Class culture matters more than class size writes Pamela Felcher, a high school English department chair in Los Angeles. She makes some smart points about the classroom experience:
“I do not mean racial or ethnic or socioeconomic culture, I mean the culture of a particular group of students in a particular room in a particular institution. I have two 10th-grade classes of about 30 students each. One of them is an “honors” class; the other, “regular.” In my honors class, the 30 students are engaged and demanding. They probe texts, cultivate questions, encourage discourse and write analytically. My regular class, on the other hand, is allergic to homework; students belch aloud and feel no shame because this is “just school”; they bully and curse at one another; they cannot sit still; they cannot listen; and their distraction is heightened by the gadgets they carry.”
In both of her classes, writes Felcher in the L.A. Times, her expectations exceed her students, however the best students in the regular class, she notes “often collapse under the weight of the apathetic, the rude, the defiant, the indolent mass that defines that class’ culture.”
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An eloquent and important post on Bridging Differences this morning from Diane Ravitch:
No matter how frequently or how beautifully you describe the joys of childhood, those who are making education policy will not be deterred or persuaded. Their agenda is competitiveness. They are in the throes of data-driven decision-making, which has become a sort of mantra that takes the place of actual thinking. How can you measure the joys of childhood? How can you measure wonder and awe? Go where the numbers tell you to go, they say; but what if the numbers are measuring trivial things? Do what the numbers tell you to do, they say; but people—not numbers—devise policy alternatives.
A humane approach to educating children, says Ravitch, “has a huge constituency among teachers, but none among policymakers. What I am suggesting is that we should talk not about a past that has been lost, perhaps irretrievably, but how to change and mitigate the policies that are now destroying joy, wonder, and any hope of a better education.”
Do we need a Hippocratic Oath for teachers?
A spate of recent examples of bad classroom behavior suggests a promise at least to do no harm might be in order. A Georgia biology teacher was arrested last week for telling an unruly student he would “rip your eyeballs out” during a tirade. That followed a pair of nationally publicized incidents where kindergarten teachers humiliated students. Megan McArdle, blogging about adoption policies at The Atlantic, recently wrote
“Virtually every profession that involves an element of coercion needs a version of the Hippocratic Oath.”
So how about it? What should a Hippocratic Oath for teachers say? What general principles ought to guide ethical classroom practice? Eduwonk set a precedent by offering a book as a prize for his “If I had $5 billion dollars” contest, and I know a good idea when I steal one:
The best teacher’s Hippocratic oath wins a $50 Barnes and Noble gift card. You choose your own book. I’m all about choice.
Update: If this article posted by Joanne Jacobs is to be believed, teachers in Australia get in hot water for simply raising their voices.
Today we call it differentiated instruction. Back in the day, it was called the one-room school house. Is it an idea whose time has come around again? At Pajamas Media (hat tip: Joanne Jacobs), Charlie Martin costs out what it would take to bring back the one-room school house…in midtown Manhattan. Martin built his scenario using the average cost of about $14,000 per year that it costs to educate a New York City public school student.
We assume 24 students in Manhattan, and a one-room school built in quality office space in midtown. I laid out a floor plan and discovered we could fit it nicely into 1,050 square feet; equip it with good quality desks and chairs and with one iMac computer for every two students, plus one for the teacher and a Mac Pro as a classroom server; and add Internet connections and $1,000 per student for books and supplies. How much remained to hire a teacher? $230,000. Almost a quarter of a million dollars.
“I think we’ve solved the problem of recruiting good teachers,” Martin dryly comments. “For $230,000 a year, it would be the rejects from elementary teaching who would go to Harvard.”
Martin concludes of his own thought experiement that we spend amazing amounts of money per student, struggle to pay teachers well enough to keep them, while outcomes decline. “We’ve seen that we could go back to the model of a hundred years ago. It’s not only possible, it would make teaching into one of the most well-paid jobs in the country, even the world, and still save money,” Martin concludes. “As a close friend put it, ‘where is the money going?’”
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