A rolling thread where we are teachers

Hello,

I was hoping that there may be discussion of How To Write A Teaching Philosophy on this thread, but there is none. How does one compose one of these things?

I found a lot of samples and just went from there

http://www.crlt.umich.edu/tstrategies/tstpts.php

hoo boy

I teach English to foreign students and I teach people how to teach English to foreign students and sometimes I teach people how to teach people to teach English to foreign students.

Does anyone know anything about getting single subject teaching credentials (e.g. for high school, etc.). I know it varies by state.

yes. you have to pass CBEST (in CA). You have to have a certain number of hours of student teaching. You can apply or look for some programs where you can actually get this credential while teaching at a private school, thereby still getting paid (because otherwise you don't get paid, and it makes it kind of hard to get a credential).

I missed this, thanks kyle!

Anyway, I start teaching film production in 3 weeks. Who wants to get schooled?

back to school tomorrow

just went to my classroom to hook up my laptop / PowerPoint and practice my first lecture to a giant, empty lecture hall

stoked!

So guys, I didn't get hired this year. I'm too expensive ... 2 Masters and 3 years experience put me out of the running in my cash-strapped state, and as of tomorrow morning I am an unemployed elementary school teacher. I've signed up for sub lists, etc., but this is ... very very difficult, and I'm looking at a year with low and irregular cashflow,as well as a more difficult time getting hired next year. In all, I sent out roughly 100 applications, with custom cover letters and glowing references and ... not one of my references got called; I didn't get an interview between May and today. It really sucks, and I'm not really sure what to do with my life right now.

This won't make you feel any better, but once I got about five years into teaching (also elementary), and was high enough on my board's seniority list that I was never in danger of being excessed, my lack of any extra qualifications--no ESL, no special ed, no French--actually became an advantage in making sure I'd always have my own classroom. There's nowhere else to put me.

I spent a few years supplying/substituting before going full time, and then--and now--the sub work in my board is extremely steady. I think our subs draw probably 90% of a full year's salary, some more.

remy, that is so disheartening. ordinarily I wd just say come to Texas but even jobs here are hard to come by now (you are still welcome to come to Texas, tho, if u don't mind 109 deg heat right now.)

Teaching: we enlist for the opportunity to counsel and educate tomorrow's youth, but we stay for the extra-long vacations.

had to sub a sixth grade health class
subject: body odor

apropos.

awesome

how do you teach about body odor? what's the lesson like?

"Okay: everybody gather around Tommy's desk for a second."

i did not have any prep time. So I talked extemporaneously about deodorant as a public service; we discussed the many implications of the phrase "your rights end where my nose begins" took a brief detour into the farts vs. pit odor discusison, and then talked about empathy, and how to pull somebody politely aside rather than publically call them out for stankiness.

Hello ILX.

I teach History, to 11-17 year olds in Northwest London.

Did do 2 years of TEFL in Barcelona.

I have plenty of body odour problems with my students routinely not showering but the worst thing is when students unilaterally decide to unload a bottle of deodorant in the room. But hey at least I don't have the problem of nits that my primary colleagues do.

Am off until Thursday!

can we keep teacher stuff on our 77 thread?
i plan on keeping anything personal on it at least

remy i'm curious what the discussion about noses and rights was like. feel free to bump the other thread though.

it's tuesday!

Tell me about your attendance policies! Especially if you teach at a post-secondary level. This is my first time getting to make up my own and I have some ideas, but I would like to compare them to what other people have done to see if I'm way off base. Thanks!

I am loving teaching right now. I got a real thrill yesterday imparting some arcane, theoretically impractical (in real-world terms, anyway) tech knowledge to one of my students yesterday and seeing him start to dig the process. I only wish teaching paid more (like enough to pay my student loans!) and I would do more of it =(

i taught my students the following words today and it was very satisfying:

monotonous/monotony/monotone
mellifluous

Did you kno that the "melli-" part is from the Latin word for "honey"?? A voice as sweet as honey!

I have some Mountain Flower Honey here on my desk and it's PRETTY SWEET.

I have laryngitis right now, and I had to teach yesterday entirely without my voice. Either in spite of, or because of, I taught a really amazing math lesson (on scale factor) and transformations using fake shrinky-dinks made from #6 plastic

"did you know"
Laurel, do you know me? Gah!

