No, they are not that valuable. If you take someone who has a firm grasp of mathematics at a 7th grade level, is motivated, engaged and honestly feels that this is a valuable and valued use of your life, they will be more than capable of teaching a 5th grade math class. They will most certainly not have industry seeking them out for their great math skills.
Having a PhD in an elementary classroom is like taking $5000 into a McDonald's. Sure, you could figure out a way to spend $10-$12 if you bought more food than one person should eat, and it is all of their most expensive menu items, but the other $4995 is completely wasted in the context.
I will agree that Child protection services is a failure, but I see it from the other side. While the states are ignoring children in actual abusive environments, they are seizing children from good, loving, healthy homes to be used by their human trafficking system for profit. My son has two friends who are, as it type this, being held by the state of Illinois. They were kidnapped by the state of Illinois during a custody visit with their mother. When the mother and her boyfriend started beating the kids, the state incarcerated the kids. No one involved with the kids, judge or Child Protection Services, in any way even implies that the home life these kids had with their father was anything but excellent. When the kids refused to tell the state psychologists that the were happy to never go home, the state of Illinois declared them mentally ill and started drugging them. The youngest was actually tortured being instructed that they would "need to keep drawing blood for tests" as long as he believed that going home was a good idea. Their older brother, luckily escaped early on. It required that a laptop and credit card be smuggled in to the kid in a box of cereal. He then enrolled at Stanford, and when Stanford's program required that he spend 2 weeks on campus, the state of Illinois didn't feel they could get away with making him drop out of college.
Very good point. Although what jumped out to me was the fact that they basically said that they had a program to identify 7th grade teachers with less than a 7th grade education and try teach them 7th grade math. Given the percentage of public schools that require teachers to have at least a bachelor's degree, the existence of this program speaks not only volumes about the quality of our public education system, but also the quality of our colleges.
This is part of our problem. We constantly hear how teachers are in poverty. When it is pointed out with reliable data that teachers are in the top half of earners in the US, the argument moves to a claim that they don't make nearly as much as other people who have the Masters Degrees and PhDs that the teachers have. This is a good thing, as a PhD brings nothing to the job of elementary school teacher.
A grand majority of students produced by the education system will emerge from it and will not have any sort of understanding of any of the material, which is, I think, a problem. As you say, they might be able to get the right answers (but only for a short time, because it's likely that they'll forget all the patterns and facts they memorized), but doing anything innovative will be beyond most of them because they have no grasp on the logic behind any of it.
This describes the 'Big Lie' of our education system. Most people simply don't leave high school with better than a 7th grade education. As you say, they either don't understand the material in the first place, and they quickly forget the rote memorization that they regurgitated for the tests.
It is a cultural problem. Being educated is not a priority. Saying you are educated is what our society values.
I have known teachers, and your comment is BS. I will grant that English language teachers frequently have to put in a lot of hours. When they assign reports, they must read them to grade them, but in most other subjects, grading is often done by students or machine. It just doesn't take that long to grade a math test.
The issue of preparation for the next two semesters is also a red herring. New teachers will have to put in a good number of hours as they develope their skills in teaching. They will make lesson plans, see that parts don't work and adjust them for future years. Once a teacher has a few years under their belt, they should not be spending huge amounts of time figuring out what they are going to do.
One of the big issues with discussing teacher's pay is that those who advocate for the teachers tend to make a conglomerate of all the worst parts of every teacher's situation to make them look like victims. They take the hours form the English teacher who has to work long hours grading essays, the pay from first year teachers who are on the low side of an above average paying job. They take the knowledge required for a High School level A.P. Science or Math teacher and the social environment from a remedial language class in the roughest inner city school they can find. They then claim that this is the standard working environment for teachers. In the process, they lose credibility.
Just two weeks ago, a friend that works in a local grade school tried to pass off the claim that "once all of the hours worked are accounted for, teachers are only making about $2/hour."
The real problem with education is rampant corruption.
I will agree with that.
What I would disagree with is that paying more is the solution to quality teachers. Teaching is a victim of certification inflation. There is no reason to pay a PhD salary for a 3rd grade teacher. There is nothing in the 3rd grade that requires more than a middle school education to teach. This scales up through the entire public education system. One needs only be about 2 levels above the student to be able to effectively teach a subject.
I don't. You have two types of students. Those that are already active and those that are not. The ones that are already active don't need PE. They will be active regardless. The ones who are not active are not going to be 'saved' by a PE program. PE is a feel good program with virtually no real benefit.
