If Chaucer read Shakespeare, he would have thought Shakespeare was butchering the language. If Shakespeare read Dickens, Shakespeare would have thought Dickens had butchered the language.
Language evolves. Saying one rule-based system, (this doesn't apply to colloquialisms or slang) is "butchered" is just a modern day form of prejudice.
I would agree it is relatively subjective, but not entirely so. Nevertheless, subjectivity isn't a bad thing as long as there are checks against a principal's power.
Can this power be abused? Certainly, but that would be the rare exception. It's dangerous to implement an entire system that solely focuses on the rare chance of misconduct. We need a more robust system. The examples in the article are some pretty heinous situations, not examples of a principal with an axe to grind.
There is a wonderful thing in advanced composition called a functional fragment.
You're technically right though, even if Kafka, Joyce, Hemingway, and other greats chose to use fragments for effect.
Even without that though, I'm not sure what you do for a living, but I'd venture to say you might make a mistake or two from time to time in your field of expertise.
But after years of having red ink strewn across your essays or the essays of your friends, I don't mind the animosity. We deserve it.
No, no. I think merit pay could be a great thing. There are issues with how you evaluate merit, but those can certainly be ironed out.
My point was, if you could fire bad teachers, teacher morale, at least among good teachers, would rise, and a lot of the performance issues would go away. More hyperbole than anything. I just see having a quality teaching staff as the primary factor in improving schools.
Nice false dichotomy you're setting up here. I can use it for my AP English Lang students. You see, it's possible to want to discuss the issue maturely without being pushed to one extreme or the other. I actually live in a non-union state, and I like it that way. I want more competition between schools, but I think the answer lies somewhere in the middle.
For most school systems, summer break is two months. Kids get longer, but we have post and pre-planning. In addition, teachers that are professional about their jobs, spend much of the summer planning, attending conferences, and working on lessons and other things that we don't have time to do during the year.
Now, I'm not knocking it. I enjoy having a longer break in the summer than most people, but it really isn't enough time to really supplement your income.
If I were to ask you if an apple is past its ripest point, you would have difficulty telling if the apple I gave you was just a day past its prime. If the apple was rotten, you would just know.
The notion that you can't quantify bad teaching is somewhat of a red herring for this issue. We aren't talking about the two average teachers down the hall, we're talking about someone who is clearly bad. When I was in high school, I had a Physics teacher who didn't notice when two fellow students drew a six foot tall penis on the back wall. He spoke in half sentences, and couldn't remember how physics worked. He should have been fired. When you get into the middle of the road teachers, firing them is a whole other issue.
I think there is a balance. Should teachers have recourse for being fired over hearsay? Absolutely. Should a teacher be able to manipulate a political system for years to the detriment of the students? Nope.
My hope is people much smarter than me will find an answer.
It differs from system to system, but the main issues are failing to teach well. For us, there are three areas a teacher needs to have proficiency, content development, promoting engagement, and classroom management. The teacher has to be able to develop a lesson that is appropriate for the grade level, cognitive ability for the students in that classroom, and that covers the standards being taught. Most teachers can do this well.
Promoting engagement is where a lot of problems arise. Can a teacher make a lesson engaging? Do they ask relevant questions that probe a student's understanding or that prompt a student to look further for a more robust understanding? Does the teacher work with all the students in the room in ways that at least attempt to get a student involved.
Finally, teachers have to manage the classroom well. Do they spend forty minutes taking roll and asking about the students' plans for the weekend, or do they get right to the lesson? How do they deal with students who are acting appropriately, or inappropriately? Do they control the situation or let the student? Etc.
If a teacher isn't proficient in many of these areas or is egregiously negligent in one of them, you can begin the process to terminate employment.
Of course there are several steps involved.
Conference with the teacher, giving details about what the shortcomings are.
Observe the teacher again, if the problems are fixed, the teacher is ok.
If the problems are still there, you have to conference again and give the teacher a remediation plan. They often have to observe other teachers and work with other teachers on how they are running their classroom.
If there are still issues, depending on the severity, you can begin termination proceedings.
If the system agrees with your position, they terminate the contract, but then the teacher can appeal. For us, the system often wins.
Of course, the article is correct that it is much easier to fire someone who is negligent. Proving a teacher is bad in the classroom isn't easy.
I'm curious about what was happening on the back end. By law administrators can't talk about personnel issues, or aren't supposed to, so in my experience, there might be some arm twisting behind the scenes. That's even more so if the teacher has seniority.
If that isn't the case in Missouri, I might just move on over!
It actually is happening in many states. There are issues with the validity of those tests.
