Common Core haters
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@scottalanmiller and you're from NY. New Yorkers' attitude of "everyone not from NY is a shit flinging monkey" is nothing new, I've heard that my whole life from literally everyone I've ever met from NY, upstate or otherwise. Really progressive.
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@RojoLoco said:
@scottalanmiller Our graduates attended colleges all over the country, all of which accepted AP class credits (yup, even real Ivy league schools).
Yes, AP are accepted almost everywhere. I'm just saying that have to be the same AP class taught everywhere. But in some regions, like California, they are just like normal classes and in other regions, like Texas, they are brutal because the kids going into them are used to completely different levels of education. And colleges in different areas, for some they barely cover the material and at others they go past graduate work.
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@RojoLoco said:
@scottalanmiller and you're from NY. New Yorkers' attitude of "everyone not from NY is a shit flinging monkey" is nothing new, I've heard that my whole life from literally everyone I've ever met from NY, upstate or otherwise. Really progressive.
Are you telling me that Texas schools used to teach even remotely as much as NY or California schools? We know that most of the south's schools, including colleges, do a fraction of the education that northeastern schools do. It's not an attitude, it's a real academic disparity.
I said nothing disparaging about you or southerners and made no claims about the north other than the Ivy League is a load of crap and not as well respected even in the north as people like to think, that the north has much more difficult academic programs. This has been shown time and again and I've dealt with education in many regions and have seen it first hand.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@wirestyle22 said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@wirestyle22 said:
That is a ton of dedication to try to further the education in our country.
the problem is, most people do that and it is "just taking the easy way out." An education degree is a super easy one (as a general thing.) Other fields can get a degree and tack on "education" as an afterthought. Classes for teachers are different than they are for most other fields.
I had several roommates who were teaches years ago. They were struggling with their master's homework. Some of us IT folks looked at it and were confused because it was material that we non-college students already knew because it was common elementary material (for English.) It took a long time to figure out that what they were struggling with at a top north east teaching school in the grad program wasn't "how to teach" elementary English, they were actually struggling with elementary English themselves!! What a top university expected them to learn in grad school, any other program would have expected them to know coming out of high school (or middle school or lower.)
Getting a Master in Education is often a very easy way to go. It doesn't mean that people are not educated or aren't caring, but the average teacher goes to college to party and takes the easy route in life. It's the one job that they've witnessed as a kid, requires no expanding of their horizons, is the easiest college programs to get into, is a party college experience, requires none of the rigour of more academic programs, and lets them avoid the work world for a year longer than most programs. It's the path of least resistance to a lot of people.
So using those factors alone (instead of individual skill, dedication, effort, etc.) as reasons why teachers should make any given wage doesn't make sense.
It's great that your teacher is doing it to teach kids. So were my roommates, they love teaching middle school English and are really passionate about it. But by and large, the average teacher is just looking for a union job with the least effort to get into that they can.
We solve that problem by making the jobs competitive. If we pay the bottom of the barrel we're going to get the bottom of the barrel.
It's, unfortunately, a catch 22. We don't have teachers worth even what they make today. Do we pay the existing unqualified teachers more? Will that encourage the field to improve? We'd have to pay a LOT more.
If the jobs are based on results, maybe we can make it work. But what do we do with all of the teachers that we make useless?
You can only base it on results if you can remove those students who won't want to partake so you're not screwing the person subject to those results.
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@RojoLoco said:
@scottalanmiller and you're from NY. New Yorkers' attitude of "everyone not from NY is a shit flinging monkey" is nothing new, I've heard that my whole life from literally everyone I've ever met from NY, upstate or otherwise. Really progressive.
Aren't you doing the same thing trying to say that the AP classes are very hard and our schools in the north must be weird if we don't accept them universally? You are making the same claims that our schools can't be as rigorous as they are (or were.) NY high schools are terrible now, the last ten years have destroyed them. They are a national embarrassment now. SUNY is still awesome, but the high school system is ruined. I would never send my kids to it, it's ridiculous.
SUNY remains probably the best collegiate education in the nation for value. Low cost, high standards, none of the BS.
According to a study I saw yesterday, there is no university remaining in the US that is a selective as several were twenty years ago. The academic world has changed dramatically. They are now shocked that some colleges accept only 5%. But several used to be below that twenty years ago.
