Teachers are not paid to be liked, and sometimes it’s better for the students when they’re not, but it makes the job so much more satisfying when your students care about you. This video above shows what a little recognition can do to a teacher.
I am not a Lady Gaga devotee, but her rendition of the national anthem was simply sublime. It is interesting to note from a teacher’s perspective, that a music teacher was by her side during that stunning performance:
If you are watching the Superbowl Sunday, you will likely see a Westchester music teacher accompanying Lady Gaga as she sings the National Anthem.
Alex Smith, who teaches at Yorktown Heights’ Soundview Preparatory School, will be at the piano with Lady Gaga when game coverage starts at 6:30 p.m., the Journal News said.
Smith can also be heard on Lady Gaga and Tony Bennett’s album, “Cheek to Cheek.”
If there was a transgender student in your class, you would certainly focus on transgender awareness in the classroom. But aside from this scenario, it is important that these types of conversations should be left to the parents. Teachers are inundated as it is and we need as much time as possible to cover the curriculum.
Sure the outcry of transgender awareness lessons will usually come from religious groups, but spare a thought for stressed out teachers with a very overblown curriculum to cover as it is:
A MOTHER has withdrawn her children from Frankston High School after the introduction of a new program to promote transgender awareness.
Cella White says her 14-year-old son was told he could wear a dress to school and that male-born students who identified as female could use the girls’ change rooms and toilets.
The government-funded program by the Safe Schools Coalition is designed to promote inclusiveness for ‘same sex attracted, intersex and gender diverse’ students, but critics say it is indoctrinating children in sexual identity politics under the pretence of a bulling program.
“It was announced in science class that boys could wear school dresses next year,” Ms White said.
“They’re telling my children to call transgender children by their requested pronoun.
“What is the benefit to my son? He’s got a learning disability, he’s struggling with his times tables, he doesn’t need to deal with this.”
I haven’t encountered too many dumb teachers, but I have come across plenty of dumb politicians:
THE Andrews Labor Government is intent on raising the bar for teachers in Victoria.
To say this is overdue is to put it mildly. It’s a no-brainer that if you put a thick teacher in front of kids, then they will not achieve.
But that is exactly what happens. Moreover, the cost of necessary remediation because of dumb teaching is high. Yes, it is your tax dollars we are talking about.
No matter. Teaching courses in Victoria set entry requirements for bottom feeders.
I am in my fourth decade of being a secondary teacher and I have seen academic standards decline in teachers.
To be blunt, they do not know enough about their subject.
Yes there are heartless ogres in some classrooms, but the underlying reason most of us choose to become teachers and educators is the urge to protect and nurture the next generation.
An Indianapolis elementary school principal was seen pushing several students out of the way of an oncoming bus before the vehicle fatally struck her, authorities said Tuesday.
Susan Jordan, the principal of Amy Beverland Elementary School on the city’s far northeast side, was killed and two 10-year-old children were hospitalized with serious but non-life-threatening injuries when the bus suddenly lurched forward, authorities said.
Buses were lined up outside the school when the accident happened around 2:45 p.m., Indianapolis Fire Department Capt. Rita Reith said.
“At some point, the stationary bus lurched forward and jumped the curb. The bus was not moving at the time directly before it jumped the curb,” Reith said.
The female bus driver told firefighters she was not sure what caused the bus to accelerate, Reith said in a statement Tuesday evening. The driver also said “in the instant that the accident occurred” she saw Jordan push several students out of the way, according to the statement.
The driver and 25 students on the bus were examined by emergency responders but did not require treatment, Reith said.
Jordan, who had been principal of the school for 22 years, was loved by her staff and the school community, Lawrence Township Schools Superintendent Shawn Smith said at a news conference.
“This is a great example of an educational leader in our state and our city. … Just a phenomenal individual that truly cared about children. This is a tragic situation that we have. This loss is going to ripple across our district of 15,000 students,” Smith said.
The district canceled classes at all of its schools Wednesday and said in a statement that four locations, including a transportation center, would be “open for emotional support to our staff and families.”
Indianapolis Police Commander Chris Bailey said the bus driver, whose name was not immediately released, would be given a blood test, a standard procedure in collisions involving fatalities.
Whilst we would all love to believe that a homework free child will use the extra time to play imaginatively. get some physical exercise in the back yard and contribute to the running of the household, this is clearly not the norm.
I am not an advocate for giving homework, but at the same time, I realise that revising the skills learned in class over the course of the week may be more beneficial than giving children the extra time to waste in front of a screen.
STUDENTS love to complain about it, and only half of teachers feel homework is “critically important” to children’s development.
But just 32 per cent of primary teachers believe their students have too much work after hours, compared with 22 per cent of high school teachers.
Catholic primary educators were the most concerned about the workload, with 40 per cent thinking it is too high.
One in five state secondary principals felt students did too much homework, compared with 31 per cent at independent schools and 30 per cent at Catholic.