There are other issues also, like the cost of implementing them, and school districts that start to place too much emphasis on the test, but it is happening. Hopefully with technology integration, the process will eventually be relatively painless and inexpensive, but that will be in the medium distant future.
Is there any reasonable and objective way to determine a teacher's performance that is independent of the students in her classroom?
Yes.
I'm an English language arts department chair at a very diverse school. As part of my job, I have to observe teachers in all different kinds of classes, AP to freshman remedial classes. It is easy to see which teacher is a good teacher and which isn't. To go with a nice car analogy. If a mechanic is working on a PoS or a Rolls, you can still tell if he knows what he is doing.
A good teacher cares, asks questions, engages the students with appropriate questions and pushes them to do a little better than they currently are regardless of the class. The bad teacher doesn't.
Now as to the subjective point. When did objective become synonymous with truth? My evaluations are subjective, with objective elements. Nevertheless, I have the experience to be right subjectively.
Whoa! Slow down tiger. I don't disagree with some of what you are saying, but the vitriolic rhetoric will get us nowhere. I would humbly suggest you go into the classrooms you're talking about and see what is going on. Don't pick one, that wouldn't be quite fair. There are actually a lot of wonderful schools that are working to produce independent thinkers (don't read as liberal). These students will be very successful in the world, both in a job and in more abstract endeavors.
What I'd like is a reasoned discussion about what is working and what isn't. I'd argue saying limit the course work to what matters is a pretty complex suggestion. So, what do we see as valid? What is the mission of schools? Who gets to decide?
Now the pay raise point, you can scream that to the heavens!
I'm actually a high school department chair, so I know a little about this issue. The problem is not finding good teachers. There are actually a lot of good applicants whenever an opening occurs in my department. The problem is the difficulty in getting rid of bad teachers. The process even where I live, a state without unions, is tremendously difficult. It can be done, but it isn't easy.
Personally, I believe this issue is the primary one impacting our students' success. If we could fire bad teachers, we could get rid of the concept of merit pay, incentives and all the other band-aid-on-a-broken-arm solutions.
CMB looks like now back a few billion years and it hits a singularity
That's assuming you don't subscribe to one theory from string theory, brane collision. If that theory gains momentum, and it has some within string theory community, the universe might actually be a trillion years or older.
Of course, IAAET (I am an English teacher), so I could be wrong.
Encourage your boys to run for office. We still have the final say, and if we had people run for office who don't want to be there, but see the importance of changing the system, we could get ourselves out of this mess. Too often though, we the people become apathetic. It's understandable, but still sad.
Just to answer this quickly, and then if we'd like to continue, let's take it to email. I'm at scott{dot]kent[at]gmail[dot}com.
I truly appreciate your comments on creation, and I'm sure that a supreme being certainly could create a world in seven days if he wanted, but I'd encourage you to read Genesis from beginning to end. In it, you will find two, completely separate, creation stories. I could summarize them, but it's better if you see them first hand. The reason there are two stories is because at the original council, there were four stories, called the J P E and D creation stories. I don't remember what the letters stood for, but one was judges, one priests and two others. They settled on two of them that made it into Genesis. When you read the two, you can probably tell which one was written by the priests.
So I'd love to keep talking about this, but I'd suggest you read a couple of things and listen to a pretty interesting program. Check out the Council of Nicea, the first conference Constantine set up, in order to refine the consolidate the beliefs of the church. There have been several conferences since. Also, most churches have their own constitutions or Disciplines that define their government and beliefs. In addition, consider http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/programs/2009/darwin/. An interesting program discussing Christianity and evolution. For instance, it wasn't until recently, around the time of Martin Luther, that people began to interpret the Old Testament as literal.
A couple of important points though, consider when / how the Bible was written. Give it some time. Not about the belief that God is all-powerful, but that the Bible is a human-created text. Look up how the Bible was created and how churches have come to define their beliefs within the context of this man-made creation. Look up the verses I referenced before, and those are just a few of the verses in scripture that contradict some of the found tenants of the Christian faith. It's interesting and will not shake your faith. It will enrich it. But take your time, be willing to explore, and see what you think. Just look at the historical evidence of how the Bible came to be. It's fascinating, but very human. Also, keep in mind what I said about parables. If Jesus used them, why not the Father?
Ok, misread your first post, but I'd still like to challenge your position. I realize many people believe as you do, and understand and appreciate the faith you demonstrate, but I'm a preacher's kid and have done a lot of research about the Bible and Christianity in general. Truth be told, Christians have always chosen which parts of the Bible they are going to believe.
