A rolling thread where we are teachers

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!"

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

This is brilliant.

Parent interviews tonight (and tomorrow). I've been doing these for 15 years--the tank's empty, nothing left to say. A teacher and I were saying it'd be fun, one year, just to take out the report cards and read from them word-for-word for the entire interview. Or to at least respond to every question in report card-ese:

Parent: "How are you tonight?"
Me: "With some assistance, I am doing fine."
Parent: "Where should I sit?:
Me: "You are encouraged to sit there."
Parent: "So--any hope for my child?"
Me: "You consistently demonstrate an ability to ask exactly the right questions."

our father came home from one of these one time and said to my sister, "your teacher said you don't even have the brain capacity of a gnat but i defended you and said that you do."

I'm goofing around, and not referring to any particular student. If your sister's teacher actually did say that, that's amazing--you'd be out of a job today!

Australia != Canada, Phil.

(Sorry)

new zealand != australia, james redd and the blecchs.

Knew that was coming.

new zealand is australia's canada tho

A rolling thread in which we are incompetent geography teachers

we won't fret about any of this.

No, wouldn't want to let a little thing like this come between me and my favorite far-flung posters.

http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/11/when-parents-yank-their-kids-out-of-standardized-tests/281417/

Teachers at Seattle’s Garfield High School voted unanimously earlier this year not to give the district’s required reading and math test. They encountered predictable resistance from district officials and harsh criticism from outside observers. Many students and parents, however, sided with the teachers.

The PTA and student government leaders voted in support of the teachers, and many parents sent in “opt-out” letters to exempt their children from testing that they viewed as an inappropriate measure of teachers’ effectiveness. And so when administrators came to class with lists of kids who needed to take the tests during the spring testing period, many students were exempted and others students simply refused to go with the administrators.

bonkers

jess hagopian is doing the lord's work

now i just wanna opt out of all kinds of stuff

or get my mom and dad to do it on my behalf

http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/11/great-teachers-dont-always-want-to-become-principals/281483/

just realizing recently that everyone around me with power over my employed life, for the rest of my career, is likely to be a questionable teacher or someone with fantasies of administering control, i.e. an administrator : /

that is one of the scariest moments, agree
also why i will not be pushed any further in that direction
it's where creativity and enjoyable human interaction goes to die

i still wanna be an administrator at some point tho if i ever just become a full time journalism teacher, prob not

http://www.fastcompany.com/3021473/udacity-sebastian-thrun-uphill-climb

"We were on the front pages of newspapers and magazines, and at the same time, I was realizing, we don't educate people as others wished, or as I wished. We have a lousy product," Thrun tells me. "It was a painful moment."

suck it, barbarians

haha, my first thought was "eat it, losers"

…

the folx at work imply that if i am gonna wanna be on their good side i am gonna wanna learn about adminispeak pedagogical techniques and prove that i can use them :/

'statistics show' that i should, apparently

ugh instructional design

how can a field full of educated people who educate others be so submerged in idiocy and sloganeering

ambition

these people need copies of orwell's 'politics and the english language' in their faculty mailboxes

or someone needs to force them to do a beckett and write everything in a second language so that they're denied every single little encrustation of verbiage whenever they want to express their thoughts

i have so many things to say but i am not going to 1) type them all out or 2) do so here.
but yeah, try doing all this in a different language and then get back to me with some hella jargony bs

hey i'm not saying it's not an impossible task, i'm just saying, goddamn

guys can we just do this from now on

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_vault/2013/12/19/photos_open_air_schools_for_sick_kids_in_the_early_twentieth_century.html?wpisrc=hpsponsoredd2

http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/01/theres-a-cheaper-more-effective-way-to-train-teachers/282778/

it often seems to me like this kind of model—apprenticeship under good and experienced teachers—is obviously right, even for higher ed. (where that could conceivably be more like the european model, save for the fact that that's often a matter of research-lead-and-subordinates as much as it is master-teacher-and-apprentice?), but when i think about the teachers i've had, i would only be willing to be apprenticed to a handful of them from the entirety of my educational career. it seems like maybe at all levels we have an allergy to requiring people to be under the authority of others, especially outside of institutional settings where people are temporarily, formally subordinate to others (i.e. schools)?

-1 the Atlantic

I'm in a program like this, but the mentor teachers are all hand-picked for not being pedagogically conservative buttholes. Although they are pedagogically conservative in some ways, their employer, who runs my program, gives them a pass for not fulfilling the butthole part and for having some teaching chops. They also have to have at least ten years experience.

