procrastinaters.com

sueZq wrote:

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I hear where your coming from, but I can't imagine most teachers being willing to learn the topics well enough to teach to a group

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Well the idea is that when the students take more initiative in the learning process, less time is dedicated to developing lectures, grading worksheet assignments, etc, and more time is devoted to working with students one-on-one and learning along with the students some of the topics as they go. I'm speaking very generally about something that would be extremely class-specific (because the whole point of specialized learning is making things class specific), but that's how it would tend to work out in classes whose destiny are moreso decided by the students. Probably most of the classes would still have one set syllabus as decided by the teacher, but there would just be an assurance that students are mainly only in classes that they're interested in, highlight their strengths, are particularly practical for them, etc. So for example, getting kids who are really interested in Spanish in two Spanish classes and maybe even a Spanish club and going a little lighter on x class.

I love the part how ADHD increases as you travel east in the US! ..."People start losing interest in Oklahoma"

I disagree with your supplementary material. Sure teacher's have state objectives and material they have to meet but they also have some wiggle room, especially in high school. I remember learning about the red scare and how the government accused pretty much all of Hollywood and blacklisted them on circumstantial evidence. You can teach students to be critical of the government without teaching every single instance the government has been corrupt (the teachers don't have the time and the government pays them, so that might be a little counterproductive). Maybe you did say this and I'm just restating it, but I didn't pick up what you were putting down.

In your third supplementary material it seems like you what high school and public school to be more like college. I agree that it would be wonderful to have a special, individualized high school education, but that would take a huge amount of restructuring of the educational system through our government. It is a good idea, but I don't see it happening anytime soon on a national scale. As alternative life styles continue to become more main stream, maybe more alternative education private schools will begin cropping up, but I can't see public schools changing that drastically before the next thirty years. I feel like it would be a change on the scale of desegregation in schools ( you can wikipedia the date, in true style of this site.) If this applies to the college level already and I read it wrong, my advisor helped me pick the best classes for my learning style, within reason of what the college can offer. You have to be realistic and realize not every situation you experience will be optimal from the start, but you can still have the opportunity to learn. It's tough for me to compare this argument for high school in one breath and college in another because they are so different in terms of teaching styles and independence of the student.

I think your last argument really applies to creative fields and would not work well with all types of subject matter. Even though we did not pick topics to study in our science classes, we would present news and research articles related to our interested field of science once a week, so maybe that applies? I really think this is so subjective to each person's own educational journey: the schools they attended, their teachers, and their own personal interest and education.


I wrote this before reading the entire blog, so none of it may apply.

Op Ed Piece in New York Times.

OP-ED COLUMNIST
How Mrs. Grady Transformed Olly Neal
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: January 21, 2012


IF you want to understand how great teachers transform lives, listen to the story of Olly Neal.


Olly Neal
On the Ground


Damon Winter/The New York Times
Nicholas D. Kristof

A recent study showed how a great elementary schoolteacher can raise the lifetime earnings of a single class by $700,000. After I wrote about the study, skeptics of school reform wrote me to say: sure, a great teacher can make a difference in the right setting, but not with troubled, surly kids in a high-poverty environment. If you think that, or if you scoff at the statistics, then listen to Neal.

In the late 1950s, Olly Neal was a poor black kid with an attitude. He was one of 13 brothers and sisters in a house with no electricity, and his father was a farmer with a second-grade education. Neal attended a small school for black children — this was in the segregated South — and was always mouthing off. He remembers reducing his English teacher, Mildred Grady, to tears.

“I was not a nice kid,” he recalls. “I had a reputation. I was the only one who made her cry.”

Neal adds: “She would have had good reason to say, ‘this boy is incorrigible.’ ”

A regular shoplifter back then, Neal was caught stealing from the store where he worked part time. He seemed headed for a life in trouble.

Carolyn F. Blakely, then a new teacher at the school (who retired last year as the dean of the Honors College that now bears her name at the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff), remembers Neal as an at-risk kid prone to challenge authority. At the time, even teachers in the school called students “Mr.” or “Miss,” but Neal disrupted class by addressing her impertinently as “Carolyn.”

To deal with kids like him, Blakely told me, “I’d go home and stand in front of the mirror and practice being mean.”

One day in 1957, in the fall of his senior year, Neal cut Blakely’s class and wandered in the library, set up by Grady, the English teacher whom he had tormented. Neal wasn’t a reader, but he spotted a book with a risqué cover of a sexy woman.

Called “The Treasure of Pleasant Valley,” it was by Frank Yerby, a black author, and it looked appealing. Neal says he thought of checking it out, but he didn’t want word to get out to any of his classmates that he was reading a novel. That would have been humiliating.

“So I stole it.”

Neal tucked the book under his jacket and took it home — and loved it. After finishing the book, he sneaked it back into the library. And there, on the shelf, he noticed another novel by Yerby. He stole that one as well.

This book was also terrific. And, to Neal’s surprise, when he returned it to the shelf after finishing it, he found yet another by Yerby.

Four times this happened, and he caught the book bug. “Reading got to be a thing I liked,” he says. His trajectory changed, and he later graduated to harder novels, including those by Albert Camus, and he turned to newspapers and magazines as well. He went to college and later to law school.

In 1991, Neal was appointed the first black district prosecuting attorney in Arkansas. A few years later, he became a judge, and then an appellate court judge.

But there’s more.

At a high school reunion, Grady stunned Neal by confiding to him that she had spotted him stealing that first book. Her impulse was to confront him, but then, in a flash of understanding, she realized his embarrassment at being seen checking out a book.

So Grady kept quiet. The next Saturday, she told him, she drove 70 miles to Memphis to search the bookshops for another novel by Yerby. Finally, she found one, bought it and put it on the library bookshelf.

Twice more, Grady told Neal, she spent her Saturdays trekking to Memphis to buy books by Yerby — all in hopes of turning around a rude adolescent who had made her cry. She paid for the books out of her own pocket.

How can one measure Grady’s impact? Not only in Neal, but in the lives of those around him. His daughter, Karama, earned a doctorate in genetics, taught bioethics at Emory University, and now runs a community development program in Arkansas.

The big-hearted Grady, now dead, is a reminder that teachers may have the most important job in America. By all accounts, Grady transformed many other children as well, through more mundane methods.

To me, the lesson is that while there are no silver bullets to chip away at poverty or improve national competitiveness, improving the ranks of teachers is part of the answer. That’s especially true for needy kids, who often get the weakest teachers. That should be the civil rights scandal of our time.

The implication is that we need rigorous teacher evaluations, more pay for good teachers and more training and weeding-out of poor teachers. The need for more pay is simple. In the 1950s, outstanding women like Grady didn’t have many alternatives, and they became teachers. Grady was black, so she didn’t have many options other than teaching black children in a segregated school.

Today, women like Grady often become doctors, lawyers or bankers — professions with far higher salaries. If we want to recruit and retain the best teachers, we simply have to pay more — while also more aggressively thinning out those who don’t succeed. It’s worth it.

“There are some kids who can’t be reached,” Neal acknowledges. “But there are some that you can reach every now and then.” As his life attests.

-- Edited by Swimgirl on Monday 23rd of January 2012 07:55:53 PM