to sphere as dice is to...
Three dimensional primitives, I got it, but it should be "cubes" not "cube".
If we fold this cube, which one will we get?
Stupidly, three of the four are possible. Apparently, the question is so hard that even the person who wrote it can't get it right.
Library is to books as...
Again, the morbid corpses option seems to be the intended answer, but the similarity doesn't exclude doctors. Is the intended relation "A stores B" or "A makes B available to public"?
Of the six vanished Wonders of the Ancient World, which was the last to disappear?
Alright, reportedly Zeus was dismantled in the 5th century. The Colossus only lasted until 226 BCE. The Lighthouse made it to 1480. However, the facts behind the Hanging Gardens are muddled. No one knows where it existed or even when it was first made. While it certainly wasn't very garden-like at 1480, it's likely that the remains of the Hanging Gardens are still around, unlike any of the other three.
Similarly:
What is the only one of Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, which still exists?
I should pick the Pyramids because they are "more intact" than the Hanging Gardens, right? I mean, the fact that the Pyramids are damaged and incomplete and missing their presumed paint and outer casing stones doesn't keep them from existing, but the Hanging Gardens stopped existing the moment the plants died.
Mental note: Make your monuments only out of rock, then you can claim they exist on a tectonic time scale.
What animal is the largest ever to have existed on the planet Earth?
This is dated conjecture. We simply cannot declare with certainty which animal is the largest. Sure this is being a bit literal, but this is a horrible question. It should be reworded: "As of 2008, which of these animals was believed to be the largest?" Of course, that wording makes it sound like you're admitting you don't know all that much.
Which, in this case, is true.
I'm sure there are others... these were the ones that stuck out to me. I really hate people who make tests without actually thinking.
Not surprising. I never took the quiz, but I think my IQ dropped 10 points just reading through the questions.