Any education system that costs as much to teach as it costs to keep old people healthy is an incredible failure. Also, Medicare is a Federal program. Education is in the domain of the state. Comparing the two makes no sense, as they do not share a budget. Finally, every household uses trash collection. Whereas only about 15% of the population uses the public school system. Basic math tells us that at best, you cannot compare the two, but at worst, trash collection should cost more, as you have more people using the service.
I don't know if this has anything to do with what the parent was referring too, but I can give you an "Ivory Tower" example. The idea higher degrees are required to teach. That any degree is required to teach for that matter. A teacher only needs to be about 2 levels above their student to be able to teach them. That means that the kindergartener teacher with a PhD is not any better than a grade school dropout.
We incessantly hear about how we can't get good teachers because teacher's pay is so bad. It starts out as claims of actual poverty. When it is pointed out that teachers are in the top half of earners in every state in US, the argument moves to a comparison between teachers salaries and other degrees professions. We hear how Ms. Mary Kindergarten Teacher has a PhD and that she should be earning what other PhDs earn.
The idea that a PhD is even remotely useful for teaching grade school is "Ivory Tower" thinking.
You are falling prey to the single biggest problem with our public education system. You blame a single entity. The problem is bad teachers. It is also bad text books, bad parents, bad administrators, bad school boards, and bad legislatures. I would add bad students in there as well, but if the rest of the system was working, the bad students wouldn't be screwing things up for the good ones because the two types of students wouldn't be interacting all that much.
Maybe the teachers were not bribed. I wasn't there, but there are definitely reports of textbook publishers bribing selection committees, and I it wouldn't surprise me to have members who were bribed to deny it.
But I really missed one opportunity. If I had only thought fast enough, I could have had a very good time on that commission. I got to the hotel in San Francisco in the evening to attend my very first meeting the next day, and I decided to go out to wander in the town and eat something. I came out of the elevator, and sitting on a bench in the hotel lobby were two guys who jumped up and said, "Good evening, Mr. Feynman. Where are you going? Is there something we can show you in San Francisco?" They were from a publishing company, and I didn't want to have anything to do with them.
"I'm going out to eat."
"We can take you out to dinner."
"No, I want to be alone."
"Well, whatever you want, we can help you."
I couldn't resist. I said, "Well, I'm going out to get myself in trouble."
"I think we can help you in that, too."
"No, I think I'll take care of that myself." Then I thought, "What an error! I should have let all that stuff operate and [kept] a diary, so the people of the state of California could find out how far the publishers will go!". . . .
At some point in your child's life, he will have to deal with felons too. Many of them convicted of violent crimes. Some will probably even have been sex offenders. That doesn't mean you send them to the nearest prison for an after school program.
13 years is most certainly experience. I am sure that some people on Slashdot were home schooled, and even more went to private school, but most will have spent 13 years experiencing public school.
You will also find that the vast majority of teachers have experience in only a limited geographical area. They two have limited experience in regard to a diverse system spread across a country.
I do realize that you did not say you agree with it, but, this is why most people leave high school with no better than a 7th grade education and we are now seeing people leaving what once were considered legitimate colleges with an 8th to 9th grade education.
The entire field of child development is one huge touchy feely echo chamber that severely abuses children. The field is a self selecting group of people who decide what the outcome will be first, and then develop 'research' that will produce those results.
I'm not going to say it is abuse for every kid, but for mine it most certainly would have been. By the age of 5, when my son would have started kindergarten, he was half way through his 3rd grade curriculum. Trying to put him into a classroom where knowing your alphabet would be considered good would have been torture. He would immediately have become one of the "problem" kids. Not to mention, there are a lot of teachers that are down right antagonistic of student that can learn without being taught by a 'real' teacher.
Imagine if today, you committed to going to a continuing education class. Imagine that this class was scheduled to be your primary activity for the next 12 years. Now imagine the instructor standing up in front of the class, and in all seriousness, holding up a sign with the letter 'A' and saying "A says ah".
This was very similar to my first experience with the public school system. I can still remember the day I lost faith in it. I was 5 years old, and it was the 2nd day of kindergarten. All of the students were given pencils and paper and told to write all of the numbers that they knew for as high as they could count. As an eager young man, I started in on the task. One by one, the other kids would give their papers to the teacher, and the teacher would instruct them to go into the room next door ( the two kindergarten classrooms were separated by one of those ceiling to floor accordion screens) and watch Sesame Street and The Electric Company. I didn't care much when half of the two classes were sitting on the carpet watching Sesame Street. I always hated that show anyway. But, by the time that I was sitting by myself in the first classroom, studiously working on the task as instructed, while everyone else was watching Spiderman on The Electric Company, I realized that the public school system was set up to punish those who could and would do their best to get a real education.
