Just a thought…

by Chris and Kris   ⋅   October 27, 2005   ⋅   Comment now   ⋅   Subscribe RSS  RSS

With the November special election there’s a whole lot of talk around cutting funding for schools and being harsh on the teachers. But, did you know California schools are guaranteed 40% of California’s income each year?

All that money spent, and still a good measure of highschool graduates still don’t know basic things such as fatoring, or the difference between the words “your” and “you’re”.

Seems like just throwing money at education isn’t the solution. I mean we’re ranked roughly 48th out of the 50 states for the quality of our education. Could it be that the teachers are the problem?

In my own experience, over the course of my academic career, the good teachers I have had can be counted on a single hand. However, to tally all the bad or incompetent teachers I would need a second set of appendages.

Take my first Trig teacher for example. When I asked her how she was getting the answers for equations such as sine of pi over 2, she told me sine and cosine were just things you punched into the calculator. If I did so I would get the answer. She never explained that they were ratios involving the sides of a right triangle in relation to the angle at which the sides connected.

Or take my first English Writing teacher. He didn’t like reading essays, so he had the class listen to techno music and perform a musical at the end of the semester. Only one essay was required, and that was a 5 to 10 page group essay, with each group consisting 10 or more kids. On average no one had to write more than a paragraph or two. Every kid that put up with his crap was given an A in the class, even though little to no writing was involved. This teacher had been fired from Stanford previously, but had somehow qualified for tenureship at my school. Due to this fact, the board could not fire him. It wasn’t until the teacher got into a physical altercation with the dean that he was suspended, and subsequently let go.

Given my experience I’m all for lengthening the time it takes for teachers to achieve tenureship.

– Chris Nelson

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Comment [1] for “Just a thought…”

  1. Teaching needs to be a job that attracts more people. Sure, if it paid better, there would be more unqualified people applying, but I’m sure more passionate people would want to grow up to be teachers. Otherwise you just get the tragic people who are good teachers but eating mac & cheese every night.

    So yeah, make tenure harder…but pay the teachers more. It seems like the money just goes into useless programs and renovating schools that don’t need it that much (cough Mountain View). I never considered being a teacher (not to say I would even have been a good one) because I knew it didn’t pay well and was a hard job (if you do it right).

    Greg Jenkins on October 27, 2005

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