Do students learn less when they focus on getting good grades?

A lot of school is a waste of time because standards aren't chosen well and the education levels aren't set up well.

Well I find it's more of a teacher resource issue when you talk about whether or not you want to assign grades. You've a teacher for 30 kids, what's the easiest way to tell them they're doing well? Grades.

It's much like multiple choice exams for most first year arts courses in university. They do that because there are a lot of students and very few people to go through their tests.

I think if you had more teachers you would naturally decrease focus on grades and focus more on constructive one-on-one feedback between the teacher and student.

How about awarding House points?

Do only the British have Houses?

^^And yet the current 'reform' discussion is "GET RID OF 'BAD' TEACHERS ABBLBLARG".

Education writers like Alfie Kohn are arguing that this is going to lead to even less people actively wanting to teach, instead of teaching just because it's a job.

I do believe in getting rid of bad teachers. I believe there are quite a few of them due to bad standards being set up.

YES

As far as I know, only private schools are going to have Houses (In America) due to the fact that you don't live at a public school In America.

Well teaching is an important aspect of society and I find it odd how lowly we grade the profession in North America. I'm not sure how you'd find good candidates for teaching if all we ever do in media and in the government are alternating witch hunts or teacher bashing. At some point we have to figure out how to hire a lot of good teachers and make the profession appear very high in status. Without that, you'll continue to get bad teachers. In fact, I would say specifically hunting for bad teachers is going to cause teachers to become worse.

When was the last time Microsoft, for instance, went on a witch hunt to constantly weed out bad employees? No, if you happen to be bad, they'll get rid of you but they spent the vast majority of their time looking for GOOD candidates.

In this case, if you have good teachers I think the question about grades becomes moot. You will still have grades but with good teachers they'll worry if a student is not learning something and work with him/her.

Teachers get a bad rap because a lot of them are ass holes who can't wrap the head around the fact that most of their students find their subject boring on top of general incompetence. From talking to someone going in for a degree with a teaching certificate, I'm under the impression you're lucky to get a class that teaches you how to set up a lesson plan, much less actual useful information on how to teach.

It's kind of hard to fire shitty teachers when there's only a handful present.

Well the teaching standards here are pretty high from what I've seen but we have a lot of hold over teachers from before the major standard increases. The problem is that they keep increasing the bar of acceptance (which isn't entirely bad but there's no point in making it way too high either) to make up for the 40 to 50+ year old bad teachers.

There's also a problem right now where individuals who fail to be accepted by teaching college here (you are required to have a bachelor's before you can apply to teaching college here), they go to the USA where it is piss easy. The problem isn't very large but it exists. That's primarily why I'm not really that concerned with it. Hm, that might also explain your complaints about the low standards.

edited 28th Oct '10 9:06:40 AM by breadloaf

Well, if your problem is grandfather clause teachers, making it so that a teacher has to take a test every few years to maintain qualifications seems like the most obvious answer.

Agreed, every two or three years. If failed, remedial training to be given to correct problem areas identified by the testing, followed by another set of testing to ensure they got the needed skillset to teach. Or something like that.

Hehe, we already have that. Which is why I think the primary issue is lack of teachers rather than quality of teachers. I've seen some poor ones but because they've been teaching so long they just have this immortal lesson plan anyways so it's not the best thing but it's "good" enough for 99% of people.

edited 28th Oct '10 1:37:20 PM by breadloaf

COMMAS

?

Learning to read is linked to myopia? Fascinating. Don't see the problem, though - we have glasses, and learning to read at a young age (assuming you're successful with it) can bring many benefits that greatly outweigh the inconvenience of glasses. If I hadn't gotten to read the many fascinating stories I read as a kid, boy, would I have missed out on a lot.

I thought that was a correlation/causation misconstruction: kids with bad distance vision gravitate to close-up activities like reading.

Or wrestling. Ór sex.