Since that day, the public school system has never shown any indication that my initial estimation of it was anything but accurate. I can count 3 teachers out of the ~30 that I had through my time in public school that I could say were really good teachers. There were another two who were not my teacher, but opened classrooms up to students before school for any that had interest in the subject. (One was plastics work and the other was computers). So, not every teacher was bad. Really, only about 10 or so were actively bad. The rest were just punching the clock.
By the time I was about 11 years old, I was plotting how I would avoid inflicting the drudgery on my own child. How I could prevent a broken system from holding him back the way I saw it holding back the brightest kids around me. Around that time, I came up with the childishly simplistic solution of opening my own private school when the time came. Lucky for me, that is exactly how many homeschoolers comply with the mandatory education law while giving their children the education they deserve. By the time my child was affected by the mandatory education laws, starting a private school was a simple, well established procedure with lots of people who had been doing it for years, ready to explain exactly what you needed to do to stay legal.
Given that my child was smarter than I was a 5, and at 9 is smarter than I was at 9, it most certainly would have been child abuse to put my child into a system that he would have to overcome to get educated.
That really touches on the one of our problems. The work "education" has lost all meaning. Since I graduated from a public school over two decades ago, the vast majority of people I seen graduating, did so with no better than what I would consider a 7th grade education. Most of the people I have met graduating from college are doing so with not much more than an 8th or 9th grade educations. Sure, there are exceptions, but most people now consider a piece of paper that claims you are educated to be the definition of educated. We are producing a population of Wizard of Oz Scarecrows.
The only reason that kindergarten isn't considered preschool is that since it is public education and thus free. With it being free, the vast majority of the parents decided to use it as free daycare. With the vast majority of kids being housed in a public schools prior to 1st grade, it started to be considered the 1st year of school.
I'm going to have to agree with this. Too many times, I have seen businesses say that they can't do something they don't want to do because of "the risk of getting sued", yet you will find them taking the exact same risks in other areas.
One must keep in mind that Mars is the most practical place to declare a new kingdom and rule as king and master of all the kingdoms inhabitants. It also has no pesky laws concerning medical experimentation.
Slashdot Mirror
No, they are not that valuable. If you take someone who has a firm grasp of mathematics at a 7th grade level, is motivated, engaged and honestly feels that this is a valuable and valued use of your life, they will be more than capable of teaching a 5th grade math class. They will most certainly not have industry seeking them out for their great math skills.
Having a PhD in an elementary classroom is like taking $5000 into a McDonald's. Sure, you could figure out a way to spend $10-$12 if you bought more food than one person should eat, and it is all of their most expensive menu items, but the other $4995 is completely wasted in the context.
Ahhh.....You got me.
There is irony in your post....
I will agree that Child protection services is a failure, but I see it from the other side. While the states are ignoring children in actual abusive environments, they are seizing children from good, loving, healthy homes to be used by their human trafficking system for profit. My son has two friends who are, as it type this, being held by the state of Illinois. They were kidnapped by the state of Illinois during a custody visit with their mother. When the mother and her boyfriend started beating the kids, the state incarcerated the kids. No one involved with the kids, judge or Child Protection Services, in any way even implies that the home life these kids had with their father was anything but excellent. When the kids refused to tell the state psychologists that the were happy to never go home, the state of Illinois declared them mentally ill and started drugging them. The youngest was actually tortured being instructed that they would "need to keep drawing blood for tests" as long as he believed that going home was a good idea. Their older brother, luckily escaped early on. It required that a laptop and credit card be smuggled in to the kid in a box of cereal. He then enrolled at Stanford, and when Stanford's program required that he spend 2 weeks on campus, the state of Illinois didn't feel they could get away with making him drop out of college.
Child protection services are the bad guys.
I think I see your mistake. Contrary to what you have apparently been told, most people don't life in 1920's rural Kansas.
Very good point. Although what jumped out to me was the fact that they basically said that they had a program to identify 7th grade teachers with less than a 7th grade education and try teach them 7th grade math. Given the percentage of public schools that require teachers to have at least a bachelor's degree, the existence of this program speaks not only volumes about the quality of our public education system, but also the quality of our colleges.
This is part of our problem. We constantly hear how teachers are in poverty. When it is pointed out with reliable data that teachers are in the top half of earners in the US, the argument moves to a claim that they don't make nearly as much as other people who have the Masters Degrees and PhDs that the teachers have. This is a good thing, as a PhD brings nothing to the job of elementary school teacher.
