I talk with Freight (from Tim Hawkins Poddy Break) about his rise to power. He captures me flinging Twinkies into the audience at the end of one of Tim’s shows.
Here is where you can get your Freight shirt and join the revolution: http://timhawkins.net/collections/all/products/make-america-freight-again-t-shirt?variant=27664464913
Then my mom comes over and scolds me for talking bad about public school teachers. Actually, she’s mad at The Peaches mostly. We have a civil conversation and it ends pretty peacefully with nobody being un-friended or cut from the family will.
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John,
Grandma Turbo stole the show. Riveting radio…err…podcastery. I wish she had been my science teacher when I was in high school, but she wasn’t teaching back then, if she just got back into it in 1986. I was a senior that year took no classes of any consequence or value.
You should have her run for the local school board… or the state. She will set them straight.
I, for one, am in favor of abolishing the Federal Dep’t of Ed and giving that power back to the states and local communities, where it belongs.
You should get Hawkins to set up a contest where a fan can win a bus trip with you guys. I would hack the electronic voting machine to win that one.
#IamCarl #MakeAmericaFreightAgain #twinkiesaloft #hashtag
Dave
Proverbs 5:13 (ESV) – I did not listen to the voice of my teachers or incline my ear to my instructors.
#Twinkiesaloft ! LOL!
Ah, I think Peaches’s opening line to the subject of education (last episode) was pretty bold. Of course, I’m already used to your conversations, so I wasn’t caught off gaurd. But I could see how a person that taught in the public school system would get worked up over “if you love your children- don’t send them to a government school”.
But, just to make note: No Child Left Behind was in the early 2000s, not 1990s ( wrong George Bush).
With the more teachers I meet, I seem to be one of the few people to support NCLB- mostly for its intentions and reasons- but not for all of its practices/ results.
You are absolutely right, Matthew. No Child Left Behind was passed by George Bush in Jan 2002 and I had retired in 1999. NCLB just capped my outrage at the changes we were bombarded with through the 80’s and 90’s. We wrote volumes of postulates in formats no one could understand, attended endless workshops which took away from valuable instruction time, and formed worthless teaching teams that were constructed to look good to the political bosses who probably never even looked at them.
You forced me to go back and do my homework. Thank you! Being a science teacher, I of all people should have checked the accuracy of my data. If someone wants the history of what I am so outraged about, go online and google: “History of No Child Left Behind”.
I believe that good teachers are born to be teachers. They are in the classroom because they want to be there and value our kids. They are punished every day by kids, parents and administrations. The buck stops with the teacher always. The politicians won’t stop until they make us like them to the detriment of the next generation! We are seeing the results every day!
You are right about intentions but it has been long enough to measure the results.
I am an education major myself, so I had learned the history of it. Plus, I was one of the first guinea pigs in the standardized testing (I was in 2nd grade in January, 2002-so I had the reading and math tests that spring- then the following year I had all the other subjects added since I was in 3rd grade)- so I remembered from first-hand experience when it came into play.
The more conversations that I have with elderly people, the more they concede that we can’t trace all problems to one source (when you take sin and spiritual warfare out of the equation). Has the change in the educational system changed society, or has societal changes shifted the educational system? Do they affect each other? Which comes first?
I, for one, think that NCLB would have had better success in the 1970s/80s. The economy was better, students were more disciplined, most kids lived in two-parent homes (divorce and teenage-mothers were still rare) and parents supported the teachers-not the students. All of these things affect the education system.
Now, a lot of your failing schools have students who are in single parent homes-mostly with their mothers who are working way more than 40 hours per week to pay the bills. They are rarely at home to discipline the kids and give them a great sense of worth. They have no father-figure in their life, which is so important. Or, the students can be in the household(s) where the parents are divorced or in the middle of one. They can live in an area with a lot of violence, whether it would be from gangs or an abusive household.
These things can leave students without: food (the common three meals per day), security (concerning themselves, family, health, and finances), and love (from friends and family). All of these things are below education and achievement in the hierarchy of needs (theory of Maslow). People who are hungry, in danger, feel unloved and/or insecure are not going to be focused on education unless those needs are met. Of course, there are always ways to fill those needs- albeit wrong methodology.
Because a lot of communities have broken households-children can run around in groups unchecked. (Of course, this was the case in the 70s, but respect for authority was higher, the majority of this nation went to church, etc- not the same scenario). They can get mixed up in the wrong things. Yet, they do not mind, because it makes them feel loved and secure. Teachers can see that their students are caught up in the wrong crowd, so they are trying to positively affect their student’s lives (provide good sources of security, love, etc) as well as educating them. However, a teacher’s ability to affect a student’s out-of-school-life isn’t measured on standardized tests.
Now, teachers can be spending as much as 20-40% (at least in my school years) of their class periods from January until March preparing students to take standardized tests- since the testing style isn’t close to the teacher’s style of teaching. Plus, considering if the students do not pass, funding can eventually be removed from the school (very strong motivator) – therefore time that could have been spent on material is focused on tests that last a week.
Another debate is whether removing funding from struggling schools is the best option. If schools are already struggling to buy new books, supplies, etc- how is removing money going to help the situation? Yet- I can also see how you do not want to throw money to a failing system.
I agree that standardized testing is a necessary way to measure a student’s success- at least in part. I think it holds teachers and students accountable in their parts of the education system. However-sometimes the repercussions for failure is even more detrimental to an already-failing system. But, I think the solution starts with our country turning to God, parents raising responsible and disciplined children, children respecting teacher’s authority, teachers being allowed by the parents to do their jobs, students not going hungry, gang-violence and drug use going down, the economy going up, etc. Then, students will do better on tests-for the challenges that teachers and students face today will be removed. Only then will tests be an accurate measurement of a teacher and their students’ success.
I may have set a record for longest non- copy-and-paste comment 😉 so thanks for bearing with me.
Matthew,
You certainly have exceeded my usual verbosity. Well done!
Dave
James 3:1 (ESV) – Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness.
This should be episode FIFTEEN. Not fourteen. 🙂
No. I mislabeled an earlier episode. We skipped episode 13…I have relabeled everything.
Well…
That’s only slightly less confusing. Because we actually referred to “The last episode–episode 14” in this podcast!
Note for Carl: the episode which made Grandma Nancy almost unfriend me was episode 13. 🙂