Posts Tagged ‘Teacher’

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A Teacher Spits on a Student and I Lay Blame on the Student

February 21, 2012

Teachers that spit on their students should be punished accordingly. It is unprofessional, unhygienic and completely unacceptable behaviour. But there is more to the story of maths teacher David Pecoraro, who was caught on camera spitting at a boy and has since been relegated to administrative duties as a result of his moment of madness.

The video shows clearly a teacher pushed to the edge of sanity. A student trying to attach his used gum on the teachers rear is rightly put in his place by the teacher. Teachers, especially male teachers, are extremely sensitive with the dangers of being accused of inappropriate behaviour. Students that purposely touch a male teacher’s backside are putting that teacher in a very uncomfortable position.

The video also shows the lack of respect he was getting from his other students. As he screams “I want to teach you maths”, we see a student sleeping and others laughing and goading the defiant, foul-mouthed, gum chewing student.

A teacher was secretly filmed on a cell phone struggling with a male student before appearing to spit in the boy’s face.

David Pecoraro, a high school math teacher, is now working in ‘administration’, after the footage was uploaded to YouTube.

Pecoraro, who taught at Beach Channel High School in Queens, New York, has a row with the student for a few minutes before the confrontation turns physical.

Pecoraro is being investigated on allegations of corporal punishment.

The teacher, who has been in the profession for 19 years, can be heard saying in the clip: ‘You can’t make contact with me, that’s illegal.’

He then tries to explain a math problem to the student who is ignoring the lesson and covering his head with a jacket.

At one point, the student, whose identity isn’t revealed, appears to try to hit the teacher.

Pecoraro then tells the teenager: ‘You’re going to go to jail, you don’t touch me… I want to teach you math.’

The altercation is witnessed by a few other students in the class – along with one boy in front of the camera who is asleep with his head on the desk.

The row continues until the teacher appears to spit at the student who then spits back at him.

The grainy film cuts out after Pecoraro can be seen dragging the student out of his seat.

As bad a this teacher’s actions was, the behaviour of the class was absolutely deplorable. This video should be enough to implicate at least two students with some fairly serious breaches of protocol. First there was the student who should be expelled for inappropriate touching and insubordinate behaviour. Then there is the student who filmed the incident. I don’t care how juicy the footage is, any student filming class and uploading the footage on YouTube deserves to be punished.

Instead, I fear that the only person punished was the one who wanted nothing more than the ability to do his job without being touched, mocked or harassed. If those two other students got off without punishment, it reinforces their despicable behaviour, and allows them to continue their bloodsport.

I pity the replacement maths teacher. I fear they are mere fodder for the next potential YouTube hit.

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Posted in Classroom Management, Corporal Punishment, Professional Conduct | Leave a Comment »

Maths Teachers Who Can’t Pass Maths

February 19, 2012

Sometimes I wonder how well Primary school maths teachers would go if they were forced to sit a basic skills maths examination. I fear many of them would stumble, especially in skills such as fractions.

How much worse it would be to have specialist maths teachers in the high school system with gaps in their maths knowledge. This may or may not be a reason for the inability for some teachers in getting the desired results from their students:

New Westminster parents are pressing their school district to investigate what they say is an exception-ally high failure rate over many years for high-school students enrolled in math classes taught by a particular teacher.

But they say the district has brushed aside their finding that three out of four students in those New Westminster secondary school math classes failed last semester. And recently, in response to their freedom-of-information request for math marks for all Grade 8-12 students in the school, the district told them they would be charged $1,385 to cover the cost of research and photocopying.

One of the parents, Lisa Chao, said she was shocked by the bill and highly doubts that much work is required to produce the information parents believe would back their contention that the teacher has been unsuccessful in teaching the lessons for many years. “This is information … they should have been gathering at the end of every semester,” she said in an interview. “It shouldn’t take more than three hours to print off.”

Parents deserve the right to information when they suspect that a teacher is letting down their children. Schools shouldn’t shy away from being open and transparent, because when they use tactics like the one referred to above, they look like a party to a major cover-up. I have no problems with schools supporting their teachers, but sometimes even the school needs to take an impartial view.
This teacher should be given every opportunity to defend the allegations. However, the doubts about his/her effectiveness seem valid and require a response.

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Posted in Maths | Leave a Comment »

5 Tips to Better Connect with Students

February 16, 2012

I stumbled upon an extremely useful guide for improving the teacher/student relationship. The following are 5 tips for assisting teachers in reaching out to their students more effectively:

 
1- Pay attention to your students’ interests
Now that I’ve been teaching 10 years and I’ve mastered my subject area and the pedagogy of how to teach and reach every child’s learning style, I’m able to focus on the interpersonal things that make a big difference.

