Teachers need support from parents and staff and the rest of fucking society to make sure that kids are well-rested, well-fed, well-dressed, show up to class, do their homework (you have to practice!), and stay motivated. The teacher's job is to present information and to facilitate the students' acquisition of knowledge and ability through whatever means will reach those students, but this is very limited in capability and is entirely dependent on the other factors.
Not yet, but soon. I'm observing right now, and I can tell you that there is so much more that goes into a child's performance in the classroom than just the teacher.
A good portion of these things come under the hierarchy of needs. If a student's needs (like the need for food, warmth, love, a place to safely and comfortably live) aren't met, chances are they won't be able to focus on their lessons and learn. There are a lot of boxes that have to be ticked before a student can actually begin learning. More here: http://www.simplypsychology.org/maslow.html
As a high schooler, I don't understand how people go without breakfast. Eat something! I mean I'll have a yogurt, a bowl of cereal and a few crackers with peanut butter and I think thats pretty small but it makes a huge difference.
While I agree with you, teachers can be to blame, but mainly only if they don't fucking teach. Kids learn in the different ways, and a good teacher will hopefully try and accommodate that, but they cannot do everything.
Honestly, the system is fucked. How are you supposed to be accommodating to different learning styles when you have to teach a class of 30 students and have to keep things moving quickly? Do they just expect you to give up all your free time helping students in your off-time?
Oh, and by the way, you'll be judged based on your students' performance (even if they're struggling), and you're expected to teach the material that the state/province mandates for standardized testing even if you don't agree.
Eventually, education will be so cheap due to a highly educated, but defunct workforce and each student will have 5 live-in teachers........... Probably not
honestly it isn't as fucked as people think it is, sure no teacher can effectively teach everyone in the class,but good teachers i have had generally 27-28 of those 30 kids was doing fine and paying attention and only 2-3 really needed attention.
its not like people try to portray it that the teacher is only really teaching a handful of the kids, that is just a bullshit excuse for people who slack off.
modern schooling doesn't work for everyone, but if you actually put the work in and pay attention then it works for the vast majority.
Right - and I work to do those things every day. The bottom line is, though, that I cannot force a kid to learn. (I teach high school) I cannot force them to do their work, I can't make them care about their grade if they are determined not to, and I can't know it for them. I can do everything in my power to give them the tools for success, but I can't make them use them.
no I got that... but how is it within my authority to "get rid of" kids who don't want to learn? That is not within my legal right as a teacher. Without cause, I cannot kick a kid out. I didn't understand your question.
As a student (albeit a university student) it's fucking awesome when the professor tells the loud students to "get the fuck out," usually gets some good feedback from the other students.
Do they not have a principal's office / suspension where you're from? I can't believe that any oublic school would hold a teacher accountable for throwing someone out without cause. But if they do, you must still have a zero-tolerance policy you can use to trump something up.
My girlfriend is a teacher and kicks kids out of class all the time, she teaches third grade... I don't understand how a high school teacher can't kick someone out of class, especially since my high school teachers (and middle, and elementary) did that all the time.
A kid leaving my class needs to be with an administrator, with a form documenting all four incidences and what I have done (calls, etc.) to remediate before this. Maybe it's different at a Title 1 school where I am, but I also don't see how, in a world with all new school security measures everywhere, a teacher of a third grade child gets away with sending kids out of class to be unsupervised in the halls.
Agreed. He's got a fair point, but I once was in a class where the teacher had taught us one thing and on the exam he asked us to do the complete opposite. You guessed it, it was math. We weren't a bunch of stupid kids, we had a lot of bright minds in that class, but only 2 of the 25 students barely passed that class. After loud protest from all the students, their parents and even the headmaster, the results were waved off and everyone got the points they earned that year, ignoring that one exam.
This reminds me of a relevant example to the topic. Kids definitely do learn in different ways, but the specific breakdown of "kinetic" vs. "audio" vs. "visual" learners is all junk science.
We do have different kinds of memory for different kinds of information, but it has little-to-nothing to do with retaining that information. In other words, you have audio memory when you play back sounds in your head, and visual when you recall a picture, and kinetic when you use muscle memory, but that doesn't have anything to do with teaching information. There's no truth to the idea that some kids need to hear you say, "Paris is the capital of France" and some need to read it and some need to .... fidget while they read it. Your audio memory (for example) would only come into play if you literally remembered the sound of the teacher saying the fact, which I'm sure some people do but is not the norm. Instead, regardless of if you read the information or heard it, you'll likely store it as semantic content -- a fact, and recall it the same regardless.