A grand majority of students produced by the education system will emerge from it and will not have any sort of understanding of any of the material, which is, I think, a problem. As you say, they might be able to get the right answers (but only for a short time, because it's likely that they'll forget all the patterns and facts they memorized), but doing anything innovative will be beyond most of them because they have no grasp on the logic behind any of it.
This describes the 'Big Lie' of our education system. Most people simply don't leave high school with better than a 7th grade education. As you say, they either don't understand the material in the first place, and they quickly forget the rote memorization that they regurgitated for the tests.
It is a cultural problem. Being educated is not a priority. Saying you are educated is what our society values.
I have known teachers, and your comment is BS. I will grant that English language teachers frequently have to put in a lot of hours. When they assign reports, they must read them to grade them, but in most other subjects, grading is often done by students or machine. It just doesn't take that long to grade a math test.
The issue of preparation for the next two semesters is also a red herring. New teachers will have to put in a good number of hours as they develope their skills in teaching. They will make lesson plans, see that parts don't work and adjust them for future years. Once a teacher has a few years under their belt, they should not be spending huge amounts of time figuring out what they are going to do.
One of the big issues with discussing teacher's pay is that those who advocate for the teachers tend to make a conglomerate of all the worst parts of every teacher's situation to make them look like victims. They take the hours form the English teacher who has to work long hours grading essays, the pay from first year teachers who are on the low side of an above average paying job. They take the knowledge required for a High School level A.P. Science or Math teacher and the social environment from a remedial language class in the roughest inner city school they can find. They then claim that this is the standard working environment for teachers. In the process, they lose credibility.
Just two weeks ago, a friend that works in a local grade school tried to pass off the claim that "once all of the hours worked are accounted for, teachers are only making about $2/hour."
The real problem with education is rampant corruption.
I will agree with that.
What I would disagree with is that paying more is the solution to quality teachers. Teaching is a victim of certification inflation. There is no reason to pay a PhD salary for a 3rd grade teacher. There is nothing in the 3rd grade that requires more than a middle school education to teach. This scales up through the entire public education system. One needs only be about 2 levels above the student to be able to effectively teach a subject.
I don't. You have two types of students. Those that are already active and those that are not. The ones that are already active don't need PE. They will be active regardless. The ones who are not active are not going to be 'saved' by a PE program. PE is a feel good program with virtually no real benefit.
The number of lies told across the board from news networks are so great that pointing to one of them and declaring them 'worse' is silly.
Any education system that costs as much to teach as it costs to keep old people healthy is an incredible failure. Also, Medicare is a Federal program. Education is in the domain of the state. Comparing the two makes no sense, as they do not share a budget. Finally, every household uses trash collection. Whereas only about 15% of the population uses the public school system. Basic math tells us that at best, you cannot compare the two, but at worst, trash collection should cost more, as you have more people using the service.
I don't know if this has anything to do with what the parent was referring too, but I can give you an "Ivory Tower" example. The idea higher degrees are required to teach. That any degree is required to teach for that matter. A teacher only needs to be about 2 levels above their student to be able to teach them. That means that the kindergartener teacher with a PhD is not any better than a grade school dropout.
We incessantly hear about how we can't get good teachers because teacher's pay is so bad. It starts out as claims of actual poverty. When it is pointed out that teachers are in the top half of earners in every state in US, the argument moves to a comparison between teachers salaries and other degrees professions. We hear how Ms. Mary Kindergarten Teacher has a PhD and that she should be earning what other PhDs earn.
The idea that a PhD is even remotely useful for teaching grade school is "Ivory Tower" thinking.
You are falling prey to the single biggest problem with our public education system. You blame a single entity. The problem is bad teachers. It is also bad text books, bad parents, bad administrators, bad school boards, and bad legislatures. I would add bad students in there as well, but if the rest of the system was working, the bad students wouldn't be screwing things up for the good ones because the two types of students wouldn't be interacting all that much.
Any discussion on textbook selection needs the obligatory link to Richard Feynman's essay on his experience being on a selection committee.
But I really missed one opportunity. If I had only thought fast enough, I could have had a very good time on that commission. I got to the hotel in San Francisco in the evening to attend my very first meeting the next day, and I decided to go out to wander in the town and eat something. I came out of the elevator, and sitting on a bench in the hotel lobby were two guys who jumped up and said, "Good evening, Mr. Feynman. Where are you going? Is there something we can show you in San Francisco?" They were from a publishing company, and I didn't want to have anything to do with them.
"I'm going out to eat."
"We can take you out to dinner."
"No, I want to be alone."
"Well, whatever you want, we can help you."
I couldn't resist. I said, "Well, I'm going out to get myself in trouble."
"I think we can help you in that, too."
