Buffalo Boy's Blog
Giving You More Than Just My Two Cents
Proof on Teachers
This article and video is a great example of my earlier point. Teachers work their asses off. Yes its at the college level and some would argue that teaching at the college level is easier because the students are self motivated for the most part. But the stuff that this professor does in his classroom has to be carefully planned.
What he is doing is simply called differentiating instruction to appeal to all learners. It takes a lot of practice, experience and knowledge as well as desire and hard work to do what this guy does.
This guy may be the extreme and realistically science may be one of the easiest areas to differentiate learning to all students but I had teachers throughout my career that made learning fun simply by being creative in the classroom. I respected that as a student.
I remember in high school my chemistry teacher almost set the classroom on fire, whether by accident or on purpose I will never forget that day/lesson that he taught. Its simple things that teachers do that take them time and energy but make the learning experience more accessible to students that make learning stick.
Today's word from the Public School System:
OMELETTE
Let's use it in a sentence ....
"I should pop yo ass fo what you jus did, but
omelette dis one slide."
you could clean up your comments
From the school house to the White House, the teacher unions are the most formidable foes of meaningful education reforms -- reforms, which I believe are necessary to achieve superior educational outcomes for children at lower costs to parents and other taxpayers through competition.
Despite their rhetoric, the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, like other labor unions, were established to redistribute income from employers to employees and the unions. There is no incentive to reduce costs when taxpayers must pay upon demand. There is no reason to excel when the best employees are paid what the worst are paid. For decades, the NEA/AFT have negotiated highly inefficient contracts covering such items as
hours of employment and compensation
teacher work load and duties
teacher qualifications
teaching assignments and seniority
benefits
teacher evaluation and tenure
taxpayer subsidies to the unions, such as paid time off for union work, use of school mail system, payroll deduction for dues and NEA/AFT PACs at no cost to the unions, and retirement credit for full-time service as a union employee.
With incredible specificity, the teacher union/school district contract heavily influences the day-to-day operations and morale of a school. In their study, researchers Howard Fuller, George Mitchell and Michael Hartmann reveal that the 174-page contract between the Milwaukee Public System and Milwaukee Teachers Education Association, is an almost "impenetrable document". Making it even more complicated, they discovered "...a 'contract behind the contract' comprised of nearly 2,000 amendments ('memoranda of understanding'), grievance-arbitration rulings, and various state declaratory rulings