BS at work

[scw2]

My kid’s “gifted” class seemed odd to us. Turns out, someone decided that they should put the slowest kids in with the fastest kids because they thought it would elevate the slow kids. In fact, all it did was harm both.

We never even got to the bottom of who was to blame. The teacher got a real shit attitude because of it and really started losing it with the kids, which prompted my wife to ask her what was going on (my older daughter had this same teacher a few years before so we knew this was out of character). Teacher blames the principal. Principal says it came from district/superintendent. Can’t get anyone there to own up to it.

I never understood this train of thought from the admin to put the "worst" with the "best" students if the idea was to improve outcomes for both cohorts. I suspect they want equality by getting equally shitty outcomes across the board. Even if there was some conceivable way this could work, it would obviously take more than simply sticking them in the same classrooms.

[JRB]

My kid’s “gifted” class seemed odd to us. Turns out, someone decided that they should put the slowest kids in with the fastest kids because they thought it would elevate the slow kids. In fact, all it did was harm both.

We never even got to the bottom of who was to blame. The teacher got a real shit attitude because of it and really started losing it with the kids, which prompted my wife to ask her what was going on (my older daughter had this same teacher a few years before so we knew this was out of character). Teacher blames the principal. Principal says it came from district/superintendent. Can’t get anyone there to own up to it.

That is exactly the sort of 'inclusion' program I'm talking about. Also, it's totally normal for these good-idea-fairy policies to suddenly become orphaned from responsibility when the optics sound good (to the bleeding heart feely-good idiot types anyway) but the results suck.
Nobody wants to own a turd, but nobody wants to speak against the good idea fairy in modern education.

I never understood this train of thought from the admin to put the "worst" with the "best" students if the idea was to improve outcomes for both cohorts. I suspect they want equality by getting equally shitty outcomes across the board. Even if there was some conceivable way this could work, it would obviously take more than simply sticking them in the same classrooms.

The 'cohort results' problems came around because too many right-leaning types were demanding that Teachers 'be held accountable' for their performance in the classroom. Suddenly there's mandatory testing and metrics and everyone's graded on scores from tests that kids don't care about, etc. So these dumb-ass ideas came around to get test averages up at the expense of high-performing students.
Because of course, we can't hold back kids from going to 4th grade when they can't read, or kids from going to high school when they can't physically write a clear sentence on a sheet of paper.

You can't shovel random garbage into a production line and expect an empirically consistent product to result.

So long as there's no accountability for student/parent behavior issues that disrupt the educational process, and so long as everyone feels too sad for the slow kids that can't perform and socially promoting them up each grade level despite failing to perform at that grade level, it'll be a 'garbage in' process.

So long as everyone's pretending that teachers can take garbage and systematically, empirically improve it with industrial/business management like controls/metrics/bullshit, we're going to get more and more admin overhead, pointless tests, etc that slurp up huge amounts of educational funding and teacher's time for absolutely ZERO net benefit to the students.

So the left doesn't want to hurt anyone's feelings and include everyone at all costs because: feelings, while the right demands that teachers magically teach and impart knowledge into students that don't give a fuck and have zero consequences for egregiously disruptive behavior that hurts the whole classroom's learning process.

Meanwhile both sides still blame Teachers for everything that's going wrong with both of these ideas.

[NWshooter]

All of my students (over 25 now) .

You have 4th graders that are over 25

Kind of old to be in the 4th grade.......don’t you think?

[Stephanie B]

My kid’s “gifted” class seemed odd to us. Turns out, someone decided that they should put the slowest kids in with the fastest kids because they thought it would elevate the slow kids. In fact, all it did was harm both.

It wasn't that bad for me. But between 3rd and 4th grade, my family from from a place with a challenging school system (for me) to a place where it seemed that most of the kids were, well, morons. I lost interest in school and didn't regained it until I was well into college.

[Totem Polar]

I never understood this train of thought from the admin to put the "worst" with the "best" students if the idea was to improve outcomes for both cohorts. I suspect they want equality by getting equally shitty outcomes across the board.

Since @blues hasn’t stopped by to post this yet, I will.

http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html

@JRB, it’s clear that you are as squared away on .ed as you are on .mil.

[JRB]

Since @blues hasn’t stopped by to post this yet, I will.

http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html

@JRB, it’s clear that you are as squared away on .ed as you are on .mil.

Only because my little sister and my mom are both teachers, and seeing their careers second-hand has given me a very candid perspective into education. I have them to thank for my understanding.

LE and teaching both face similar and very massive problems.
Both fields are a labor of love borne of a sense of obligation to make the world a better place.
Both are almost always significantly underpaid, with fewer and fewer exceptions.
Both careers are beset on all sides from critics that relentlessly accuse them of being racist, intolerant, under-trained, lazy, etc.
Both are routinely subjected to absolutely unrealistic expectations from day-to-day dumbasses that know absolutely fucking nothing about LE or Teaching, and their expectations are all too often made into the latest good-idea-fairy policies and thus doomed to fail.
Both careers are subjected to those new policies with zero or basically zero input from the LEO's and teachers themselves.
Both careers are held personally responsible by these same ignorant assholes for the failings of policy, lawmakers, parenting, and common sense. e.g. "It's the teacher's fault my kid didn't get an A." or "It's the cop's fault my kid got arrested."

