

The trouble with schools isn't about the teaching of teachers - jseliger
http://jseliger.com/2009/11/12/susan-engel-doesnt-get/

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jerf
HN's title seems to be misleading; one main point of the linked article is
that changing the incentives around teaching will lead to changes in how
teachers are taught (second paragraph after the big chart), which would seem
to imply the author does indeed consider that part of the problem.

I've spent a lot of time thinking about math education and one of the problems
I have with it is that it is very, very incestuous. Teachers who barely know
what is taught in high school, and certainly nothing beyond it, then go on to
teach other teachers, without mathematicians safely sealed off from the
process so as not to interfere with the latest theory of the day on how to
teach a math one hundred years divorced from actual mathematicians. Getting
more people with actual degrees in relevant fields involved in the process
could have profound second-order effects in an educational curriculum that
feels stale because it _is_ stale. Education sealed off every avenue that new
blood could come in decades ago, and every year it just gets worse. Often in
the name of fixing education... which never happens because at this point the
educational establishment is pretty clueless about the situation they are in,
so how do we expect them to fix it?

~~~
jseliger
"that changing the incentives around teaching will lead to changes in how
teachers are taught (second paragraph after the big chart), which would seem
to imply the author does indeed consider that part of the problem."

It's part of the problem, but a very small part relative to other problems
related to incentives in the field, which chiefly relate to pay, merit, and
the relative ability of highly qualified people to get other jobs.

~~~
jerf
Well, you seem to be both the original author and the HN summarizer, so I
guess I can't complaint about misleading titles then.

But it does seem to be all of a kind, all boiling down to a lack of competent
people in the profession. Personally I'd consider the "second order effects"
to be even more important than the direct effects of getting more skilled
teachers in the field; the problem is a culture and that problem must be fixed
by culture, and it will never be solved by just importing good people (even
were that possible) if the cultural deck gets stacked against them making any
changes, whereas even a small number of people could profoundly improve the
entire system if the culture chose to let them.

------
Perceval
Is the solution to avoid hiring education majors for education jobs,
preferring instead people with degrees relevant to the subject?

One aspect of academia and academic training is that it is not built
_primarily_ to produce teachers, but instead to produce researchers. Johns
Hopkins started this trend back in the 1800s, turning professors from teachers
into researchers. All other major educational institutions largely followed
suit. Because academia is engaged in self-reproduction, they no longer really
instruct anyone in teaching (as most of us find out when dealing with grossly
incompetent TAs in discussion section), instead their graduate and masters
students learn to be researchers.

Maybe the trouble with schools is that they don't train people engaged in
disciplines how to teach their discipline, instead relying on people
specifically schooled in 'education' in the abstract to teach whatever course
administrators deem necessary.

~~~
HistoryInAction
I agree. I forget who told me this, but the US Patent and Trademark Office in
DC hires engineers for their engineering disciplines' patent examiner FTE
slots. The argument goes that it's easier to take an engineer and give them a
smattering of law education than it is to take a lawyer and give them a
smattering of engineering education and expect them to understand the utility
of a new engineering application or detect whether or not it is novel because
they don't understand the technology enough to see what's similar to it.

However, as the article demonstrates, a piece-wise comparison of A/B where A
is what you've trained for and B is being an educator, A wins for pay in just
about every field. B is always a step down in pretty much whatever metric you
look at, aside from developing future generations. Simple game theory proves
that B is only going to be populated by low-tier individuals who don't have
much in the way of other options or those few gems in which the 'developing
future generations' is an outsized factor in their decision-making.

~~~
yummyfajitas
Teaching is a step down in _pay_ , but not in _compensation_. Teachers get
summers off, short working hours, public sector union pensions/health plans,
earlier than normal retirement, and ridiculous job security.

[http://web.missouri.edu/~podgurskym/articles/files/fringe_be...](http://web.missouri.edu/~podgurskym/articles/files/fringe_benefits.pdf)

~~~
HistoryInAction
I would argue that when considering a job, most people don't write out and
include these sort of benefits in their cost-benefit analysis. I personally
consider benefits to be a service that's cost neutral, rather than factoring
it into my overall pay. I know that's not accurate, but that's just how my
mind works.

Also, any self-respecting teacher (especially new ones) will tell you that
short official working hours are a mask for quite decent hours spent preparing
for the teaching hours.

~~~
yummyfajitas
I'm not sure what you mean by "quite decent", but in general teachers work a
little bit less than other full time professionals 9 months out of the year.

The other 3 months they work dramatically less.

<http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2008/03/art4full.pdf>

~~~
HistoryInAction
Sorry for the lack of precision, I mean 40+ hour weeks, much of it unpaid. The
rule of thumb that I was told was that you're working about 8 hours of prep
for every hour of teaching the first year. Drafting lesson plans, putting
together projects, laying out longer term units of study, things like that.

They're only paid for the 8 am - 3 pm (35 hours or so a week, though the pay
is per hour better), but most teachers I know show up early and work at home
grading, preparing dittos, stuff like that.

Add in requirements for Continuing Education, administrative tasks, and non-
teaching related requirements that most unions/tenure programs require, and
I'd still say it's a surprisingly low paid position for the time that goes
into it and the long-term effects on the students.

~~~
yummyfajitas
That doesn't appear to be the case in general. According to the link I posted
(which gets it's data from the American Time User Survey), even young teachers
tend to work less than 40 hours. Note that this survey asks the question "how
many hours did you spend working yesterday, how many hours sleeping, etc", not
"how much time were you paid for yesterday".

The study does however suggest that teachers do show up early and work at home
more than other professionals.

Regarding total working hours, I'm guessing the teachers you know are either
highly atypical or else they have unrealistic ideas about how much they really
work.

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RK
I have never understood the educational purpose of tenure for pre-university
level teachers. It just seems like a symptom of teacher unions holding the
system hostage.

~~~
yummyfajitas
Or even for non-research tenured professors.

Actually, even among research professors, tenure is used more to protect the
lazy than to protect academic freedom. Every department has plenty of
deadwood, but rarely more than one or two people with radical ideas.

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kiba
My AP Computer Science course is more like teaching people how to program in
Java. They taught us the specifics like interface class, abstract class,
ArrayList class, and the like. Then they make us do toy programs that teaches
these concept. I practically roll my eyes at the "Student class, Person class,
etc" assignment.

It was as if they don't have enough for all that they need to teach in Java
programming and decided to push it over to computer science.

I thought I was going to be writing algorithms, learning data structure, how
to optimize it, etc. I was wrong. It was nothing more than gorified java
programming class, at least this semester.

Plus the teacher doesn't seem to be interested in her students' private
projects and what we really think of her class.

It was only a class of 8 students. As a result there's only 8 people who take
computer science AP class in the entire school. Java programmming class have a
lot of students but few students made it to computer science.

There's little incentives in providing a compelling computer science education
in high school.

~~~
HSCompSCI
Well, the course description specifically states what is tested and taught for
the APCS exam. I think you were hoping to get more of an "AB" curriculum
rather than an "A".

You are simply in the wrong class if you "roll your eyes". You should look at
taking a class at a local community college in something more challenging.

I have a few articles that covers problems in the APCS test at
<http://www.hscompsci.com>

Unfortunately, the "AB" tested is dropped this year. The College Board lost
like $700,000 per year because not enough high school students took the test
compared to how many people they have to hire to grade them.

So yes, the "A" curriculum is pretty fundamental (though 40% of students flunk
the "A" test each year)

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dpatru
Seliger cites a study showing that GRE scores for education graduate school
students are 27 out of 28 disciplines. The only discipline with worse scores
is public administration.