"No, I think I'll take care of that myself." Then I thought, "What an error! I should have let all that stuff operate and [kept] a diary, so the people of the state of California could find out how far the publishers will go!". . . .
You changed preschool to daycare. You lost the subject of the thread.
At some point in your child's life, he will have to deal with felons too. Many of them convicted of violent crimes. Some will probably even have been sex offenders. That doesn't mean you send them to the nearest prison for an after school program.
13 years is most certainly experience. I am sure that some people on Slashdot were home schooled, and even more went to private school, but most will have spent 13 years experiencing public school.
You will also find that the vast majority of teachers have experience in only a limited geographical area. They two have limited experience in regard to a diverse system spread across a country.
I do realize that you did not say you agree with it, but, this is why most people leave high school with no better than a 7th grade education and we are now seeing people leaving what once were considered legitimate colleges with an 8th to 9th grade education.
The entire field of child development is one huge touchy feely echo chamber that severely abuses children. The field is a self selecting group of people who decide what the outcome will be first, and then develop 'research' that will produce those results.
I'm not going to say it is abuse for every kid, but for mine it most certainly would have been. By the age of 5, when my son would have started kindergarten, he was half way through his 3rd grade curriculum. Trying to put him into a classroom where knowing your alphabet would be considered good would have been torture. He would immediately have become one of the "problem" kids. Not to mention, there are a lot of teachers that are down right antagonistic of student that can learn without being taught by a 'real' teacher.
Imagine if today, you committed to going to a continuing education class. Imagine that this class was scheduled to be your primary activity for the next 12 years. Now imagine the instructor standing up in front of the class, and in all seriousness, holding up a sign with the letter 'A' and saying "A says ah".
This was very similar to my first experience with the public school system. I can still remember the day I lost faith in it. I was 5 years old, and it was the 2nd day of kindergarten. All of the students were given pencils and paper and told to write all of the numbers that they knew for as high as they could count. As an eager young man, I started in on the task. One by one, the other kids would give their papers to the teacher, and the teacher would instruct them to go into the room next door ( the two kindergarten classrooms were separated by one of those ceiling to floor accordion screens) and watch Sesame Street and The Electric Company. I didn't care much when half of the two classes were sitting on the carpet watching Sesame Street. I always hated that show anyway. But, by the time that I was sitting by myself in the first classroom, studiously working on the task as instructed, while everyone else was watching Spiderman on The Electric Company, I realized that the public school system was set up to punish those who could and would do their best to get a real education.
Since that day, the public school system has never shown any indication that my initial estimation of it was anything but accurate. I can count 3 teachers out of the ~30 that I had through my time in public school that I could say were really good teachers. There were another two who were not my teacher, but opened classrooms up to students before school for any that had interest in the subject. (One was plastics work and the other was computers). So, not every teacher was bad. Really, only about 10 or so were actively bad. The rest were just punching the clock.
By the time I was about 11 years old, I was plotting how I would avoid inflicting the drudgery on my own child. How I could prevent a broken system from holding him back the way I saw it holding back the brightest kids around me. Around that time, I came up with the childishly simplistic solution of opening my own private school when the time came. Lucky for me, that is exactly how many homeschoolers comply with the mandatory education law while giving their children the education they deserve. By the time my child was affected by the mandatory education laws, starting a private school was a simple, well established procedure with lots of people who had been doing it for years, ready to explain exactly what you needed to do to stay legal.
Given that my child was smarter than I was a 5, and at 9 is smarter than I was at 9, it most certainly would have been child abuse to put my child into a system that he would have to overcome to get educated.
That really touches on the one of our problems. The work "education" has lost all meaning. Since I graduated from a public school over two decades ago, the vast majority of people I seen graduating, did so with no better than what I would consider a 7th grade education. Most of the people I have met graduating from college are doing so with not much more than an 8th or 9th grade educations. Sure, there are exceptions, but most people now consider a piece of paper that claims you are educated to be the definition of educated. We are producing a population of Wizard of Oz Scarecrows.
The only reason that kindergarten isn't considered preschool is that since it is public education and thus free. With it being free, the vast majority of the parents decided to use it as free daycare. With the vast majority of kids being housed in a public schools prior to 1st grade, it started to be considered the 1st year of school.
I'm going to have to agree with this. Too many times, I have seen businesses say that they can't do something they don't want to do because of "the risk of getting sued", yet you will find them taking the exact same risks in other areas.
The same can be said for individuals.
One must keep in mind that Mars is the most practical place to declare a new kingdom and rule as king and master of all the kingdoms inhabitants. It also has no pesky laws concerning medical experimentation.