Administrators, school boards, and districts may see numbers, but numbers are not children. No child is a number. Children have names and hobbies and interests and family lives. Children are individuals and it is my job as a teacher to help them find their unique talents. I want to be the one that helped them on their journey of self-discovery.

2- Tell your students what they need to hear not what they want to hear.
I’m not here to be popular, I am here to teach. I am here to love these kids and to do what is right by their future selves. I believe I have succeeded when my students come back in 10 years and thank me. Sometimes they think I’m tough now and they groan, but I know that I’m doing right by them.

3- Take time to think about individual students.
One of my heroes is the director of our learning lab here at Westwood, Grace Adkins. Every weekend she carries home a folder with the learning profiles, test results, and current work of 3 children who she works with in the lab, and she has been doing this for 60 years. She studies her students like a college student studies a textbook. She has doctors, lawyers, and bankers who credit her with helping them learn how to learn.

4- Learn to teach using many modalities.
Lecture may be ok some of the time, but it is never ok to do this all the time. Good teachers learn about pedagogy, the methods used to teach. Yesterday, I had a student dress up in a chef’s outfit with a mixing bowl and a recipe book with labels on everything to teach how microprocessors work. When I finished, my students said, “that is easy to understand.” A good teacher can demystify a complex topic and make it simple to understand.

5 – Let your passion come through.
If you love your topic, it will come through in your voice, your body language, and everything you do. There are times I’ve loved one subject more than another, but I can always get excited about teaching a child something for the first time that I know is valuable. I think it is important to let your own personality come through in your teaching.

The greatest challenge of teaching is reaching as many children as possible. Touching every student is an impossible task — but every moment in our lives as educators brings new opportunities.

I absolutely love this list. I think they have nailed some of the most essential methods for maintaining a strong connection between teacher and student.

 

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Posted in Teaching Methods | Leave a Comment »

Maths is Taught So Poorly

February 13, 2012

I realise that what I am writing is a gross generalisation, but I believe that maths is generally taught in a very abstract and monotonous way. No wonder the students are not benefitting from maths instruction at the primary level. Traditional maths teaching involves worksheets, a mindless array of algorithms and plenty of other rote styled goodies.

The tragedy of it all is that maths can be taught in a completely different way. I find the basic skills of maths the most refreshing and creatively exciting subject to teach. The fact that maths is a composite of everyday skills means it translates wonderfully to problem solving activities.

The other day, whilst teaching ordering numbers up to 4 digits, I got my 8-year-old students into groups, each given a particular airline to reasearch. The groups had to find the 3 lowest airfares for a return domestic trip between certain dates and times, These prices were then compared and ordered from least expensive to most expensive. Isn’t that the whole point of ordering and comparing numbers?

Whilst engaging in the exercise, the students enjoyed working in groups, competing for a bargain against other groups, learning how to book airline tickets and simply use their imagination by pretending they were actually intending in going on the flight.

Isn’t that more interesting than a worksheet that has numbers on it to order?

This is why I am not at all surprised that British students leave Primary school ‘with the maths ability of 7-year-old’:

An analysis of last year’s SATs results has shown 27,500 11-year-olds are going on to secondary school with the numeracy skills of children four years their junior.

The figures equate to a staggering one in 20 of the total of those leaving primary school. Boys perform worse than girls, with 15,600 behind in their ability.

Separate statistics published two weeks ago also revealed that one in three GCSE pupils fail to get at least a grade C in maths.

The disclosure follows the launch of a Daily Telegraph campaign – Make Britain Count – to highlight the scale of the nation’s mathematical crisis and provide parents with tools to boost their children’s numeracy skills.

It comes amid concerns that schoolchildren are less likely to study maths to a high standard in England, Wales and Northern Ireland than in most other developed nations.

I appeal to Primary teachers to give the text-book a rest and don’t be afraid to try new and exciting ideas to engage your maths students.

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Posted in Maths, Teaching boys, Teaching Girls | Leave a Comment »

Tips For Supersizing a Cramped Classroom

February 12, 2012

We’ve all had the problem at stages of our career. We’ve been allocated a classroom that is far too small to comfortably teach in. There is insufficient room for mat time and the children, especially the very restless ones, need more space to work in.

I came across a piece that attempts to make this problem far more manageable:

Even if your classroom is much cozier than you imagined, there are ways to stretch the boundaries. These “big” ideas will help.

