September 14, 2018 Mike Enright will present, "Improving Education".
Mike, a career teacher, will propose how we can increase the effectiveness of
our education system. Everyone is invited to discuss the importance of
education to the American way of life.
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Ira Glickstein
Fascinating talk Mike. Eliminating tenure, merit pay for teachers and paying students are intriguing ideas. My twin brother retired from lawyering and for fun got a Phd in French at Ohio State University. He is now a teacher for hire (in one year increments)at OSU. He describes for me a profoundly dysfunctional French department. None of the tenured teachers teach but putatively publish and if they do teach, are execrable. The best teachers are the teachers for hire who are paid the least. The tenured teachers are worthless.
ReplyDeleteScott: THANKS for initiating this "home work assignment" discussion about "Improving Education" for K-12. I agree with you and Mike totally!
ReplyDeleteFor the record, Mike's 7 points were:
1- Parental involvement
2- Merit pay
3- Eliminate teacher tenure
4- Practical courses that prepare students for real lives
5- Job shadowing and work-related classes
6- Work harder and longer class schedule (more days, more hours/day)
7- Pay students for achievement
Ira
I would add an eighth point to Mike's excellent list of seven. Namely, separate students according to achievement. When I was in second grade we all knew that the kids in Mrs. Smith's class were the "dumb" ones. There were four second-grade sections in our school, 4-1, 4-2, 4-3, and Mrs. Smith had 4-4.
ReplyDeleteMy only experiences teaching elementary school students were:
1) Our three daughters, who needed minimal help. (They did their homework on the living room floor with MTV blasting. We did not interfere so long as their grades and teacher reports were positive.)
Our oldest and youngest ended up with PhD's in Science fields, and our middle daughter ended up with a Masters and worked in Marketing research.
2) I taught Sunday school, teaching a handful of students the Hebrew letters, Bible stories, and songs. Even though I had only 6 to 8 students, their capabilities and achievement varied greatly. Michael was brilliant, and got everything instantly, but he was bored out of his mind as I helped the others, including one who was quite slow and one who had a known mental problem (that one never learned the Hebrew letters to any extent, but he was mild mannered and not purposely disruptive). Michael, in frustration, would roll his pencil noisily on his wooden desk. I'd say, "please don't do that Michael" and he'd stop, but only for a while. Lucky for him (and our society because I'm sure he ended up being a highly productive American citizen with an important career), I didn't stick that pencil into one of his ears and out the other!
I have great respect for elementary school teachers who have 20-30 students of varied abilities for many hours per day, five days a week. Month after month, year after year.
I got my slower Sunday school students involved by having them all act out the Bible stories, assigning roles according to ability.
Of course, if we separated students according to ability and achievement now, we'd find too few students of certain racial and ethnic categories in the top-level sections. So, I guess (given these "politically correct" times, we'll have to keep the slower students in the "mainstream" to get them used to failure, and to bore the faster students out of their skulls! Too bad!
Ira