On 5 Feb 2007 03:21:59 -0800, "Charlie Self"
wrote:

On Feb 3, 8:34?pm, "Morris Dovey" wrote:
J. Clarke wrote:
I don't want to hear someone say that this isn't a solvable problem.
All you're talking about here is getting teachers a little exposure to
the world outside their classrooms!

I've long wondered where this "get the teachers a little outside world
experience" BS came from.

Every teacher I know has worked somewhere other than in a school.
Every single one. Most kids who go on to become teachers do not come
from wildly priviliged backgrounds, so have to find a way to fund
college. Most of us do that by working. Many years ago, the HS math
teacher I was engaged to for a time had worked her way through college
as a waitress.

And how did she apply what she learned in school to waitressing? How
did going to school help her get that job? Has she ever done anything
in which the subject that she is teaching was actually a bona-fide
occupational qualification? If not then how is she supposed to
convince the kids that it's useful for anything?

While I only did sub teaching, I did a lot of different
things to get through college, including, I guess you could say,
spending four years in the Marines, loading trucks at night and
running a corner grocery store at night.

And how did your public school education prepare you for this?

My oldest stepdaughter worked
summers at a McDonald's--long enough ago that it wasn't a thing to
sneer at

And her public school education helped her get this job by . . .?

--and my grandson is helping fund his time at UVa working
summers for our local city as a computer whatever,

Using the computer skills he learned in public school?

while he also pays
some bills at school working on student' computers--officially. He's
study computer science and may well teach aspects of that subject.

And public school prepared him for this by . . .?

All these people need to get a touch of real life.

Or maybe they need to relate their subjects to what they're doing. The
oldest stepdaughter teaches Latin, and every other year takes a group
of her students to Italy, Greece and similar areas to look at what has
resulted from the Greco-Roman bit.

Nice if you've got the budget for that.

I can't speak for my former
fiancee, as I haven't seen or heard from her in more than 40 years,
but...all the teachers I know have had a touch or two of real life
during their ivory tower years.

A touch or two of real life perhaps, but have they ever worked in a
position in which knowledge of the subject they teach was of
significant benefit in doing the job? That's where the problem lies.

One good one I had was an English teacher who was a former Marine
Drill Instructor. He was big on acting. And he could relate that to
the training of soldiers.

I could wish for better actual subject knowledge for some teachers:
English teachers are the ones I catch out most often (which probably
makes a lot of sense). But, in general, they know what they have been
taught by the preceding generation of teachers, good or bad. When you
see the number of wildly different solutions that come up to a
moderately complex engineering question here, and elsewhere, on-line,
you have to wonder if just maybe the liberal arts aren't the only
subjects in need of more intensive and correct coverage, but that
seems to result more from college education lacks than lacks in high
school.

In engineering any solution that meet the specs is "correct". Where
I see the problems arise _here_ is in misinterpreting or ignoring the
specs.

But not all fields translate directly to work: it is difficult to take
teacher who handles algebra and plane geometry in high school and
place them in a job that uses those fields without other training.

And they should know math beyond algebra and plane geometry. However
if they have worked a drafting job they'll know the value of both of
those in their own right.

Of course plane geometry properly taught isn't about geometry, it's
about the nature of proof--geometry class is the first and in many
cases the only time that a student is required to actually produce a
mathematically rigorous proof of anything.

Same with most HS lab sciences. Yes, there are related jobs and the
subjects are vital. But, as we find with getting kids to understand
the relationship, it's not easy relating those subjects directly and
without additions to any particular job.

And a trouble with those lab sciences is that the teachers generally
don't understand the scientific method themselves and so the emphasis
is on getting the right answer and not on the nature of experimental
science. The kid whose experiment is wildly in error and who learns
_why_ it is so far off gets more out of it than the ones who just do a
procedure and get the expected result.

My _college_ physics labs were run by a delightfully devious woman who
carefully contrived that the results be in error. She's file the
micrometers and cut the specimens out of square and so on and do it
just subtly enough that you didn't catch it by looking at the stuff.

All in all, not a subject that is easily covered or a problem that is
easily solved.

You're going to have teachers who don't have a clue. You will have
other teachers who are sharp, can motivate kids, and do a wonderful
job.

And the sharp ones generally burn out on the politics of the job early
on and either turn into mindless functionaries or find something else
to do that involves less politics.

When these people are first hired, it's usually impossible to
tell the difference.

I do wonder if merit pay is some of the answer, just to stick a really
rough oar into the water of controversy.

If it can actually be assigned on the basis of merit and not on who is
the most skillful toady.