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@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@wirestyle22 said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@wirestyle22 said:
That is a ton of dedication to try to further the education in our country.
the problem is, most people do that and it is "just taking the easy way out." An education degree is a super easy one (as a general thing.) Other fields can get a degree and tack on "education" as an afterthought. Classes for teachers are different than they are for most other fields.
I had several roommates who were teaches years ago. They were struggling with their master's homework. Some of us IT folks looked at it and were confused because it was material that we non-college students already knew because it was common elementary material (for English.) It took a long time to figure out that what they were struggling with at a top north east teaching school in the grad program wasn't "how to teach" elementary English, they were actually struggling with elementary English themselves!! What a top university expected them to learn in grad school, any other program would have expected them to know coming out of high school (or middle school or lower.)
Getting a Master in Education is often a very easy way to go. It doesn't mean that people are not educated or aren't caring, but the average teacher goes to college to party and takes the easy route in life. It's the one job that they've witnessed as a kid, requires no expanding of their horizons, is the easiest college programs to get into, is a party college experience, requires none of the rigour of more academic programs, and lets them avoid the work world for a year longer than most programs. It's the path of least resistance to a lot of people.
So using those factors alone (instead of individual skill, dedication, effort, etc.) as reasons why teachers should make any given wage doesn't make sense.
It's great that your teacher is doing it to teach kids. So were my roommates, they love teaching middle school English and are really passionate about it. But by and large, the average teacher is just looking for a union job with the least effort to get into that they can.
We solve that problem by making the jobs competitive. If we pay the bottom of the barrel we're going to get the bottom of the barrel.
It's, unfortunately, a catch 22. We don't have teachers worth even what they make today. Do we pay the existing unqualified teachers more? Will that encourage the field to improve? We'd have to pay a LOT more.
If the jobs are based on results, maybe we can make it work. But what do we do with all of the teachers that we make useless?
You can only base it on results if you can remove those students who won't want to partake so you're not screwing the person subject to those results.
Yup, that is a huge issue with the system. The students don't get to pick the teacher and the teacher doesn't get to pick the students. I totally understand why results based teaching is a problem. You have to come up with a way to equally evaluate a teacher when every possible thing is variable - there is no means of creating a baseline for comparison. No two teachers have the same kids, at the same age, for the same material.
Over a career you might be able to evaluate the averages of a few teachers who taught closely, but that's long after the value is gone.
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@JaredBusch said:
@coliver said:
@JaredBusch said:
@dafyre said:
@scottalanmiller said:
The issue with the Common Core is not the Common Core itself. That's actually just a standard of what kids should know at different levels. It's actually not half bad. A bit slack, but anything in public education is.
People associate sometimes whacky and nonsensical teaching methods and standardized testing with Common Core. Those are actually the things that people hate or are having issues with.
That and things like number lines... I've seen a few examples and those simply don't make sense to me at all... and I took Math all the way up to Calculus and we never touched on that -- not in the long-winded roundabout way that I've seen examples work.
I was taught number lines. There is nothing convoluted about them. It is all math. Math is always 100% logical.
My daughters are taught number lines in their Japanese courses that have nothing to do with the US education system.
I was going to say. We were taught this in elementary school. I always thought it was a waste of time and could do it in my head.
Numbers lines teach people visibly how math works. That is why I cannot understand how so many people shit on it.
Once you have memorized basic math, you do not need a number line to do math functions, this is true, and why some cal it a waste of time. But people who just learn by memorization never actually learn how/why math works. They just learn that 2+2=4 because they were told so.
Huh - I don't think I learned this number line method your talking about - it kinda of came instinctually over time after I learned how numbers worked. I guess it just seems odd that we have to teach them this, when I basically taught it to myself. or even if I didn't teach it to myself, I learned it at such a young age that it was natural. But to be learning it beyond the third grade? no way - and using it beyond the third grade, again, nah.. use real operations - at least that's my take on it.
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@scottalanmiller All I can speak for is the time I was in HS, late 80s early 90s. ALL schools have gone to shit in the last 25 years. AP classes where I went to school were at least 3 steps beyond our curriculum, which put them in a different galaxy from GA public schools. I have no idea what NY schools have ever been like, all I know is the NY attitude that I've seen firsthand my whole life.
