Author Topic: California judge says no to homeschooling  (Read 160407 times)

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sirs

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Re: California judge says no to homeschooling
« Reply #150 on: March 18, 2008, 04:01:41 PM »
So screw you. And the horse you rode in on. You have no concept of the problems teachers face.

BINGO, XO!!

And apparently you 2 have no concept of how the NEA's priorities of job security trump children's education.  I'll forgo the unnecessary insultive barb though
"The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal." -- Aristotle

Xavier_Onassis

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Re: California judge says no to homeschooling
« Reply #151 on: March 18, 2008, 04:13:01 PM »
If the teachers did absolutely EVERYTHING that you think they should, they would not get paid one dime more unless they had an organization to do battle for them.

You have never belonged to the NEA, you have never been a teacher. So your opinion is worth exactly zilch.
"Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana."

sirs

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Re: California judge says no to homeschooling
« Reply #152 on: March 18, 2008, 04:19:17 PM »
If the teachers did absolutely EVERYTHING that you think they should, they would not get paid one dime more unless they had an organization to do battle for them.

Yea, they would.  In a competative market place, the better employees are rewarded with better salaries, while the incompotent ones are fired


You have never belonged to the NEA....

And I NEVER will (have any intention of EVER being part of a Union)


You have never belonged to the NEA.  So your opinion is worth exactly zilch

so then "obviously" your opinion on the war is worth zilch too, since you've never belonged to the military.  Is that the route you plan on taking, Xo?
« Last Edit: March 18, 2008, 05:46:53 PM by sirs »
"The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal." -- Aristotle

Cynthia

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Re: California judge says no to homeschooling
« Reply #153 on: March 18, 2008, 06:39:18 PM »


"And apparently you 2 have no concept of how the NEA's priorities of job security trump children's education.  I'll forgo the unnecessary insultive barb though."

So, tell me Sirs, how many years have you been teaching in a classroom?
« Last Edit: March 18, 2008, 06:42:46 PM by Cynthia »

sirs

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Re: California judge says no to homeschooling
« Reply #154 on: March 18, 2008, 06:52:27 PM »
So tell me Miss Cynthia, how long have you been a member of the military & war in Iraq?  You do seem to be criticising it ever so frequently now, and membership is apparently required to be able to do that, right??

(And FYI, I did teach for 2 years, before I got into PT school, and while I was a Physical Therapist, I spent about 3 years working in the school system.    >:( )
"The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal." -- Aristotle

Xavier_Onassis

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Re: California judge says no to homeschooling
« Reply #155 on: March 18, 2008, 06:56:43 PM »
Teaching is not in any sense a competitive economy, nor should it be.

Competition does not make for good education. It makes for an environment in which only one is a winner and all the rest are losers.
A good education requires cooperation, not competition. It is not and never will be a race to see who knows more than whom.
Education can be measured against only one standard: ignorance.


As a professional educator, I know that the only place in a school for competition is possibly varsity sports, and that only in the sense that it builds a loyalty to the institution for some people to whom a ball is the only thing they understand. Sports are mostly good exercise, though some (basketball, track, soccer) are far superior to others (hockey, football, in which serious injuries and expensive equipment costs can outweigh the benefits of exercise) and baseball, in which over half the players are required to just loiter around and wait rather than exercise.

A teacher who is told he will be fired unless he does everything in some prescribed way, which is what happens when some bozo decides on "standards", will never try any new techniques and no one who is constantly threatened with being fired will be able to teach in any effective way.

My main objection to war is that it is exceedingly costly in lives and treasure. I make no claims to  being an expert in strategy, unless it is really obvious, as was Rumsfeld's insufficient force resulting in disaster. The real pros already knew this, and told him so.

If you would not join a union, this tells me that you are incapable of cooperating in any meaningful way with your fellow me, and definitely do not belong in education.

Even an army requires cooperation. Actually, an army demands cooperation. But Armies are about brute force and destruction, and education is about training each person to realize his highest potential. Brute force and destruction are rarely a part of any sort of decent education.

One example would be General Petraeus, who dared to actually think what he was doing through in Iraq, and managed to cooperate with the locals, rather than just do the easy thing and scare the crap out of them. He used his head. The other officers did only as they were told, and enjoyed little or no success. The army is not a place where creative thought is generally considered a positive thing.