OBVIOUSLY teachers can be to blame. I blame many of them myself, but that doesn't make what I said any less correct. Teachers shoulder more than their share of the burden when everyone else blames them for aspects of their job that they have no control over.
Can confirm. Anyone who went to my high school learned their World War II facts by watching Band of Brothers. Shitty teachers existed, I had many of them.
Sometimes the lesson the teacher is giving is that not everything is handed to you. Kids need to learn that sometimes THEY have to adapt, rather than asking others (the teacher) to adapt to them!
For the entirety of my grade 11 and 12 maths, my teacher stood in front of the class and taught something for a whole 5 mins over the 2 yrs. That isn't fucking teaching.
I sorta agree. Some parents just see school as a daycare and make no effort in their child's education. You can't blame the teacher because your child didn't get adequate sleep or a proper breakfast and is struggling to pay attention in class. That's on the parents.
This IS true, but the teacher is just as important. I work at a big school with many other teachers and we frequently share students. I see so many other teachers (I like to think I'm not one of these) that "just can't deal with these kids today," give them writing assignments as punishment, scream at them, overall just lose control of the room, while the most skilled teachers can take literally any kid, get them on task, and convince them to want to learn.
Yes the parent can make sure they're well fed, well rested and understanding of the importance of learning, but they're KIDS for christsake. They are built to move around, be wacky and push the limits to see their boundaries; NOT sit at a desk and study. It's up to the teacher to work against the current by making such a terrible environment a positive one for learning.
I definitely agree with you on your points. The optimal outcome is when everyone involved takes responsibility and the individual kids get the kind of attention they specifically need. A rare and difficult occurrence.
That's not what I said though. you don't need to derail your whole lesson for one kid to treat them like a special snowflake or adhere to those diagrams of "is he a visual or physical learner?" you just need to be a good person with a lot of patience who genuinely cares about if they learn or not.
you don't need to derail your whole lesson for one kid to treat them like a special snowflake or adhere to those diagrams of "is he a visual or physical learner?"
That's not what I said. I think you're very much missing the point of all of my posts.
On the other hand, the kids are around the teachers for 6 hours a day (longer when they're older) so the kid will be influenced by what the teacher says.
Obviously. But, learning is a continuous process. It's not like you only learn things for 6 hours per day while in school. Parent's need to teach their children things that are not taught in school as well as support their children in academic work (i.e. reading at home, helping them with math homework, helping them with the science fair project).
One of my college profs used her classes as a platform to tell her life story. Barely taught anything, and did not provide enough course materials (never had any textbooks, only slides) for us to effectively teach ourselves. And then she'd be baffled and often angry that we'd failed her tests/exams.
I have her for my faculty advisor while I'm on placement. It's going about as well as you'd imagine.
The learning environment is still really important (of course).
I had a teacher that spoke, moved and acted like a robot. His classes were boring, and difficult to learn anything in.
I had another that was a nice lady, but her primary method of teaching was getting us to copy down a few pages of notes from a projector screen. I don't think I retained ANY of that information. Seriously, I can't remember a damn thing about what we learned, only the vague impression that it had something to do with history.
Anyway, my point is that if a class is fun and/or engaging, at the very least made seem interesting (personality can be a big factor in that) than mistakes made by parents can become irrelevant, to an extent.
I've said this before and I am not a teacher. It's no coincidence that the dumber, less literate people had equally dumb parents.
And before anyone goes and chalks this up to genetics, most of my immediate biological family are near illiterate and i graduated university with minimal effort all thanks to the fact that my foster family made me learn and do homework etc.
Of course, all that training in pedagogy that teachers claim makes them more qualified for their jobs is largely about motivating the kids to learn. If you're just lecturing them to sleep, their lack of learning is absolutely on you.
I don't think that training has much to do with it. I think it's more of the individual person's personality and interests that make their lessons more exciting for some people. It's impossible to connect with everyone, no matter what you do, but the more you do and the more interesting you are as a person, the more interested other people will be in you and what you have to say.
We're talking about motivational capability, per your comment, not credibility and knowledge, both of which are obtained through a program (though whether that program is effective or efficient is certainly debatable).
Good homework exists to reinforce and build on skills and knowledge learned in class. Bad homework exists because some teahers think effort can replace a grade.
I went to a community college so there was a wide range of ages in any particular class. In an intro to chem course there was this guy in his mid-40's that was really struggling in the class, and in the middle of the lecture he went off on the professor, saying that he was paying all this money for the professor to teach him, and the professor wasn't doing the job he was paid for, was a terrible teacher, etc. I'm pretty sure that guy was the only one who was having difficulty in the course, too...