Way back from the time of Charlemagne, clergy chose which Gospels to include in the Bible. The argument could be made that they were divinely inspired, but that's a slippery slope since so many versions have been written with glaring inconsistencies. So which Bible is truly the word of God?
If we assume that the Bible is the inviolate word of God, then how do you reconcile the two creation stories in Genesis?
More importantly, how do you justify defying the word of God in your church? Do you force a brother to marry his deceased brother's wife if she bore no children (Deuteronomy 25:5)? Do you let women enter the church during their menstruation or within thirty-three days after giving birth (Leviticus 12:4)?
Most churches or denominations, have actually had conferences on these issues and have established rules that say generally that the old social Jewish laws put forth in the Bible don't hold sway over the church, but focus instead on the lessons of Jesus and the moral laws from the Old Testament. I have no issue with them making these decisions, but making them invalidates the claim that the Bible is the direct word of God. It seems to an outsider like churches get to pick and choose which laws they follow. Again, I don't disagree with their right to make these decisions, but if you are picking and choosing, for whatever reason, man is interpreting what should or should not be in the Bible. If that is true, then it isn't man arguing against the word of God, but rather man arguing against man ABOUT what is or is not the word of God.
Again, I applaud your faith and commitment, but I would respectfully argue about what is considered the inviolate word of God. I would also argue that you can have faith, consider the Bible as mans' long time interpretation of the will of God, collected and culled through our culture's wisdom, to give us a wonderful moral guideline. Is it not also possible that the God of the Old Testament also spoke in parables as Jesus did? When we think of Jesus discussing the eye of a needle, we don't think he really wants us to force a camel through such a narrow space; instead we embrace the moral lesson he intended. Might we also do the same thing with the story of Job, or Noah, or the stories in Genesis, that teach us some of the most basic lessons of faith, compassion, goodness and badness?
I'm surprised you didn't go into Deuteronomy at all. There are a lot of inconsistencies there that would help present an argument of the duality of positions in the Bible. If you're trying to argue with someone about faith, you can't use science as the basic means to contradict them. Presumably, people who believe in a supreme deity also believe said deity can perform miracles.
As to misreading my post, irony is an easy thing to miss when it's written.
Someone either praying or asking for divine intervention, while seeking to remove public references to God is ironic.
Slashdot Mirror
For those of you who didn't pay attention in your 4000 level lit classes...
A brief selection from Finnegan's Wake by James Joyce. Arguably the most complex novel in the English language.
http://finwake.com/1024chapter1/1024finn1.htm
If Chaucer read Shakespeare, he would have thought Shakespeare was butchering the language. If Shakespeare read Dickens, Shakespeare would have thought Dickens had butchered the language.
Language evolves. Saying one rule-based system, (this doesn't apply to colloquialisms or slang) is "butchered" is just a modern day form of prejudice.
I would agree it is relatively subjective, but not entirely so. Nevertheless, subjectivity isn't a bad thing as long as there are checks against a principal's power.
Can this power be abused? Certainly, but that would be the rare exception. It's dangerous to implement an entire system that solely focuses on the rare chance of misconduct. We need a more robust system. The examples in the article are some pretty heinous situations, not examples of a principal with an axe to grind.
There is a wonderful thing in advanced composition called a functional fragment.
You're technically right though, even if Kafka, Joyce, Hemingway, and other greats chose to use fragments for effect.
Even without that though, I'm not sure what you do for a living, but I'd venture to say you might make a mistake or two from time to time in your field of expertise.
But after years of having red ink strewn across your essays or the essays of your friends, I don't mind the animosity. We deserve it.
No, no. I think merit pay could be a great thing. There are issues with how you evaluate merit, but those can certainly be ironed out.
My point was, if you could fire bad teachers, teacher morale, at least among good teachers, would rise, and a lot of the performance issues would go away. More hyperbole than anything. I just see having a quality teaching staff as the primary factor in improving schools.
Nice false dichotomy you're setting up here. I can use it for my AP English Lang students. You see, it's possible to want to discuss the issue maturely without being pushed to one extreme or the other. I actually live in a non-union state, and I like it that way. I want more competition between schools, but I think the answer lies somewhere in the middle.
For most school systems, summer break is two months. Kids get longer, but we have post and pre-planning. In addition, teachers that are professional about their jobs, spend much of the summer planning, attending conferences, and working on lessons and other things that we don't have time to do during the year.
Now, I'm not knocking it. I enjoy having a longer break in the summer than most people, but it really isn't enough time to really supplement your income.