I would say that by and large, our best officers are far better at getting their goals accomplished than our dummy politicians. The only trouble is that like Colin Powell, Shalikashvili and the Admiral Fallon, they are too often thrown out for being too competent.


"Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana."

sirs

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Re: California judge says no to homeschooling
« Reply #156 on: March 18, 2008, 07:38:32 PM »
Teaching is not in any sense a competitive economy, nor should it be.

That's your opinion

Competition does not make for good education.

Wrong.  I can't tell you the frequent comptetions I was in as a student, wanting to better my best friend.  And what the hell do you call a Spelling bee competition??  or Math Competitions??, or Science Fair Competitions??.  Testing is in and of itself a competition with yourself.  You can make all the rationalizations you want on perseverating the status quo, and continued degradation of the Public School system.  The point is, where competition is allowed to flourish, greatness occurs.  When monopolies are maintained......well we see those results all to frequently as well


It makes for an environment in which only one is a winner and all the rest are losers.

OR, it makes ALL winners, by prompting EVERYONE to do a better job, from teachers to principals to administrators


"The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal." -- Aristotle

BT

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Re: California judge says no to homeschooling
« Reply #157 on: March 18, 2008, 07:54:11 PM »
Quote
A teacher who is told he will be fired unless he does everything in some prescribed way, which is what happens when some bozo decides on "standards", will never try any new techniques and no one who is constantly threatened with being fired will be able to teach in any effective way.

A teacher is hired to teach. And at the end of the school year his charges should be able to perform at a certain level. That level is ascertained by sampling and averaging and sooner or later becomes a standard.

Holding a teacher accountable for reaching those standards in no way inhibits innovation and new techniques as long as the results meet the prescribed standards. What has changed is that all the children in that class must attain the level prescribed. The challenge is issued. The question is whether the educational force is up to it.

sirs

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Re: California judge says no to homeschooling
« Reply #158 on: March 18, 2008, 08:01:11 PM »
Holding a teacher accountable for reaching those standards in no way inhibits innovation and new techniques as long as the results meet the prescribed standards.  

PRECISELY
"The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal." -- Aristotle

kimba1

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Re: California judge says no to homeschooling
« Reply #159 on: March 18, 2008, 08:46:22 PM »
in no way inhibits innovation and new techniques

but that`s the real question
are teachers allowed to use new techniques?
note all the talk to push students to do better by raising the bar,but none about whether teacher are allowed freedom to try methods to met it.

BT

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Re: California judge says no to homeschooling
« Reply #160 on: March 18, 2008, 08:54:13 PM »
One would think that when presented with such a new and exciting challenge as to make sure all their students are prepared for the next level, that new and innovative approaches would be tried.

Necessity is the mother of invention, dontchaknow.


Xavier_Onassis

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Re: California judge says no to homeschooling
« Reply #161 on: March 18, 2008, 08:59:36 PM »
Holding a teacher accountable for reaching those standards in no way inhibits innovation and new techniques  as long as the results meet the prescribed standards. 

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++


Well see, there is the problem. We don't really KNOW how people learn the most effectively. If you experiment with a new technique, it might not work at all. Most likely, it will be effective for some, but not others, since not ever person learns the same way.The people at the forefront of learning theory are not Doctors of education, but Doctors of Brain physiology, and they have yet to apply their findings in any effective way to serious educational theory and/or experimentation.

The purpose of any experiment is to see what works and what does not. If the teacher tries something and it does not produce better results than the previous method, he has succeeded as a scientist, but failed as a teacher to the degree that his hypothesis did not work out. And he will no doubt catch hell for trying something new.

If his hypothesis works, then he is a hero, of course.

As for competition, the very WORST example is in high school sports. The kids that make the team are only a small percentage of all the students for whom physical exercise is advantageous. The kids who really needs physical training--the fat kids, the wimpy kids, the scrawny nerds--never make the team. They sit on the benches even during PE class, And the kids who need physical training the very least make the team and nearly all the money is spent on them.

This may aid in producing a few professional athletes, but it shortchanges at least 90% of the student body even in the smallest high schools.

Spelling bees in ONE class might be useful to the students. It becomes less and less useful as the total group becomes larger. Eventually we end up discovering that one 12 year old Southeast Asian girl is the only human in the nation who can spell everything, at which point it is a lot more a freak show than an educational exercise.


