This bothering might be a little controversial, but iam guessing were mature enought to express ourselves properly.

School quality is a little questionable. i cant talk for schools around the world, but for english schools in quebec. so here's how it is down here(or should i say up for the americans? )

-Classes with a minimum of 30 students per class(and there far from big classes)

-books about soem guy masterbating

-reduced budget, increase students in classes

-students not being tough well, things we should have mastered in grade 6 have to be re-tought again because kids forgot

now, does anyone fidn this normal? iam sure asking more questiosn ot teachers i could fidn many more problems, these are only a few.

Kids are responsable. not doign all there homework is one of them.
Teachers are responsible for not making sure the material has been learned properly, and high school teachers tell themselves " why would i bother? there big enought and can pay for the consequence, etc"
But those who coem up with these programs demandign that kids learned thsi and that for the end of the year dont realize the teachers dont have enought time to teach the material properly.

Maybe iam wrong about some things, but thats what ive been told by my french, english and old french teacher.

This is bothering me because, everythign seems to be going wrong, hopsitals, schools, at least in quebec.

Comment qould be great, maybe i could get a more positive look at our educational system

Frank

Are you sure you didn't just visit the U.K because this sounds very familiar.

I'm a teacher in the UK. You'd never know from the handle would you? What Francois has said rings a bell, even over here. Society is moving on. The pupils have changed, the teachers have changed. From the teachers' point of view, we are overworked. Despite what many see as fantastic holidays, any teacher worth his salary works every evening preparing lessons, and hours at weekends preparing and marking. If you examine the stats, a very high percentage of teachers drop dead within 6 months of retiring. That's just out of those that make it to retirement. The kids these days are VERY aware of their rights. They are also very aware, that we can hold little in the way of sanctions above their heads.
I consider myself to be a good teacher. I actually care about wanting to see the kids I teach do something with their lives. Most of my kids come from a deprived inner-city area (Liverpool), and for many, education will be their only way out, but it's hard to care all the time.
I know that there are going to be times each day, when my stomach will be in knots, my BP sky high, and I'll want to kill something after a confrontation. This can be a normal occurrence for a teacher. These days if you 'phone a business and begin to sound the tiniest bit angry, then they'll cut you off. Yet a 12 year old can still tell a teacher " F*** off you c***" with near impunity. This is what teachers have to put up with. I find myself thinking, that if they don't want to learn, sod them.

Vinnie

Francois

Sounds very like Queensland too. I don't think that the rest of Australia would be much different.

The spell it as it sounds concept really p@@@es me off. Fortunately my dad was a teacher (taught me in Grade 2) and I have always been good at English. When I started studying law at 28 I was surprised by the number of younger students that couldn't spell or even use correct grammar. As the lecturers used to say "You have to write legal opinions and letters to clients - if you can't put it all together properly you are giving the client a very bad impression"

As a Clerk of the Court I get to see many letters from those who have been before the courts and almost unversally they cannot spell sometimes to the point that their letters are incomprehensible.

I think that this is a sad indictment on society - not the teachers who work under trying enough conditions as Vinnie said. The attitude I see from our juvenile defendants is appalling. In fact an appearance in court is nothing special for them, they show no respect for authority - whether parents police or courts.

Certainly they come from a different era of 1914-1918 or even 1939 - 1945 but I thin their present attiude is such that if the same happened again none of them would "Answer the Call".

Boy I had better stop now before I really get started.

Brian

Vinnnie
Take my hat off to you ..i worked i Social Services in London had my nose broke wrist and my car trashed,its a great world we live in good luck and i dont blame how you feel but thanks for trying you do make a difference.
Cheers Chris

I am about a year away from becoming a secondary (middle school/high school) history teacher. Right now I am observing a high school in Chicago as part of my course work. It sounds as if these problems are not just limited to a few areas, here in Chicago they have a new goal to bring schools up to speed by 2010. If a school is consistently failing it will be shut down and totally restaffed and reorganized. I believe only two have actually met this fate. It does not sit well with alot of teachers either.

As much as I want to believe-- not all kids are going to benifit from school. Some truely do not want to be there and will drop out...but there is a push in this country that every kids must be passed through the system and 'educated'. It just seems like kids learn too late that their education is more important than alot of things.

I could go on and on about this topic, so I'll pause for now

Sean

I understand how difficult it can be to teach kids but I believe no matter how little resources you have, you MUST produce educated students.

At my work, no matter how much of a budget I have I must produce a quality product and sell it. There is no excuse for being short on sales or lax on quality.

Also there seems to be too much emphasis on preserving self esteem instead of passing on education. Passing a kid with a D or 60% score is pathetic. I have never heard of a teacher fired for not teaching enough kids to pass a certain test. If I produced a product with only a 60% quality rate I would be on my ass.

Alan, I'd like to see you produce quality goods using crap materials. Teachers are expected to do it all the time.

Vinnie

The difference, Alan, is when you produce a widget or a jet engine, your product has no will of its own, no disdain for a system that might get them a $6 an hour job, no drug stuporred role models with gold capped teeth bragging of having been shot a dozen times before they were old enough to vote.

Your product doesn't have parents making babies at 13 years old so they can be loved, parents who are working 2 and 3 jobs to break even in a rotten apartment.

There was a time of natural winnowing of problem students. They dropped out early and found their way to the mills and the mines and the west. Now, they MUST remain in school until they are 16 and steal air from the students who want to learn. There's a reason private schools do better, it's harder to get in and easier to be asked to leave.

