Entries associated with the tag "Teaching":

Every teacher is a fountain of stories, but few tell them as well or as honestly as recently retired Michigan music teacher Nancy Flanagan in her blog "Teacher in a Strange Land." (Hat tip to Blogboard.) She's a real person (so, like Howard Dean, she'll never be president) and not an ideologue. The Blogboard link will get you her hair-raising story about trying to become a substitute in the district where she taught last year.

A few days earlier, she posted about her grad-school office-mate Jeff, "precisely the teacher that the talking ed-heads and columnists say we desperately need: a bright, well-prepared high school science specialist" who used to teach in Cincinnati:

"A few years into his career, the Cincinnati Federation of Teachers proposed a new pay system tied to an innovative evaluation plan, involving classroom observations by principals and peers, plus a professional portfolio, all standards-based. While Jeff had some reservations about the plan—he felt some of the indicators were less demanding than they could be—he thought the system would reward hard workers like himself and weed some of the deadwood. In fact, he was sure he could reach the top of the scale in a couple of years—a five-figure salary boost. For a young husband and father, this was reason to stay in teaching for a good long while.

"The plan was voted down in May of 2002, by 96% of Cincinnati teachers. Jeff believes he was one of only two teachers in his high school who voted for the plan. He says there were issues between union and district leaders and a mistrust of the new evaluation system, not enough time for teachers to absorb the ramifications of change—too much revolution all at once. Lots of reasons, all boiling down to the same thing: fear. Jeff began seriously looking, that spring, at graduate schools and new career paths, plotting an eventual escape from a system that suddenly felt unbending and stuck in the past.

"Jeff will be a world-class teacher educator, but it is a shame that he stopped teaching those kids in Cincinnati so soon. What is absolutely criminal is that he was pushed out by the intransigent fears of his colleagues. We are not a profession of risk-takers or innovators. We sometimes prefer the mediocre known to the potential of the unknown, and we keep settling for a little extra for everyone rather that shuffling the deck and trying to use our resources to reach our goals."

• Former Chicagoan Sean Carroll, who blogs at Cosmic Variance, learned something at the fall meeting of the Illinois and Iowa sections of the American Association of Physics Teachers: "High-school science teachers live in a very different world than professional researchers. Typically a 'department' is only one person, and when it comes to resources one has to be a little creative. So it’s quite common (I’ve just learned), when one first is hired, for the new teacher to be presented with a storeroom full of stuff that their predecessors had acquired one way or another. . . . Sometimes, indeed, it’s hard to figure out what the stuff is! So here at the FM of the IIS of the AAPT, people have been bringing in pieces of apparatus that have been lying around for decades and have become unmoored from their original purposes. They then show the wayward equipment to their assembled colleagues, and ask for help figuring out what the heck this thing is supposed to be." Read the whole thing, and the comments too.

• Treehugger nominates the Jerusalem artichoke, which "looks like a ginger root, tastes like a cross between a radish and an artichoke," as the "most underrated" [hate that phrase!] native American food. Other underrateds include birch syrup, analogous to maple syrup except that it's a lot more work to boil down: "It takes an average of 100 gallons of sap to make 1 gallon of birch syrup. Maple syrup, by comparison, averages 40:1." Maybe it's a native food, but the processing sounds really energy-intensive.  Let's not confuse boutiquery with greenness.

• Medpundit offers a close look at something your ancestors didn't want to know: cough syrup ingredients from the good old days.

James Redfield teaches Greek at the University of Chicago. He also knows a thing or two about different styles of teaching. Students, he observes, often prefer that he "take control" of a class and just tell them what he knows. In an essay on the Web site of the U. of C.'s Center for Teaching and Learning he writes:

"One of the major issues about discussion teaching . . . is that everybody is for it, except maybe the students.  I have a short list of the things that everybody knows are good, but nobody is quite clear why.  Discussion teaching is on that list. . . . 

"Some people seem to think that somehow discussion is a way in which people individualize themselves, and everybody gets to have their own opinion. The lecture is much better for that because, as I say, it leaves you alone. Discussion is a consensus process, and, insofar as it is working, it creates a group that tends to draw people closer and closer together and cuts off the edges on them."

Read the whole thing--even if you don't buy it, the thoughts per word ratio is off the charts. (Yes, I know, it originally was a talk he gave in 1988.)

I love that list of "things that everybody knows are good, but nobody is quite clear why." What would you add to it? Or should I just tell you?

(Hat tip to Savage Minds.)

Anyone who's ever hung out in the halls of academe will want to devour Terry Caesar's clever article on RateMyProfessors.com over at Inside Higher Education:

"One thing you immediately learn when you visit RATE is that students generally seem to care more passionately than you realized, and some are able to write with more wit than you saw in your own course evaluations," he writes. "A Top Twenty from the site circulates online, including 'Three of my friends got A’s in his class and my friends are dumb,' 'If I was tested on her family, I would have gotten an A,' and, my own favorite, 'BORING. But I learned there are 137 tiles on the ceiling.'

"From a reader’s point of view, who cares if these comments are accurate? They’re fun to read. From a colleague’s point of view, who cares if just about any comments are just? They’re irresistible to read, like gossip. RATE opens up the whole evaluative process insofar as teaching is concerned. Suddenly students get to say what they really think, not just to themselves but to a potential audience of thousands. Rather like guests on certain afternoon television talk shows, individuals feel inspired to be more recklessly candid."

In other words, sites like this are doing for educators what blogs are doing for journalists: the pros get to be publicly judged (and often smeared) by unqualified amateurs--who are also their customers.

Caesar doesn't mention the counterpart underground site Rate Your Students, now in estivation for the summer. It may make better reading for rant-lovers over 30, and in any case the slackers and nimrods often vilified there aren't named or shamed in public as the teachers are.

And yes, there is one for high schools nationwide. No doubt there are pearls of wisdom buried here somewhere, but this randomly selected comment will do for most: "she is f-ing awesome she passed me and I never showed up 4 swimming!!"