LEO's and Teachers themselves pay the price - both career fields are suffering nationwide shortages from burnout, suicide, etc. Ultimately their communities and the kids are the biggest losers while administrative brass and politicians keep flinging the same old turds back and forth on why everything's going wrong.

[Casual Friday]

we've been seeing that locally as well.

I can only assume they simply want to get paid not to work. (which is different than "they don't want to work")

If I was a professional teacher and not 2-3 years from my pension my butthole would be puckered up water-tight right now. A LOT of people are looking at alternative means of education. Also, a lot more people are seeing firsthand just how much time in a school day is wasted and just how little material actually gets communicated as well as the fact that in government school (and most private schools) the learning goes at a pace and fuck the kids of they either get bored or can't keep up. If that continues for long it's only a matter of time before some of us start a "defund the schools" movement.

I come from a family of teachers, and frankly my dream job (outside of it involving modern academia) would be college prof, but government schooling is rife with people that maybe got into it for the right reasons, and maybe do really "care about the kids" but have gotten their heads pretty twisted up relative to the real world. I'd hate to be a 35 year old teacher right now with no job experience to date other than 13 years of teaching and miles to go before my pension.

My hope is that what we eventually see is a ton of education reform. I firmly believe most of the unrest and "inequality" we see right now is fueled almost entirely by a lack of basic education. I'd like to see that change. We can't afford for it not to.

When our schools were shut down the first couple weeks we were just winging it until the district got the online plan in place. Once that happened, the kids were basically getting the same amount of school work per day. There was a giant email that my youngest daughter's elementary teacher used to keep the parents updated and to respond to questions we had. Some time during the second week or so, some of the parents complained that the schoolwork was taking their kids 6-10 hours to do everyday. I kinda panicked because my daughter was finishing hers between 90 minutes and 3 hours consistently. I thought she'd missed some work every day. Turns out, that was on par with other kids in the class who are self motivated and the kids' whose parents were complaining are the ones that need constant attention to keep them on task.

It prompted me to ask my youngest to break down the normal school day. She described getting assigned work, completing it and having to wait for the next thing to do while the teacher basically forces some of the kids to finish. The self motivated kids are encouraged to read or do activities on the chrome books to fill the time. I knew to some degree that this happens but I didn't realize how bad it was. It seems now that instead of special classes for kids with mild learning disabilities or teacher's aides who would spend time with them, they just toss them all into the same class because: fairness or something. I can't really fault the teachers for that, they don't get to make those kinds of decisions.

If a kid is lazy about school work, or they have learning disabilities, but they have parents that work at keeping them up to date and on task, it's not as bad. If you have a kid that's lazy or they have a learning disability and their parents don't give a shit, that's a bad combo.

We just got the email today about the remote learning lesson plans for the upcoming year. Instead of having all the work available each day and the students working through at their own pace like they did for the last couple months of the school year, each subjects assignments will be uploaded at a certain time, beginning at 9:25am with the last assignments being available at 2:30pm. Fuck me, they won't even let them work at their own pace at home.

[FNFAN]

That is exactly the sort of 'inclusion' program I'm talking about. Also, it's totally normal for these good-idea-fairy policies to suddenly become orphaned from responsibility when the optics sound good (to the bleeding heart feely-good idiot types anyway) but the results suck.
Nobody wants to own a turd, but nobody wants to speak against the good idea fairy in modern education.



The 'cohort results' problems came around because too many right-leaning types were demanding that Teachers 'be held accountable' for their performance in the classroom. Suddenly there's mandatory testing and metrics and everyone's graded on scores from tests that kids don't care about, etc. So these dumb-ass ideas came around to get test averages up at the expense of high-performing students.
Because of course, we can't hold back kids from going to 4th grade when they can't read, or kids from going to high school when they can't physically write a clear sentence on a sheet of paper.

You can't shovel random garbage into a production line and expect an empirically consistent product to result.

So long as there's no accountability for student/parent behavior issues that disrupt the educational process, and so long as everyone feels too sad for the slow kids that can't perform and socially promoting them up each grade level despite failing to perform at that grade level, it'll be a 'garbage in' process.

So long as everyone's pretending that teachers can take garbage and systematically, empirically improve it with industrial/business management like controls/metrics/bullshit, we're going to get more and more admin overhead, pointless tests, etc that slurp up huge amounts of educational funding and teacher's time for absolutely ZERO net benefit to the students.

So the left doesn't want to hurt anyone's feelings and include everyone at all costs because: feelings, while the right demands that teachers magically teach and impart knowledge into students that don't give a fuck and have zero consequences for egregiously disruptive behavior that hurts the whole classroom's learning process.

Meanwhile both sides still blame Teachers for everything that's going wrong with both of these ideas.

One of the best posts about education I've seen anywhere. Thank You.

[MichaelD]

To those of you teaching online: my grandson had pretty good success with online because he could replay parts of the video to get understanding where he was too shy to ask questions in class if he didn't get something the first time.

Instant replay for the win!
@breakingtime91 your situation pisses me off and I'm just somedood on the Web. As others have said, thanks for being a good guy online -- I imagine you're an awesome guy in person.

[Totem Polar]

We just got the email today about the remote learning lesson plans for the upcoming year. Instead of having all the work available each day and the students working through at their own pace like they did for the last couple months of the school year, each subjects assignments will be uploaded at a certain time, beginning at 9:25am with the last assignments being available at 2:30pm. Fuck me, they won't even let them work at their own pace at home.

That sounds like bullshit to me.