If I follow you correctly, you're right that they'd run into a lot of buttholes-without-chops if a program like this was expanded to include every new teacher. Or maybe you're just saying that students would bristle at being under someone's authority, in which case, it's nice of you to consider them. My program director is also working at the state level (California) to try to change credential testing to make it more "authentic." She helped implement PACT, which consists of 2 unedited 10 minute clips of the student/intern teacher teaching and a thesis-length analysis and explication.

I think the number 1 most effective school reform would be an emphasis on goodman/glasser/kohn-style student and teacher autonomy. From the teacher side, you can't really police what a teacher thinks or says or does in a classroom, and when you try you get, e.g., the anti-teacher, anti-union standards movement, which has cost a lot of money and has accelerated the bean counter philosophies of school and district management, but has arguably (not arguably) made American schools worse. So you can't very effectively (and without repurcussions) tell a teacher what to do or who to be, but a new teacher participating in a schoolwide democracy, in which consensus and consent are foregrounded elements of the occupation, and in which the administrative mandarins take a backseat in directing school function and policy, is a new teacher who will learn to be a school leader, to be better educated about state and district policy and law, and to be more conscientious about their curriculum and planning. A lot of traditional schools with revolving door administrations already have crippled versions of this model in place, because the schools would die if the teachers didn't assume, of no one else's volition but their own, leadership roles. These schools would do much better to just restructure and forget about hiring that principal or vice principal or "guidance counsellor."

i don't think it's just being nice! i seriously question how much someone doing that job can be told what to do or who to be, even to the extent of taking guidance from a 'master' / mentor for a limited period of time. i know that it HAS been done, that arrangements like that are not unheard of (thinking of old-timey disciplinarian schoolmarms or whatever, to dig that far back?), but it literally just perplexes me. something about the idea of one person who is supposed to enjoy/exercise some degree of authority visibly/tangibly being directed by a superior exercising their own authority, same place same time, gets something wrong about the work that's being done. (i suppose that is why this program gets pitched primarily as 'observation', 'helping' etc.?)

once in graduate school i happened to have (this was in no way the norm, for obvious reasons) a fellow graduate student as a t.a., for one of my first classes of my own in fact, and one day i heard her sitting in with some students engaged in group discussion, and the stuff she was saying made me just want to stop and say SHUT UP, DON'T RUIN THEM WITH YOUR MEDIOCRITY, but of course i couldn't quite do that so i just tried to leave her with few responsibilities so that she would disengage from the class for the remainder of the semester instead of trying to chip in. (now, with less of a need for control over all the aspects of the course, i could handle that better, but even late on i had a nightmare of a t.a. who i just had to cross my fingers would not ruin her students' chances of getting anything out of the class.)

'let me teach you how to teach someone else' kind of leaps over the fact that you're the one who has to do it, in the end. and in some way which is not exactly the same as say with a surgeon, 'let me teach you how to perform this procedure'. or 'explain thing x to someone else the way -I- tell you to explain it', which is a little closer maybe. with certain things, you can tolerate the requirement that your own explanation essentially repeats one you were given / told to give. but when the requirement bears on your own manner of giving the explanation / relating to others?

I agree with you. I meant it's nice of you to think of them because no one else will, because they're students, and nobody cares about students, even if they're adults. I see you're addressing it from a much more practical point of view, though.

You're perfectly describing one of the key motivations for decentralizing schools! Structural changes will always trump reforms that emphasize behavior.

'but how can we make improvements if we don't tell people what to do and then look to see if they did it?!'

http://dianeravitch.net/2014/01/22/north-carolina-greatest-insult-to-teachers-ever-cooked-up-in-backroom/

“The NC 60/30/10 Plan, which “embraces high teacher turnover,” would place teachers on one of three tracks: Apprentice, Master or Career.

“Sixty percent of all North Carolinian teachers would make $32,000/year in the Apprentice category and be allowed to teach for up to twenty years, at which time they must retire or move on to another industry.

“Thirty percent of teachers would be eligible for the Master category if they have been teaching for three years, have completed an online training program, and can demonstrate mastery of the teaching method based on “customer survey data.” Master teachers would earn $52,000/year.

“Ten percent of teachers would become Career teachers, making $72,000 if they have an advanced degree and can innovate and lead.

“All teachers would be able to serve in North Carolina for no more than 20 years. If the plan were to be adopted, all teachers in North Carolina would be required to reapply for their jobs in 2015.

wau

i guess the tool hawking the plan has since said they are backing off the most bonkers part, the 20-year limit for 'apprentices'

though now that i look more closely, the 'masters' aren't just more highly trained, they're trained in 'the teaching method based on "customer survey data"', surely one of the cornerstones of any solid customer-teacher relationship

fuck corporate ed reform forever