Quote:
Originally Posted by purl4peace
Or in the case of my other son with Asperger's "no child left behind even if they have to be dragged kicking, screaming, bloody, and bruised"...
The stupid thing is what would they have a kid do if he is done with his work? Is he just supposed to sit there staring into space. Yeah... that works really well with a 6th grade boy full of energy and imagination.
But I digress!
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A lot of education systems in the world have some serious, serious problems, and the field of education in North America has become a bit polarizing in its teacher/administrator output.
Much concern has come from the lack of fundamental reassessment of systemwide problems. Everything has been treated as a superficial blame game, whether it's parents, teachers, students, administrators, lawmakers, or anyone else who wants to join in.
Although from another country altogether, let me give you an example from Asia (which is fallaciously associated with good education systems because of high test scores). A friend of mine was an English teacher who was one of the rare foreign teachers in Asia with pretty honest intentions (I don't want to get started on a rant complaining about foreign teachers). Anyway, the business he was working for collapsed and left him without employment, so he found a job with a "cram school" designed as a glorified daycare for 7-12 year old children. Once the testing session was done, he received a phone call and was given a rather strong warning from his manager. As it turned out, many of the students had received scores of barely passing, and some noticeably below. The manager said that was not acceptable and that the teacher needs to ensure that students all get above 85%, since the schools often use these high test scores as advertising and competition for customers.
They didn't fire him then, since he didn't know the policy, but the next test session, he came to me complaining about how the school made him give the students all the answers to the test the day before so that they could go home and study, and the day of the test, he was supposed to walk around and check and make sure they were answering the questions correctly, and make them fix answers that he saw weren't right. He would have been fired had he not done that.
My advice to him was to just quit. He stuck with it for another few months, and then left the country behind, relatively bitter about the experience. Another thing he was told was he could not use verbal discipline or do anything else that might cause the children to complain to their parents. If a parent complains, they'll often demand that the teacher be fired, and schools will frequently oblige, afraid to lose their customers. Teachers come and go, but a student is business. Getting fired for such things could mean getting blacklisted from a lot of other schools as well.
Now of course, these were in a *somewhat* aberrant (but not uncommon) branch of a nationwide chain private school, and not a public elementary school or junior high school. I don't want to lead anyone into thinking that these issues are in all the public sectors, because they're not really. Those schools have completely different sets of serious problems.
Sometimes it makes me wonder if the foreign teachers were drinkers and stoners before working in Asia, or if working in Asia drove them to it.
As far as having an ebook reader in class, it's difficult to gauge the situation without being there. I don't teach or work with children, but I can easily imagine a dozen situations where it would be feasible to temporarily deprive a child of a book in class. I've met too many incompetent teachers to dismiss the possibility of asshattery, but I've never cared for ignorant blaming of any party involved in a dispute (usually substantiated by another example "and there was this one time..."). It's unfortunate that such a situation occurred, but it's surely not the first time, and surely not the last time it's happened.