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@wirestyle22 said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@wirestyle22 said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@coliver said:
@Jason said:
Also teachers are usually underqualified to teach anyway.
No argument here... but that may be because they are paid scraps.
One supports the other. We don't want highly skilled teachers, so we don't pay for them, so we don't get them.
We do want highly skilled teachers we just apparently don't want to pay for them.
I don't agree. If we wanted that, we'd pay that. We can say that we want it all that we want but that's just bluster. Actions speak louder than words. I don't know any local community that, as a community, cares about the education of the community.
Out of all the depressing posts this one makes me the most sad. I don't want to get into a political debate and I don't mean what I'm about to say in a political way but we (the US) are making ourselves obsolete. It's really sad.
Really? How is this different than most of US History? Those who could afford to go to school 100 years ago went and were educated well, today, it's just not a real requirement.
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@Dashrender said:
@JaredBusch said:
@coliver said:
@JaredBusch said:
@dafyre said:
@scottalanmiller said:
The issue with the Common Core is not the Common Core itself. That's actually just a standard of what kids should know at different levels. It's actually not half bad. A bit slack, but anything in public education is.
People associate sometimes whacky and nonsensical teaching methods and standardized testing with Common Core. Those are actually the things that people hate or are having issues with.
That and things like number lines... I've seen a few examples and those simply don't make sense to me at all... and I took Math all the way up to Calculus and we never touched on that -- not in the long-winded roundabout way that I've seen examples work.
I was taught number lines. There is nothing convoluted about them. It is all math. Math is always 100% logical.
My daughters are taught number lines in their Japanese courses that have nothing to do with the US education system.
I was going to say. We were taught this in elementary school. I always thought it was a waste of time and could do it in my head.
Numbers lines teach people visibly how math works. That is why I cannot understand how so many people shit on it.
Once you have memorized basic math, you do not need a number line to do math functions, this is true, and why some cal it a waste of time. But people who just learn by memorization never actually learn how/why math works. They just learn that 2+2=4 because they were told so.
Huh - I don't think I learned this number line method your talking about - it kinda of came instinctually over time after I learned how numbers worked. I guess it just seems odd that we have to teach them this, when I basically taught it to myself. or even if I didn't teach it to myself, I learned it at such a young age that it was natural. But to be learning it beyond the third grade? no way - and using it beyond the third grade, again, nah.. use real operations - at least that's my take on it.
Right, that's my problem. I just understood how they worked based on the normal teaching methods (of the time.) So I've never seen what gap the number line is supposed to be bridging.
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@RojoLoco said:
@scottalanmiller All I can speak for is the time I was in HS, late 80s early 90s. ALL schools have gone to shit in the last 25 years. AP classes where I went to school were at least 3 steps beyond our curriculum, which put them in a different galaxy from GA public schools. I have no idea what NY schools have ever been like, all I know is the NY attitude that I've seen firsthand my whole life.
And all I said was that the AP classes were not much different from our normal curriculum and the college that I was accepted at already told me that it wouldn't accept them (or any coursework from the NY colleges either) so not to bother doing them.
You feel like I'm giving you attitude, but I think that you are reading into it. I was explaining why the AP appears very hard some places and not hard in others and why most schools accept it but some do not.
I did one AP class in high school and it was "just another class." We didn't think of it as an AP class, it was just senior math. It did not count for me in college and I had to do it again.
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@Dashrender said:
@wirestyle22 said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@wirestyle22 said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@coliver said:
@Jason said:
Also teachers are usually underqualified to teach anyway.
No argument here... but that may be because they are paid scraps.
One supports the other. We don't want highly skilled teachers, so we don't pay for them, so we don't get them.
We do want highly skilled teachers we just apparently don't want to pay for them.
I don't agree. If we wanted that, we'd pay that. We can say that we want it all that we want but that's just bluster. Actions speak louder than words. I don't know any local community that, as a community, cares about the education of the community.
Out of all the depressing posts this one makes me the most sad. I don't want to get into a political debate and I don't mean what I'm about to say in a political way but we (the US) are making ourselves obsolete. It's really sad.