As to firing a teacher because students didn't pass a test, you can bet the best, toughest and most demanding teachers would be getting fired left, right and sideways. "Mr. Tong gives out too many detentions. Lets's all screw up on his tests and get him in trouble."

Now we're seeing the newly energized religious right wanting to only be taught what they already believe as science. I could have done so much better in calculus if I'd been able to demand to be taught that the answers I came up with were what I believed to be true! Maybe the neo-Nazis will get to have little stickers in the front of history books saying students should consider there are people who don't believe the Holocaust happened and these alternate ideas need to be evaluated as a real possibility.

Unfortunately, there are no easy answers.

Not just that, but how can you hold a teacher up to 30 different standards? If I have 30 students all with have a range of grades, of course I'd want more to excell than just slide by, but I think this demostrates that it is not 100% the teachers responsiblity, students are just as, if not more, important.

I see where you are coming from Alan, and I agree with you...thats why Chicago has Goals 2010...they are actually shutting down failing schools and retooling them. So it is being done in a sense

Sean

I am not faulting the teachers but more the whole system. Many teachers work very hard. But as you can see it's very difficult to churn out a quality educated kid given what we accept as passing grades today

You guys are pointing soem good stuff out realy and it makes me realize that schools havnt changed for the better ovr the years. like ZzZ said, there cutting hte freakin budget the second they can. were giving millions of dollars in aid aroudn hte world, losing millions in political scandals like the sponsership thing, but to pay for all this we must cut hte budget for the ill in need waiting for soem transplant in a hospital bed, and give totaly inadequate ( spell...) equipment to teach! as an example of this, in my leadership course, we must spend 3 days in the woods sleepign in snow shelters, and since the school doesnt have enough equipment to satisfy our needs, it was cut down to 2 days! and hte material we have is soem old stuff donated by the military...

And i must agree with teacher, teaching hard heads you use there rights against you the secondary they can and dont give a about school, is like welding plastic with a mig... its imposible.

See, fortunatly there are exceptions, i msut give credit to my english teacher, he cares abotu his students education ,enspired soem to become teachers and do soemthing with htere lives, doesnt teach anything new until the EVERYONE in class has understood, even if it take the whole year. and also my principle, as much as i can hate him sometimes, he does excelent work and knows his staff and can say whos a rot and who isnt.

Frank

You do? You have taught?
It's the whole 'walk a mile in my shoes before casting stones' bit here.
Volunteer at a school, or get yourself onto a substitute teacher list and then get back to us on how hard it is.
Teacher is right, any of us doing this job for any length of time work as many hours per week as any other full time worker.
I however cannot 'turn off' my job at the end of the day.
Widget Co. employees seldom go home and replay the day and reevaluate their work for the day.
Applying buisness models and solutions to education problems DOES NOT WORK!!

Nor does federally mandated 'leave no child behind' policies that remove resources from the neediest schools.




As Teacher so aptly pointed out, in any buisness/porduction model, you have control over your raw materials.
I cannot, no matter how talented I am, make quality widgets without a raw material of quality as a starting point.

Nor am I free to fire any disruptive, uncooperative, or low performing employee.




Agreed, it is often said in my classroom, where I am known to be somewhat of a hardcase and unsympathetic to the feelings of my students, "No one will ever care as much about your self esteem as your elementary ed teachers. Now get back to work."

But letting the imates run the asylum, having students control , again as others have said, allowing student choices to such as agreeing to tank a given test to have influence over the professional career of a teacher is lunacy. As is idea of 'merit pay'.
Don't get me wrong, I am glad when my wife gets a bonus at her job for meeting goals she is entirely in control of. But the volume of factors influencing student performance is massive, and the number of factor I directly and fully control is microscopic in comparison.

As an aside, I am often guilty of being a poor typist, but Francois, buddy... , a little re-reading for clarity and word use as well as some editing for spelling would do you a world of good.
-sorry, that's intended to be somewhat tongue in cheek and not as sarcastic as it probably sounds...

Mike
US 4th grade -10yr olds- teacher

sorry, iam french ( pathetic excuse since i speach english as well as any english kid around lol) but it might make me feel less stupid lol

i have a hard time making sure everything is well typed, but i give it a look not to look like a slob :-)

and MLD, thats very well said

Frank

over the past several years I have regretted choices I have made in my life. I have struggled the past four years in my career of distrbution management, and have been told by everyone who knows me I should have been a teacher. When I looked into it, despite having two degrees (one in History) it was just too time consuming and cost prohibitive to do this. After reading the responses back from the folks who are teachers, I am not regretting it as bad. I think I would have found it too demoralizing to find such a high percentage of kids that didn't want to at least try to learn. In my day at my high school, 75 % of us went to college. Fort Knox High, class of 72

Blaster, il tell you something. at least how it is here in my high school. give us a history class thats manditory in sec.4 and msot will tell you to [auto-censored] off because they dotn care about history, then you have to go in a long lesson why its important etc. however, youve got the kids who want to learn which encourages and motivates teachers ot go on and support loisy conditions.

take a hsitory course in sec.5 that is optional and you'll have yourself a lot of fun because the kids wanna learn, thast what they chose to learn because they enjoy. so it all gets down to this.

By the tiem kids are in sec.3(14-15 years old) they have a good idea of what they like. why cant they make french, english math manditory, but for the rest of the courses, offer more options. not everone will want to study hsitory, science or religion, these are the classes kids [auto-censored] around in when they find no intrest, so instead of having them act up and all, jsut give them what they want: the chance to chose mroe than ONE course so they take school more seriously and want to persue study's

Frank