As an American educator, who for the most part is proud of my profession, let me say...I think I love you.
If I were to ask you if an apple is past its ripest point, you would have difficulty telling if the apple I gave you was just a day past its prime. If the apple was rotten, you would just know.
The notion that you can't quantify bad teaching is somewhat of a red herring for this issue. We aren't talking about the two average teachers down the hall, we're talking about someone who is clearly bad. When I was in high school, I had a Physics teacher who didn't notice when two fellow students drew a six foot tall penis on the back wall. He spoke in half sentences, and couldn't remember how physics worked. He should have been fired. When you get into the middle of the road teachers, firing them is a whole other issue.
I think there is a balance. Should teachers have recourse for being fired over hearsay? Absolutely. Should a teacher be able to manipulate a political system for years to the detriment of the students? Nope.
My hope is people much smarter than me will find an answer.
It differs from system to system, but the main issues are failing to teach well. For us, there are three areas a teacher needs to have proficiency, content development, promoting engagement, and classroom management. The teacher has to be able to develop a lesson that is appropriate for the grade level, cognitive ability for the students in that classroom, and that covers the standards being taught. Most teachers can do this well.
Promoting engagement is where a lot of problems arise. Can a teacher make a lesson engaging? Do they ask relevant questions that probe a student's understanding or that prompt a student to look further for a more robust understanding? Does the teacher work with all the students in the room in ways that at least attempt to get a student involved.
Finally, teachers have to manage the classroom well. Do they spend forty minutes taking roll and asking about the students' plans for the weekend, or do they get right to the lesson? How do they deal with students who are acting appropriately, or inappropriately? Do they control the situation or let the student? Etc.
If a teacher isn't proficient in many of these areas or is egregiously negligent in one of them, you can begin the process to terminate employment.
Of course there are several steps involved.
Of course, the article is correct that it is much easier to fire someone who is negligent. Proving a teacher is bad in the classroom isn't easy.
I'm curious about what was happening on the back end. By law administrators can't talk about personnel issues, or aren't supposed to, so in my experience, there might be some arm twisting behind the scenes. That's even more so if the teacher has seniority.
If that isn't the case in Missouri, I might just move on over!
It actually is happening in many states. There are issues with the validity of those tests.
There are other issues also, like the cost of implementing them, and school districts that start to place too much emphasis on the test, but it is happening. Hopefully with technology integration, the process will eventually be relatively painless and inexpensive, but that will be in the medium distant future.
Welcome to the club man. It's a pain in the ass but worth every minute of it. Just don't forget that part about loving teaching.
Yes.
I'm an English language arts department chair at a very diverse school. As part of my job, I have to observe teachers in all different kinds of classes, AP to freshman remedial classes. It is easy to see which teacher is a good teacher and which isn't. To go with a nice car analogy. If a mechanic is working on a PoS or a Rolls, you can still tell if he knows what he is doing.
A good teacher cares, asks questions, engages the students with appropriate questions and pushes them to do a little better than they currently are regardless of the class. The bad teacher doesn't.
Now as to the subjective point. When did objective become synonymous with truth? My evaluations are subjective, with objective elements. Nevertheless, I have the experience to be right subjectively.
Whoa! Slow down tiger. I don't disagree with some of what you are saying, but the vitriolic rhetoric will get us nowhere. I would humbly suggest you go into the classrooms you're talking about and see what is going on. Don't pick one, that wouldn't be quite fair. There are actually a lot of wonderful schools that are working to produce independent thinkers (don't read as liberal). These students will be very successful in the world, both in a job and in more abstract endeavors.
What I'd like is a reasoned discussion about what is working and what isn't. I'd argue saying limit the course work to what matters is a pretty complex suggestion. So, what do we see as valid? What is the mission of schools? Who gets to decide?
Now the pay raise point, you can scream that to the heavens!
I'm actually a high school department chair, so I know a little about this issue. The problem is not finding good teachers. There are actually a lot of good applicants whenever an opening occurs in my department. The problem is the difficulty in getting rid of bad teachers. The process even where I live, a state without unions, is tremendously difficult. It can be done, but it isn't easy.
Personally, I believe this issue is the primary one impacting our students' success. If we could fire bad teachers, we could get rid of the concept of merit pay, incentives and all the other band-aid-on-a-broken-arm solutions.
That's assuming you don't subscribe to one theory from string theory, brane collision. If that theory gains momentum, and it has some within string theory community, the universe might actually be a trillion years or older.
Of course, IAAET (I am an English teacher), so I could be wrong.
As an English teacher, I teared up reading this thread.