Mill Park Heights Primary principal Deborah Patterson said she was more interested in students learning creatively at home, like helping with the cooking, cleaning and shopping, and playing outdoors.
“Research is showing kids should be more active, out there playing and doing as much as they can,” she said.
Most teachers gain their inspiration from the desire to give back to the community and invest in the potential of youth. But this is just the starting point. Noble intentions aren’t nearly enough.
You can’t just announce yourself as the saviour of impressionable children and expect it all to fall into place. You have to have the patience, dynamism, determination and communication skills that great teachers have. You have to overcome bad lessons, days, weeks and terms and move on. You’ve got to innovate, because your students are already sick of the “norm”, they need and expect more from a teacher they are going to appreciate.
And you can’t expect them to respect you just because you see more in them than they do in themselves. Kids don’t like being told they are wasting their life any more than adults do. Being preached to by somebody that professes to know you and thinks you are wasting your potential doesn’t always inspire. Sometimes it does the opposite.
I haven’t read Ed Boland’s book yet, but I predict that whilst its sarcasm against the public school system is perceptive and enlightening, it will be light on self criticism:
IN 2008, Ed Boland, a well-off New Yorker who had spent 20 years as an executive at a non-profit, had a midlife epiphany: He should leave his white-glove world, the galas at the Waldorf and drinks at the Yale Club, and go work with the city’s neediest children.
The Battle for Room 314: My Year of Hope and Despair in a New York City High School is Boland’s memoir of his brief, harrowing tenure as a public-schoolteacher, and it’s riveting.
There’s nothing dry or academic here. It’s tragedy and farce, an economic and societal indictment of a system that seems broken beyond repair.
The book is certain to be controversial. There’s something dilettante-ish, if not cynical, about a well-off, middle-aged white man stepping ever so briefly into this maelstrom of poverty, abuse, homelessness and violence and emerging with a book deal.
What Boland has to share, however, makes his motives irrelevant.
Names and identifying details have been changed, but the school Boland calls Union Street is, according to clues and public records, the Henry Street School of International Studies on the Lower East Side.
Boland opens the book with a typical morning in freshman history class.
A teenage girl named Chantay sits on top of her desk, thong peeking out of her pants, leading a ringside gossip session. Work sheets have been distributed and ignored.
“Chantay, sit in your seat and get to work — now!” Boland says.
A calculator goes flying across the room, smashing into the blackboard. Two boys begin physically fighting over a computer. Two girls share an iPod, singing along. Another girl is immersed in a book called Thug Life 2.
Chantay is the one that aggravates Boland the most. If he can get control of her, he thinks, he can get control of the class.
“Chantay,” he says, louder, “sit down immediately, or there will be serious consequences.”
The classroom freezes. Then, as Boland writes, “she laughed and cocked her head up at the ceiling. Then she slid her hand down the outside of her jeans to her upper thigh, formed a long cylinder between her thumb and forefinger, and shook it. She looked me right in the eye and screamed, ‘SUCK MY F***IN’ D***, MISTER.’”
Nice use of hyperbole but off the mark in a big way.
Still, I am not in favour of compulsory sex education in schools. Below are the reasons I come to this unpopular conclusion.
It adds to a ridiculously over-crowded curriculum – People sometimes forget that teachers have a job, and that job is to cover the curriculum, with a focus on the fundamentals. By adding programs, which sound good on the surface, such as anti-gambling, gender issues, drug education, anti-smoking, resilience and diversity, we are being hamstrung in covering the very material we are specifically charged to teach.
You do realise they are learning this stuff at school? – All the programs that are mentioned above and others such as anti-bullying as cyber safety are wonderful programs, but do they work at school level? My experience has been – no. One of the reasons I have taken such an interest in the How to UnMake a Bully series is its ability to transcend a classroom preachiness and get students to make healthier choices without it feeling like a school subject. But this series is in the minority. Most programs are preachy, condescending and written by academics with no real insight into how children really think and feel. Most are full of classroom exercises, which may as well be code for “tune out activities” as far as school students are concerned. What you are left with, for all its good intentions, is a train wreck. Kids approach these lessons with either sarcasm or boredom. It may as well be another mindless trigonometry lesson as far as they are concerned. Whilst the intentions of these programs are sound, we should judge these initiatives by the results not its intentions.
Let’s expect more from parents – Let’s not make our teachers pseudo parents. Let’s be a society that expects our parents to, well, actually “parent”. It is not the job of the teacher to educate the students in this area. That is the job for the parent. Parents are entitled to hold views about sex that are unique and unpopular, and they are similarly entitled to hold their children to those views, until the children can form their own beliefs. It’s not the job of the teacher to interfere in these matters. I realise that some parents choose to forgo their duties and omit these important discussions, but that is where society should step in. Instead of enabling them to be so lax, they should be reminding them about the need to address these issues with their children. If they don’t, it’s simply not good enough. Telling parents that if they don’t do it someone else will enables them to be mediocre. Do we really want to encourage our parents to be mediocre?
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