Really? How is this different than most of US History? Those who could afford to go to school 100 years ago went and were educated well, today, it's just not a real requirement.
how is it different than any other country, either? Sure, tons of them like Switzerland, Finland and Japan are quite a bit ahead of us in school, but it doesn't completely change the landscape there (well the political one it sure does.)
But all countries have a lot of people getting overeducated and the elite getting better schools and such. Some are better than others, but they all have the problems. I don't think the issue is obsoleting the US as much as you think, other issues might be, but not this one. Those that need an education find it. The Internet age ensures that.
In Romania, we just learned, they don't start school until eight years old!
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And just in case it wasn't clear, my complaints about schools using fake number scales to make grades look better... were NY schools.
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@Dashrender said:
@wirestyle22 said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@wirestyle22 said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@coliver said:
@Jason said:
Also teachers are usually underqualified to teach anyway.
No argument here... but that may be because they are paid scraps.
One supports the other. We don't want highly skilled teachers, so we don't pay for them, so we don't get them.
We do want highly skilled teachers we just apparently don't want to pay for them.
I don't agree. If we wanted that, we'd pay that. We can say that we want it all that we want but that's just bluster. Actions speak louder than words. I don't know any local community that, as a community, cares about the education of the community.
Out of all the depressing posts this one makes me the most sad. I don't want to get into a political debate and I don't mean what I'm about to say in a political way but we (the US) are making ourselves obsolete. It's really sad.
Really? How is this different than most of US History? Those who could afford to go to school 100 years ago went and were educated well, today, it's just not a real requirement.
The lack of change is the problem from my perspective
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@wirestyle22 said:
@Dashrender said:
@wirestyle22 said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@wirestyle22 said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@coliver said:
@Jason said:
Also teachers are usually underqualified to teach anyway.
No argument here... but that may be because they are paid scraps.
One supports the other. We don't want highly skilled teachers, so we don't pay for them, so we don't get them.
We do want highly skilled teachers we just apparently don't want to pay for them.
I don't agree. If we wanted that, we'd pay that. We can say that we want it all that we want but that's just bluster. Actions speak louder than words. I don't know any local community that, as a community, cares about the education of the community.
Out of all the depressing posts this one makes me the most sad. I don't want to get into a political debate and I don't mean what I'm about to say in a political way but we (the US) are making ourselves obsolete. It's really sad.
Really? How is this different than most of US History? Those who could afford to go to school 100 years ago went and were educated well, today, it's just not a real requirement.
The lack of change is the problem from my perspective
Should it really change, though? I mean things should get better, certainly. But is there really a goal of everyone getting a good education? That's a nice sound bite, it's something we've heard so much in the media that we don't question it any longer. But is it true? What is the end goal to making people who hate learning and won't benefit from it do so?
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@scottalanmiller said:
@wirestyle22 said:
I think the standards for what we consider to be 'average' would greatly increase if we paid gifted teachers to teach our children.
You may be correct but I don't think so. I mean, it would help slightly, but much? Not likely. In every large population you need a lot of workers and very few thinkers. Tiny places can work hard and skew this (Luxembourg) but large places cannot much.
The vast majority of jobs will not ever benefit from a great degree of education and the majority of people will be happiest not having jobs that would require them to do so. Just look at IT! We think that we are an elite field, but read SW and sadly, it seems that most people are offended if you even suggest that they need to learn something or think critically about it. They want to do a minimum effort, learn things by rote and never have to think about what they are doing.
Just like we said in another thread - to us the idea of not striving to improve ourselves is terrible. But to the average person, striving to improve themselves is what is terrible. It's painful and wasted effort.
Heck, I'd say that those that came to ML a year or more ago are the thinkers of the group. a bit of that is by design, only those that were found to worthy were told about it, but now a days, we are getting a little bit of everything.
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@wirestyle22 said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@wirestyle22 said:
I think the standards for what we consider to be 'average' would greatly increase if we paid gifted teachers to teach our children.
You may be correct but I don't think so. I mean, it would help slightly, but much? Not likely. In every large population you need a lot of workers and very few thinkers. Tiny places can work hard and skew this (Luxembourg) but large places cannot much.