Encourage your boys to run for office. We still have the final say, and if we had people run for office who don't want to be there, but see the importance of changing the system, we could get ourselves out of this mess. Too often though, we the people become apathetic. It's understandable, but still sad.
Just to answer this quickly, and then if we'd like to continue, let's take it to email. I'm at scott{dot]kent[at]gmail[dot}com.
I truly appreciate your comments on creation, and I'm sure that a supreme being certainly could create a world in seven days if he wanted, but I'd encourage you to read Genesis from beginning to end. In it, you will find two, completely separate, creation stories. I could summarize them, but it's better if you see them first hand. The reason there are two stories is because at the original council, there were four stories, called the J P E and D creation stories. I don't remember what the letters stood for, but one was judges, one priests and two others. They settled on two of them that made it into Genesis. When you read the two, you can probably tell which one was written by the priests.
So I'd love to keep talking about this, but I'd suggest you read a couple of things and listen to a pretty interesting program. Check out the Council of Nicea, the first conference Constantine set up, in order to refine the consolidate the beliefs of the church. There have been several conferences since. Also, most churches have their own constitutions or Disciplines that define their government and beliefs. In addition, consider http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/programs/2009/darwin/. An interesting program discussing Christianity and evolution. For instance, it wasn't until recently, around the time of Martin Luther, that people began to interpret the Old Testament as literal.
A couple of important points though, consider when / how the Bible was written. Give it some time. Not about the belief that God is all-powerful, but that the Bible is a human-created text. Look up how the Bible was created and how churches have come to define their beliefs within the context of this man-made creation. Look up the verses I referenced before, and those are just a few of the verses in scripture that contradict some of the found tenants of the Christian faith. It's interesting and will not shake your faith. It will enrich it. But take your time, be willing to explore, and see what you think. Just look at the historical evidence of how the Bible came to be. It's fascinating, but very human. Also, keep in mind what I said about parables. If Jesus used them, why not the Father?
Ok, misread your first post, but I'd still like to challenge your position. I realize many people believe as you do, and understand and appreciate the faith you demonstrate, but I'm a preacher's kid and have done a lot of research about the Bible and Christianity in general. Truth be told, Christians have always chosen which parts of the Bible they are going to believe.
Way back from the time of Charlemagne, clergy chose which Gospels to include in the Bible. The argument could be made that they were divinely inspired, but that's a slippery slope since so many versions have been written with glaring inconsistencies. So which Bible is truly the word of God?
If we assume that the Bible is the inviolate word of God, then how do you reconcile the two creation stories in Genesis?
More importantly, how do you justify defying the word of God in your church? Do you force a brother to marry his deceased brother's wife if she bore no children (Deuteronomy 25:5)? Do you let women enter the church during their menstruation or within thirty-three days after giving birth (Leviticus 12:4)?
Most churches or denominations, have actually had conferences on these issues and have established rules that say generally that the old social Jewish laws put forth in the Bible don't hold sway over the church, but focus instead on the lessons of Jesus and the moral laws from the Old Testament. I have no issue with them making these decisions, but making them invalidates the claim that the Bible is the direct word of God. It seems to an outsider like churches get to pick and choose which laws they follow. Again, I don't disagree with their right to make these decisions, but if you are picking and choosing, for whatever reason, man is interpreting what should or should not be in the Bible. If that is true, then it isn't man arguing against the word of God, but rather man arguing against man ABOUT what is or is not the word of God.
Again, I applaud your faith and commitment, but I would respectfully argue about what is considered the inviolate word of God. I would also argue that you can have faith, consider the Bible as mans' long time interpretation of the will of God, collected and culled through our culture's wisdom, to give us a wonderful moral guideline. Is it not also possible that the God of the Old Testament also spoke in parables as Jesus did? When we think of Jesus discussing the eye of a needle, we don't think he really wants us to force a camel through such a narrow space; instead we embrace the moral lesson he intended. Might we also do the same thing with the story of Job, or Noah, or the stories in Genesis, that teach us some of the most basic lessons of faith, compassion, goodness and badness?
I'm surprised you didn't go into Deuteronomy at all. There are a lot of inconsistencies there that would help present an argument of the duality of positions in the Bible. If you're trying to argue with someone about faith, you can't use science as the basic means to contradict them. Presumably, people who believe in a supreme deity also believe said deity can perform miracles.
As to misreading my post, irony is an easy thing to miss when it's written.
Someone either praying or asking for divine intervention, while seeking to remove public references to God is ironic.
God willing.
I don't know if this is what they had in mind, but...http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/01/14/2126204