There’s no question that a small classroom is a real challenge to arrange. When I walked into my kindergarten classroom for the first time, there was wall-to-wall furniture! I had half of a room and 27 children; there simply was not enough space to set up a proper kindergarten room. With a little ingenuity, however, I was able to orchestrate a workable classroom layout that met all my — and my students’ — needs. Similar strategies just may work for your small classroom:

  • Remove excess or over-sized furniture. Instead of a large piano, I brought in my small keyboard, which could be stored in a cabinet. Round and kidney-shaped tables were quickly adopted by other teachers who had more space. I kept only rectangular tables and a few desks in the room.
  • Store rarely used equipment out of the way. I arranged for media equipment, which I don’t use on a daily basis, to be stored elsewhere. I did keep one student desk, which I made into a permanent listening center by removing the legs so that it sat only six inches above the ground. The cassette player sat on top of the desk and the headphones were stored in the desk.
  • Consider carefully your furniture needs. Midway through the year, I decided my students did not need to have their own individual desks or table spots. Eliminating just one table from the classroom and placing the other tables around the perimeter of the room opened up a large center area for whole-group activities and provided space for centers, math manipulatives, reading, and writing.
  • Explore creative management techniques. Without the traditional seat-for-every-student arrangement, I struggled with how to engage the entire class productively. I finally hit upon splitting the class; half would work at the tables and half would work in centers. I alternated the groups, so that everyone could participate in both activities on the same day.

If you’ve had this problem before and employed some strategies for maximising space I’d love to hear about it.

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Posted in Classroom Presentation | 2 Comments »

The Teacher They Haven’t Sacked, But Should

February 9, 2012

Call me a prude but I am of the opinion that when you sign up to be a teacher you are making a commitment to act with a greater degree of responsibility than most other professions. Whilst it may perfectly alright for a tradesman or receptionist to have a double life as a porn star, a high school teacher should know better and act better.

What makes this story worse is that this teacher was filmed with a former student. I find it unsavoury for teachers to hook up with their former students at the best of times. To make a porn video with them just adds another layer to what is a clear breach of standard teaching protocol.

Or is it?

The graphic video of the teacher and the student, who graduated in 2008, went viral on social media websites after students discovered it.

A preview video shows the couple naked, in sex acts, and with the girl blindfolded.

The ex-student explained yesterday that everyone who knew them understood the couple were in a committed relationship. The couple live together and jointly own a business.

“We’re consenting adults,” she said.

Oberon High School principal Alison Murphy said she took immediate action when she became aware of the video on Tuesday, but said the video did not change her view of the “successful” VCE teacher.

“He is not here today. It’s uncertain when he will return,” she said. “The matter is under investigation.”

She said the teacher was “well regarded”.

Ms Murphy said it would be inappropriate to suspend the teacher until investigations were completed.

Could someone please explain to me why it would be inappropriate to suspend the teacher?

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Posted in Professional Conduct | Leave a Comment »

Stricken With Self-Doubt

January 31, 2012

It’s the first day of a new school year tomorrow and I’m suffering from my annual bout of self-doubt. I get very anxious before a school year starts. I worry about whether or not I will succeed at helping my students. I worry about whether my style of teaching will work on a new bunch of kids.

The week leading up to the start of the school year doesn’t help. It’s a week that is set aside for preparing the classroom. This involves displays, fancy name tags and innovative ways to use a small space to enhance learning. The female teachers I work with put a lot of emphasis on the look of their classrooms. Borders are replaced around noticeboards, name tags are put on everything (and I mean everything!) and the fear of death is reserved for the poor laminator who cops the brunt of all this activity.

When it comes to developing fun lessons, I am very comfortable. When it comes to decorating a classroom, I am completely out of my league! I have been getting comments ever since I started about the plainness of my classroom compared to the other teachers. My bosses have pointed out that my classroom looks far less inviting and colourful. This year I put up a beautiful piece of red material to cover my noticeboard, before being told that children don’t learn well in a room of red. Apparently the colour red has a negative effect on concentration and creativity. The comments certainly made me see red!

Then there’s the endless diatribe from those in charge about new responsibilities and expectations that all staff need to adhere to. These usually involve devoting a great deal of extra time. If there is something all teachers have in common, it is the absence of any extra time.

Handover isn’t much fun either. As the previous teacher reads each name from the class list, every child is presented as difficult to teach. There’s behavioural issues, Aspergers, ADHD, ADD, Oppositional disorder, social issues, anger management issues, language disorders etc. What is it with psychologists today? They have turned every personality type into a disorder. Why is every second child on a spectrum? What is this spectrum, and how did it get to be so big? In today’s age, the one kid who can’t manage to get on the spectrum of any modern psychological condition probably ends up feeling left out and abnormal.

All this makes me very uneasy. I get very frightened. I desperately don’t want to let my students down.

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Posted in Classroom Presentation, Teachers Stress | 6 Comments »

Five Signs it is the End of the School Year

December 16, 2011

Teachers find the last weeks of a school year absolutely exhausting. Many of us crawl towards the finishing line amazed that the deadlines have been reached and the seemingly insurmountable boxes have somehow been ticked.

Now that I am both a teacher and a parent of a school aged child, I can see that the end of year poses challenges for parents too.