The vast majority of jobs will not ever benefit from a great degree of education and the majority of people will be happiest not having jobs that would require them to do so. Just look at IT! We think that we are an elite field, but read SW and sadly, it seems that most people are offended if you even suggest that they need to learn something or think critically about it. They want to do a minimum effort, learn things by rote and never have to think about what they are doing.
Just like we said in another thread - to us the idea of not striving to improve ourselves is terrible. But to the average person, striving to improve themselves is what is terrible. It's painful and wasted effort.
You don't have to be an intellectual though. As I said, this applies to vocational school to teach skill based jobs. My Dad (RIP) wasn't a book smart man but he did welding, carpentry, heating and air conditioning, electrical work, you name it he could do it. He was a genius in his own way. I think that the vast majority of the population has something they can excel at.
I would love to see public education include vocational skills - sadly there is an air of classism related to things like that.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@RojoLoco said:
@scottalanmiller All I can speak for is the time I was in HS, late 80s early 90s. ALL schools have gone to shit in the last 25 years. AP classes where I went to school were at least 3 steps beyond our curriculum, which put them in a different galaxy from GA public schools. I have no idea what NY schools have ever been like, all I know is the NY attitude that I've seen firsthand my whole life.
And all I said was that the AP classes were not much different from our normal curriculum and the college that I was accepted at already told me that it wouldn't accept them (or any coursework from the NY colleges either) so not to bother doing them.
You feel like I'm giving you attitude, but I think that you are reading into it. I was explaining why the AP appears very hard some places and not hard in others and why most schools accept it but some do not.
I did one AP class in high school and it was "just another class." We didn't think of it as an AP class, it was just senior math. It did not count for me in college and I had to do it again.
I took AP classes in HS too, calculus.. but really, it was just calculus.. this whole idea that it was AP - I didn't get it, frankly still don't. I learned the same thing that one semester of college would have taught in the subject, I was just lucky enough to take it in HS for free. I was in AP English and History too, but man what a joke. Sure I had to write one or two more papers than they did in regular class, but that didn't see like all that much more rigorous.
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@Dashrender said:
but now a days, we are getting a little bit of everything.
Yeah just look at that @BRRABill yokel. Moron.
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@wirestyle22 said:
@Dashrender said:
@wirestyle22 said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@wirestyle22 said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@coliver said:
@Jason said:
Also teachers are usually underqualified to teach anyway.
No argument here... but that may be because they are paid scraps.
One supports the other. We don't want highly skilled teachers, so we don't pay for them, so we don't get them.
We do want highly skilled teachers we just apparently don't want to pay for them.
I don't agree. If we wanted that, we'd pay that. We can say that we want it all that we want but that's just bluster. Actions speak louder than words. I don't know any local community that, as a community, cares about the education of the community.
Out of all the depressing posts this one makes me the most sad. I don't want to get into a political debate and I don't mean what I'm about to say in a political way but we (the US) are making ourselves obsolete. It's really sad.
Really? How is this different than most of US History? Those who could afford to go to school 100 years ago went and were educated well, today, it's just not a real requirement.
The lack of change is the problem from my perspective
Change? by saying lack of, you imply there has been none? Oh beggin' yo'r pardon sir.. there's been a ton o' change! Just look at a test from 100 years ago in nearly any subject - I think we'd be lucky if 1% of students at the same grade level as the test is designed for could actually pass it.
It's changed alright, for the worse. But as I think Scott has inferred, that's not what school is for today. We don't need millions of highly educated people today in today's workforce. A highly educated person doesn't want to be a trash person, or construction worker, factory worker, etc. Getting back to Scott's only 10% of the world actually contribute to the bottom line, the rest are just window dressing. It's true! As robotics/automation make manual labor more and more outdated - I just have no idea what's going to happen to human race - we could move to his plan of putting most on earth welfare where people can just live to live - to enjoy life - think floatie chairs in Wall-E. Those who want to work, invent, make improvements will, those who don't.. well they won't need to because our technology will eventually take care of everything else.
Educating for educating sake while sounding great really isn't. If you have the personal drive, then being educated can be helpful, but if you're like most of the population that just wants to skate by doing the minimum, then why bother with the education, all it will more likely do is make them unhappy.