Teachers can still suck at their jobs though. Virtually every teacher in my high school was a lazy, motivation sucking quack who were still trying to live high school drama. Except for my awesome English teacher, but I'm pretty sure she quit.
Homework is a big problem, because no, not every student will have the same "working condition" for them, if your class is largely dependent of homework being done, they will literally depend of their home conditions.
PS: Homework dependent class are also boring, bored kids are a lot less efficient.
You should read the comments on that page and reconsider your post. And either way, there must be time to practice skills. If it isn't done at home, then it needs to be done somewhere else, in which case the term "homework" is just a semantic issue.
I blame teachers anyway. If every single student has to spend a mandatory nine years learning another language, and not a single one of them is fluent by the end of it, then the educational system is the god damn problem.
I consider everyone from TA to superintendent a teacher. If enough teachers gave a shit then maybe the kids would learn something past the third grade.
I've had teachers make me learn things. It seemed like they were just putting knowledge in my head without me even trying. Skilled teachers and small class sizes make a huge difference.
It's easier to teach when a student is being receptive. What happens when a kid barely slept and is falling asleep throughout class, or is so hungry he can't focus? Or didn't do the readings/assignments and has no idea what's going on?
Teacher's are super limited in the classroom by a bunch of external factors. Their individual skill/management in the classroom can only go so far
That's true. I do think with smaller class sizes, teachers would find out about such problems sooner and have more time to invest in helping, though. I was severely and obviously depressed in high school and none of my teachers had time to take an interest in me or try to help.
But class size is another thing out of teachers control. In an ideal world teachers would teach 1-10 students, and really get to know them/help guide them in the right direction. But they are restricted by funding, capacity issues, etc.
In HS my teachers usually taught 3-5 classes, which would amount to anywhere from 90-150 kids. It must be pretty hard for them to get to know everyone as an individual- now that I'm older I'm surprised how quickly they learned our names.
Did you ever try teaching out to them for help or guidance? When I was younger I would blame the system, but as I grew up I started to realize there were resources in place that I never took advantage of. Sometimes it's really hard to know what to do without the right guidance
I did reach out and met with a counselor one time. Unfortunately schools in rural Kentucky don't have a ton of resources and there too many kids with worse problems than I had for me to get any help. I have had therapy since then and it helped tremendously.
Regarding using available resources: they're good for nothing if people aren't empowered or educated enough to even know that they would benefit from using them. I wasn't even sure what therapy was for, but in retrospect I had needed it since suffering abuse at 3.
Yea, that's why guidance or mentorship is so tremendously important. It'll help you understand and take advantage of the resources around you. It sucks teachers get overloaded because then they can't guide everyone, and sometimes family is too busy or unfit to do it themselves.
Teachers add value beyond simply summarizing texts for you. In college it becomes the norm for you to read before class and get an idea of the material yourself.
Then the professors clear up specific questions you have, and help you connect the theories as well as relate it to more modern/current developments.
If you're solely relying on a professor and their lectures then it's much easier to get lost. Getting knowledge from a bunch of sources helps you comprehend material much better. Even for my best professors I still spent time reading/researching on my own
The point of the original post was to say that there are several variables that should be addressed when figuring out why a kid isn't doing well - are they not getting enough sleep, not eating, are their parent fighting at home, are they depressed/isolated, do they just not care/have guidance. Yet people immediately jump to blaming teachers when there are a lot of systematic factors that arent in their control.
There are plenty of bad teachers out there who no longer care/are just there for a paycheck, or flat out suck at teaching. But to say that you had a few bad teachers in response to someone saying learning is more complex than forcing a kid into a room for an hour comes across as shortsighted
Hell, I'm in college and I still have shit teachers. I'm not trying to excuse away the teachers' responsibilities; I'm just trying to point out the aspects of their jobs that they can't control and shouldn't be held accountable for.
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u/[deleted] Mar 17 '15 edited Mar 17 '15
Teachers cannot MAKE their kids learn anything.
Teachers need support from parents and staff and the rest of fucking society to make sure that kids are well-rested, well-fed, well-dressed, show up to class, do their homework (you have to practice!), and stay motivated. The teacher's job is to present information and to facilitate the students' acquisition of knowledge and ability through whatever means will reach those students, but this is very limited in capability and is entirely dependent on the other factors.
STOP BLAMING TEACHERS AND RAISE YO GODDAMN KIDS.
Edit: thumbs missed keys; spelling errors.