Education / What's it like in your Country?

bountyhunter

Joined Sep 7, 2009
2,512
So what you are saying is that schools should stop teaching things like geometry, trigonometry, physics, calculus as well as anything related to industrial arts until they are up to snuff in grammar and other basic topics across the board.
NEGATIVE. Schools should be required to demonstrate their students can speak their own language before trying to teach them another.

We are going through this in Cali right now where parents are screaming because budget cuts have forced high schools to drop their LACROSSE teams...... no I am not making that up. Public schools are busy providing everything except basic education.

Geometry, trigonometry and physics should be offered as prep classes to enable students who qualify to attend college.

What college requires bilingual ability to attend? None I ever saw.
 

bountyhunter

Joined Sep 7, 2009
2,512
When I become king, the first steps I will take to fix public education are as follows.

1. Make all extracurricular activities extracurricular. Want to play football or be a cheerleader or play in the marching band? Good for you; practice is NOT during school hours.
and taxpayer $$$ will not be used to support it if cuts are being made to actual educational areas.

2. Want to have a multimillion dollar sports facility? Fine, as long as it is self-supporting through ticket sales and/or donations. Same thing for the coaching staff. (And keep the coaches out of the classrooms.)
And as long as taxpayer $$$ are not tapped to build it.


3. Cap the superintendent's salary at three times a starting teacher's pay. Cap the principal's salary at two times a starting teacher's pay.
And make pay contingent on student performance on basic testing.

5. Separate students according to performance (not ability,) and tailor the curricula accordingly.
Already doing that here: the dummies are in the basic "track" and the "college bound" students were put into the college track classes where they grade a lot harder.

6. Allow non-performers to fail; stop "social promotion." Allow non-performers to drop out at 16 years of age.
Provide a parallel path where they can either be brought up to speed on basic skills or opt out and get other work training.
 

bountyhunter

Joined Sep 7, 2009
2,512
some exercise is good but
In reality: mandatory phys ed all the way through school was for one reason only: to make sure that the kids were in good enough shape to be drafted into the military.

In the late 60's here, all colleges had mandatory phys ed requirements up to the age of 26 (seriously) which was blatant age discrimination. The same college degree only required PE if you were in the "draft zone" of age. I remember it well. I hope that is no longer the case.

Kids are so fat now I think we would be lucky if 20% of 18 year olds could serve in the military.
 

THE_RB

Joined Feb 11, 2008
5,438
...
If the government shifts the personality of the whole country to better fit a growing percentage of the population, I would be greatly impressed. Usually we notice incidents of racism and fear of change.
Do the government have that much of a choice? Things are well under way.

With the increase in non-english background population comes voting rights, so one of the first things you'll see is hispanic background mayors, governors, senators etc.

Then will be things like blingual emergency signs, bilingual govt services leaflets, etc then advertisers will jump on that will bilingual advertising.

And increased use of Spanish expressions in TV sitcoms and movies etc (a popular way of educating the dumb masses).

People in the southern states would likely be already seeing a lot of this already happening.

And another sign would be, of course, compulsory Spanish lessons in schools.
 

Georacer

Joined Nov 25, 2009
5,182
By reading myself quoted I realized how close we came to politics.

Let's try to contain this thread within education. If not... oh, well!
 

Thread Starter

killivolt

Joined Jan 10, 2010
835
By reading myself quoted I realized how close we came to politics.

Let's try to contain this thread within education. If not... oh, well!
I've always thought, most people talk with their hands. Why don't we have a Global Sign language. You could speak in your native language and speak the meaning of what your saying in sign language.
 

WBahn

Joined Mar 31, 2012
29,976
I imagine this is true, but can anyone confirm that sign language is spoken-language-independent?
There are numerous different sign languages in use. I don't know whether any effort has been made to standardize one internationally. I know that sign languages have dialects that are strong enough that it can be hard for two people using nominally the same sign language to communicate. Also, all sign languages support an alphabet that is frequently used to spell out words for which a short-hand gesture isn't available (or shared in common). On top of that, there are lots of words in any language that have multiple meanings or are homophomes and I suspect that this influences sign language to at least some degree.
 

WBahn

Joined Mar 31, 2012
29,976
When I become king, the first steps I will take to fix public education are as follows.

3. Cap the superintendent's salary at three times a starting teacher's pay. Cap the principal's salary at two times a starting teacher's pay.
I wonder how many of us here would be willing to live by this same standard.

How would we respond if someone recommended, in an effort to make goods more affordable for everyone, that engineers with ten to twenty years of experience and who are responsible for projects with several dozen engineers working on it be capped at twice a starting engineer's salary? Or that engineers with about thirty years of experience and who are responsible for multiple projects with thousands of engineers assigned be capped at three times a starting engineer's salary?