;)

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/05/science/new-test-for-computers-grading-essays-at-college-level.html?hp&_r=0

where are these clowns getting the 'keep resubmitting until you get it right' idea from?

also

Mark D. Shermis, a professor at the University of Akron in Ohio, supervised the Hewlett Foundation’s contest on automated essay scoring and wrote a paper about the experiment. In his view, the technology — though imperfect — has a place in educational settings.

With increasingly large classes, it is impossible for most teachers to give students meaningful feedback on writing assignments, he said. Plus, he noted, critics of the technology have tended to come from the nation’s best universities, where the level of pedagogy is much better than at most schools.

“Often they come from very prestigious institutions where, in fact, they do a much better job of providing feedback than a machine ever could,” Dr. Shermis said. “There seems to be a lack of appreciation of what is actually going on in the real world.”

= let's not kid ourselves southwest northern state u

e-boox watch students, report on them to teachers

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/09/technology/coursesmart-e-textbooks-track-students-progress-for-teachers.html?pagewanted=1&_r=4&hp&

“They caught me,” said Mr. Tejeda, 43. He has two jobs and three children, and can study only late at night. “Maybe I need to focus more,” he said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/20/education/score-corrections-qualify-nearly-2700-more-pupils-for-gifted-programs.html?hp

The errors were discovered when two parents, one a statistician, complained that their children had been incorrectly scored, the department said.

According to Pearson, three mistakes were made. Students’ ages, which are used to calculate their percentile ranking against students of similar age, were recorded in years and months, but should also have counted days to be precise. Incorrect scoring tables were used. And the formula used to combine the two test parts into one percentile ranking contained an error.

Earlier this week, the department said that score reports for 400 students had been lost, but that those tests had been found and were being scored.

One parent, Rena M. Ismail, 36, who had been told that her 5-year-old son, Hyder, was not eligible for a gifted seat, said the department informed her that her son had scored in the 89th percentile, when, by her math, he was in the 91st.

“I knew he got it,” she said. “I could see it. They told me I was mistaken.

“I am an educated person. I know how to add and multiply, and I knew he got in by his score sheet.”

http://www.citypages.com/2011-02-23/news/inside-the-multimillion-dollar-essay-scoring-business/full/

Then came the question from hell out of Louisiana: "What are the qualities of a good leader?"

One student wrote, "Martin Luther King Jr. was a good leader." With artfulness far beyond the student's age, the essay delved into King's history with the civil rights movement, pointing out the key moments that had shown his leadership.

There was just one problem: It didn't fit the rubric. The rubric liked a longer essay, with multiple sentences lauding key qualities of leadership such as "honesty" and "inspires people." This essay was incredibly concise, but got its point across. Nevertheless, the rubric said it was a 2. Puthoff knew it was a 2.

He hesitated the way he had been specifically trained not to. Then he hit, "3."

It didn't take long before a supervisor was in his face. He leaned down with a printout of the King essay.

"This really isn't a 3-style paper," the supervisor said.

Puthoff pointed out the smart use of examples and the exceptional prose. The supervisor just shook his head and pointed out how short the paragraphs were.

"You know, it's more of a 2," the supervisor repeated. "Not enough elaboration."

Puthoff quickly learned these were not arguments he could win. But as time went on, he found himself having more and more of them.

The great myth of rubrics as an objective panacea. They've been front and center in my board since I started 15 years ago--in the provincial marking I did for a few summers, in this thing that came in a few years ago called TCLP ("Teaching Critical Learning Pathways"--took me forever to stop accidentally calling it TLCP, after the "No Scrubs" group), in just about anything we come up with at the grade level (speeches, art assignments, etc.) They definitely make life easier--check, check, check, 3+, next--but the idea that you can eliminate the whims of subjectivity (setting aside whether you've even want to) is an illusion. From the linked article:

Although DiMaggio had been through a training process, he found himself tripped up as he began scoring the essays. What made the organization "good" as opposed to "excellent"? What happens when the kid doesn't answer the question at all, but writes with excellent organization about whatever the hell he wants?

And the people who do the training often have no idea either. I still remember a question on mean and median from one of the provincial tests--check that, assessments--I marked one summer. At first we were instructed that if the kid did everything right but had the two concepts backwards, that was an NE--not enough for a grade, essentially a zero. After 15 or 20 minutes of debate about this, word came back within the hour that such answers should be given a Level 2 (in the C-range). I guess you could say that's good, that they ultimately got it right, but I wonder instead about their original contention that such an answer deserved a zero.