And, no, in most schools the teachers are far too overworked to try innovative techniques in any scientifically useful way. Not following the prescribed lesson plan is going to get any beginning teacher fired for sure. Your best chjance is to teach in a school everyone considers hopeless, like the Chicano Garfield High in the film Stand and Deliver.
« Last Edit: March 18, 2008, 09:06:00 PM by Xavier_Onassis »
"Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana."

MissusDe

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Re: California judge says no to homeschooling
« Reply #162 on: March 18, 2008, 10:14:05 PM »
Quote
Well see, there is the problem. We don't really KNOW how people learn the most effectively. If you experiment with a new technique, it might not work at all. Most likely, it will be effective for some, but not others, since not ever person learns the same way.

Actually, we do know howpeople learn the most effectively. The best teachers I know use this as a guideline for designing lesson plans which address the differing learning styles of each of their students:

http://www.wcupa.edu/_ACADEMICS/sch_cas.psy/Career_Paths/Educational/subfield3.htm

Cynthia

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Re: California judge says no to homeschooling
« Reply #163 on: March 18, 2008, 11:49:13 PM »
So tell me Miss Cynthia, how long have you been a member of the military & war in Iraq?  You do seem to be criticising it ever so frequently now, and membership is apparently required to be able to do that, right??

(And FYI, I did teach for 2 years, before I got into PT school, and while I was a Physical Therapist, I spent about 3 years working in the school system.    >:( )

Ok, maybe that wasn't fair of me to ask you that loaded question, Sirs...sorry bout that....
It is obvious that you have not seen the front lines of a PS system.
I admire your desire to debate this issue, but I can only share what I believe to be my truth. I believe you are wrong. I know you are wrong . You have not seen both sides of the NEA issues..you are not able to step out of a  black and white box.

I speak for myself. I work in a system which hangs by a thin thread and could break apart if not for the NEA, not to mention and ironically so....the help from the GOVERNMENT.  Ok, yes, the  NCLB has a lot to save this broken system, it does. But it needs a major overhaul.

That's how I feel.

Cynthia

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Re: California judge says no to homeschooling
« Reply #164 on: March 19, 2008, 12:33:42 AM »
 It is a well known fact among educators that individuals learn in a variety of ways.
The link you provided is spot on.
THe issue we face currently in the PS system centers around the push for educators to teach all children in the same way using the same method, same book level, (with varying degrees of differentiation).
Stepford kids! No real learning curve, no realistic understanding of how children learn. Nada.


 what and how to teach use a scripted type program, basal books by a company Houghton Mifflin, or Harcourt Brace....making them a lot of money by the way..and in no way do these companies address those styles of learning.

As a young college student, I received all of the best practices in terms of such knowledge and more. Piaget, Vygotsky to name a couple.  (side bar:. When I was in Geneva in 1974 on my honeymoon, I was minutes away from meeting Jean Piaget in his office at the University of Geneva in Suisse. That would have been like meeting  Freud for a student of psychology ....ha)

 I would have to say that that is the crux of the problem in our schools today. We are not encouraged to use such knowledge. 
The push to get scores up and have everyone read,no matter what,has brought  a clash between what the Universities and Colleges teach and what the schools perform.

 The professors in the Ed. Dept. at UNM or the College of Santa Fe are completely at odds with the public schools here.  ON the one hand they provide such a classic knowledge base in terms of child development, learning styles etc, but when a student teacher enters any classrooms in the system these days, time is spent of ironing out their confusion.
I had a student teacher last year. She was caught between a rock and a very hard place, indeed.


"Well see, there is the problem. We don't really KNOW how people learn the most effectively. If you experiment with a new technique, it might not work at all. Most likely, it will be effective for some, but not others, since not ever person learns the same way" XO

IMO, when a school system decides to "experiment" with new techniques, as is the case in our district with the HMR programs, we really don't know if it is going to "work" and quite frankly, to forcue us to teach by using an experiemental new scripted program with no regard to learning styles..... is a slap in the face. Sure, there has to be some sort of minor awareness or background of such things on teh part of the text book companies, but there is a front end element that spells out teach all with very little empasis on the individual.

So then, the COE graduates might just as well take a few "training sessions" to learn how to teach....that is waht we are MANDATED TO DO. I mean mandated. We can't budge an inch or a minute lost on scripts...lest we get pulled into the office for a write up.