And consider the secondary consequences. How much could an engineer hope to make after two or three decades working as an engineer but remaining a project engineer if their boss' boss is only making twice what the new guy is making?
 

tracecom

Joined Apr 16, 2010
3,944
I wonder how many of us here would be willing to live by this same standard.

How would we respond if someone recommended, in an effort to make goods more affordable for everyone, that engineers with ten to twenty years of experience and who are responsible for projects with several dozen engineers working on it be capped at twice a starting engineer's salary? Or that engineers with about thirty years of experience and who are responsible for multiple projects with thousands of engineers assigned be capped at three times a starting engineer's salary?

And consider the secondary consequences. How much could an engineer hope to make after two or three decades working as an engineer but remaining a project engineer if their boss' boss is only making twice what the new guy is making?
Teaching isn't like engineering; a first year teacher has essentially the same level of responsibility as a teacher with 30 years of experience. They don't get the easier, less important assignments. They shoulder a full load of responsibility from day one. In addition, the new teacher's workload is often heavier, the classes to which they are assigned are often more demanding, and the standards are often enforced more vigorously.

My point is that public school teachers are not paid what their responsibility level deserves. It's also my opinion that public school administrators are overpaid for what they do. And the saddest part of all is that the only path for significant income increases for teachers is by jumping from instruction to administration (or coaching, but that's another story.) Increase salaries for starting teachers and watch the demand for those jobs increase, and the quality of the applicants rise as well.

Increasing teachers' pay to be commensurate with their responsibilities would allow me to implement step number 7: do away with tenure and weed out the teachers who have given up or shouldn't have been hired in the first place. The days in which teachers could sacrifice income for the satisfaction of a job well done are gone. Now, we need to put our money where our mouth is, and pay teachers what they deserve.
 

WBahn

Joined Mar 31, 2012
29,976
Teaching isn't like engineering; a first year teacher has essentially the same level of responsibility as a teacher with 30 years of experience. They don't get the easier, less important assignments. They shoulder a full load of responsibility from day one. In addition, the new teacher's workload is often heavier, the classes to which they are assigned are often more demanding, and the standards are often enforced more vigorously.

My point is that public school teachers are not paid what their responsibility level deserves. It's also my opinion that public school administrators are overpaid for what they do. And the saddest part of all is that the only path for significant income increases for teachers is by jumping from instruction to administration (or coaching, but that's another story.) Increase salaries for starting teachers and watch the demand for those jobs increase, and the quality of the applicants rise as well.

Increasing teachers' pay to be commensurate with their responsibilities would allow me to implement step number 7: do away with tenure and weed out the teachers who have given up or shouldn't have been hired in the first place. The days in which teachers could sacrifice income for the satisfaction of a job well done are gone. Now, we need to put our money where our mouth is, and pay teachers what they deserve.
Oh. Okay. Then by this reasoning a teacher's salary should go down over time since their responsibilities are not increasing and they get to teach the easier, less demanding courses. At the very least, their salaries should not increase and a teacher with thirty years experience should be content with making the same salary as the new teacher.
 

tracecom

Joined Apr 16, 2010
3,944
Oh. Okay. Then by this reasoning a teacher's salary should go down over time since their responsibilities are not increasing and they get to teach the easier, less demanding courses. At the very least, their salaries should not increase and a teacher with thirty years experience should be content with making the same salary as the new teacher.
No, I didn't say that and it's not logical. Teachers should receive salary increases over time for the same reasons as any other employee, i.e., time on the job should count for a modest increase, but more significant increases should come with performance improvements.

Currently, in most public schools, increases are based only on longevity and additional college course work, and those increases don't keep up with inflation. One of the few teacher perks for longevity is being assigned to honors classes and elective courses. If we started new teachers off with a fair salary, and based their increases on performance as measured by student progress, there would be an incentive for teachers to gravitate toward the students and classes where there is the most room for improvement. So, the students who need the most help get the teachers who most want to prove their effectiveness and get larger salary increases.

And as to some high-performing newer teachers being paid more than teachers with more time on the job, but poorer performance, so be it. That happens in every industry that I have worked in except education. It separates out the chaff.
 

Miss Kelly

Joined Nov 9, 2013
6
My grandkids attend a charter school that offers language immersiin in Spanish, French, or Chinese. We have a large Hispanic population in our area, as well as several other ethnicities. I think we're at a point of needing to be multi-lingual in everyday life. One of my high school teachers was from Norway. I remember her telling us that several other languages, including English, were taught in school right from the beginning, because Norway is a much smaller country than the US, and being able to converse in the language of the neighboring countries was important. My grandfather grew up in rural Missouri, speaking Gaelic, but had to learn English when he went to school. I think being able to function in more than one language will be a valuable asset to the students of today when they become the leaders of tomorrow.
 
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