Complaints about low quality teachers, especially in the maths and sciences, seem international. Honestly, I complain about language skills, too. How can I teach a foreign language to kids who don't know their own properly?
The real cause of the scarcity of high level teachers is that young teachers are the results of terrible teaching and education methods. Once it became "forbidden" to correct young children's grammar, and that was in the '50's, things began going seriously downhill. Add to that school workbooks, which replaced copying from the board, pocket calculators and phones that do all the math and an emphasis on fluency over accuracy... What can we expect? That's why there are so few teachers today capable of teaching high level academics. The standards have fallen to keep the "Bell curve."
We're dealing with cultural and emotions issues that block educational goals. I wonder how possible it is to correct it all.
2 comments:
I don't think it is.
While I was an undergrad at MIT, I was a math tutor for grammar school and a TA. After finishing, my first real job was with a program designed to improve math education in low performing high schools by helping educate math teachers, and by adding some "College prep" material to their math courses.
It was a disaster. The students in the honors junior courses, who were supposedly on track to go to college, couldn't multiply 7 by 9. They all had graphing calculators, and most of them couldn't tell you by looking at an answer if they'd hit the wrong button. They couldn't tell you if a unit conversion problem should have returned .00001 or 100000.
In their classrooms, they had a short lesson of less than 15 minutes, and most didn't pay attention to the teacher. They then had a worksheet to do in class, with less than 6 problems on it, and they were assigned NO HOMEWORK.
They had no work. They had no practice. No one corrected the worksheets anyway. The teachers had no solutions, because they weren't taught how to teach to students who were not required to do work. They couldn't correct them. They couldn't make them learn their times tables. They couldn't flunk them.
The kids who were in lower level courses were worse off, but at least they had no misconceptions that they'd survive college.
I had no authority to make the kids work, no authority to assign work, no authority to flunk them, no authority to kick out the troublemakers. I quit that job before the school year ended, and I will never go back. The teachers who stick around will never be able to make a difference given what they are up against.
That's so depressing. How will we get out of the mess?
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