What I generally do with a rubric is work backwards: go with my initial sense of what grade I want to give, then make the rubric fit the grade. I don't think where I end up is any more subjective than working in the other direction.

otm. grading is the art of pretend objectivity.

this is not surprising at all
i have friends who do grading for TOEFL and IB essays and everyone acknowledges that it's a bit of a farce but also not a bad way to make some extra cash
i don't think it means that grading rubrics are useless, just that factory grading is flawed

That's actually why I stopped doing the provincial marking: for the first few summers, there was lots of really valuable discussion every step of the way ("Is this a low 3 or a high 2? Why?"), which went on for as long as necessary, but gradually that gave way to no discussion, here's the rubric, now mark x number of booklets in y amount of time or you won't be invited back.

I don't know, LL--the main value I see in rubrics is from the teacher's point of view, that they make it easy to mark a class set of something very quickly. I don't know how much students get out of them. They're supposed to clarify for the student why a certain grade was given--look at the categories, look at the criteria--but if I try to write thoughtful commentary to go along with my grade (which takes time, which is why they can be useful as a teacher), to me that's just as good.

Actually, I realize they're supposed to be prescriptive, too: here are the expectations for the assignment, here's how the grade will match up with how well you meet those expectations. But I think I do that anyway when I make up an assignment sheet: here's what I'm looking for, and there'll be (for example) 12 marks for your information, 5 marks for the quality of your writing, and 3 marks for neatness and overall presentation. I think that plus relevant commentary when you mark the assignment works just as well.

i'm not gonna sit around on a sunday morning debating the utility of rubrics, but i find them useful for more than just speed and ease. just as one little example, my students sometimes also like to use them as a checklist to make sure they're paying attention to the assignment and have done what they need to do in order to succeed on the assignment. assignment sheets help, but they need to see it in several different places/ways sometimes. the usefulness of a rubric really depends on a wide array of very different factors, many of which don't really apply to the situation being described in the mass standardized grading above.

I'm positive the Velvet Underground's "Sunday Morning" was all about debating the utility of rubrics. No other time makes as much sense.

ILXteachers: i'm hoping one of you can help me out -

my friend and her partner are thinking about moving to california from NZ, and i'm trying to find info on how teaching jobs work for foreigners. she is just finishing up her teaching degree this year, so she has never actually worked as a teacher. my amateur google skills didn't turn up much info, so if anyone has a useful link or two, i'd greatly appreciate it (i REALLY REALLY want my friend to move here).

what part of california? a lot of districts aren't hiring right now because of the state budget crisis.

here's the best link for finding public school teaching positions: http://www.edjoin.org/advancedSearch.aspx

i'm not sure her teaching credential would have reciprocity in california. but supposing it did, here's how she could parlay that into a california teaching credential.

http://www.ctc.ca.gov/credentials/leaflets/cl870.pdf

thanks! i think they are looking at LA, but i don't know how soon it would happen - it all depends on her partner's job situation. in fact, i think there is only a slim chance that she will be able to even get a work visa for herself, but i still want to track down info for her.

ILXteachers: i'm hoping one of you can help me out -

my friend and her partner are thinking about moving to california from NZ, and i'm trying to find info on how teaching jobs work for foreigners. she is just finishing up her teaching degree this year, so she has never actually worked as a teacher. my amateur google skills didn't turn up much info, so if anyone has a useful link or two, i'd greatly appreciate it (i REALLY REALLY want my friend to move here).

― just1n3, Friday, July 19, 2013 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

http://j1visa.state.gov/

Best of luck to both of them!

This is the teacher programme: http://j1visa.state.gov/programs/teacher

a j1 visa is how i got here! and that was 5 years ago... actually, it hadn't occurred to me to get her looking at that, i was focused on how she would get a work visa as part of a couple since her partner will get job sponsorship, i think.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-OLldU8Vi8

it's an education, anyway

so tired

Back at it tomorrow. As I'm standing outside trying to round up kids in my class, thinking of asking each one of them "Are you going to bust my chops this year?" before entering the school. If they can't answer no to that question, I don't want 'em.

What if they say, "No, I was thining of busting your nads instead."

Both expressions turn up in Scorsese films (slightly different rendering of the second)--I went with the milder. If that is their comeback, I'm going to assume they've seen Goodfellas, and then it's "Welcome aboard!"