That’s why I loved this piece by Nancy Davis Kho, whose article about the five telltale signs that the end of the school year has been reached (from a parents perspective) is very insightful and humorous:

1.) You’re Broke. Between the gift for the classroom teacher, the teacher’s aides, the piano teacher, the math tutor, the babysitter graduating high school who wasn’t much for cleanup but at least she could walk home, and the niece graduating college after the five year plan, you are clean out of $20 dollar bills. (Apologies if you are more of $100 dollar bill gifter, I didn’t mean to insult you. Can I please be your babysitter?) It gets so bad that you could almost use a second job. But you can’t do that, because…

 

2.) Your Productive Workday Has Been Shot to Hell. You have to be up at school to see the end-of-year talent show, of course, and your child would never forgive you for missing out on the end-of-year class picnic. Then the school districts get in on the act, fulfilling some budgetary or union contract obligation by cutting a bunch of June school days in half. Your to-do list becomes an archive, saved in its non-checked-off state for future generations to admire. It’s enough to make you run for comfort to the cookie jar which is full because…

3.) You Have Baker’s Elbow. Brownies for the ballet recital, pound cake for the Little League team party, chocolate chip cookies for the celebration of a completed Social Studies group project; you’re churning them out like your middle name is Poppin’ Fresh. You would like to buy stock in King Arthur Flour and Betty Crocker, but can’t get out of the kitchen long enough to log onto E*trade. And if you’re going anywhere past the stove it’s going to be to the laundry room because….

4.) The Lunch Bags Look Like They’ve Been Beaten. Bruised, torn, bearing tiny flecks of unidentifiable foreign substances that may or may not be mold, the insulated lunchboxes that started off the year in bright primary colors have been reduced, through constant improvised use as seats, soccer balls, and weapons, to an indistinguishable grayish brown.  You weigh running them through the washer one last time. But would it be the cycle that finally separates the strap from the rest of the bag? That would probably make you cry, because…

5.) You Burst Out Crying At Inopportune Times. It’s the inevitable result of being handed concrete evidence, in the form of a graduation certificate or a class council election, that Your Children Are Growing Up. The ultimate example was when the Kindergarten teacher rewrote Eric Carle’s “A Very Hungry Caterpillar” to describe all the knowledge that our children had hungrily gobbled up throughout the year. Then she had them hold up wobbly, colorful pictures they’d drawn of butterflies and said, “And now you are beautiful butterflies who will fly off to First Grade!” Twenty-three moms, 15 dads, and one kindergarten teacher hit the deck sobbing, delaying the children’s American Sign Language performance of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” until we’d (temporarily) recovered our composure.

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Posted in Parenting | 2 Comments »

I Thought Christmas Was About Good Will?

December 4, 2011


I thought Christmas was about family, community, good will, acceptance, tolerance and togetherness.  Turns out I was wrong.

Should a teacher have told her class that Santa doesn’t exist? Of course not. Should she have told them that their presents are planted under the tree by their parents? Absolutely not.

But here’s where the parents of these children had a choice. They could have had a quiet word to the teacher, accepted her heartfelt apology, practised the long-lost art of forgiveness and not taken the matter any further.

Allowing this mishap to get overblown and on the nightly news suggests that Christmas may not be about real values, but rather, about the “real” Santa:

A teacher ruined Christmas for a class full of second-graders when she told them that there is no Santa Claus during a lesson about the North Pole at their Rockland County, N.Y., school.

The educator even told the youngsters, mostly 7 and 8-year-olds, that the presents under their trees were put out by their parents, and not St. Nick.

The stunning behavior caused a blizzard of outrage at the quiet George W. Miller Elementary School in Nanuet, where angry parents would like to see the teacher roasted like a chestnut over an open fire.

“If that happened to my daughter in her second-grade class … I’d be very upset,” according to 48-year-old Sean Flanagan, whose child was in second grade at the school last year. “If her brothers told her [there was no Santa], they would be punished. So I can’t imagine what should happen to the teacher.”

A nanny picking up a child at the school said that anyone who tells kids that Santa does not exist should get coal in their stocking.

“It’s outrageous that a teacher would strip a child of their innocence and try and demystify something,” 59-year-old Margaret Fernandez said.

A grandmother of a kindergartener added, “I think this is awful. If it happened to my granddaughter, I’d tell her [that] her teacher made a mistake, and there is a Santa.”

The unidentified teacher reportedly made her anti-Santa comments Tuesday during a geography lesson, when students told her that they knew where the North Pole was because that is where Santa lives.

School officials would not discuss the Christmas incident or say if the teacher would face any discipline.

District Superintendent Mark McNeill released a brief statement, saying only, “This matter is being addressed internally.”

Above is one of many scathing reports about this teacher. Let’s examine the facts.

Did she “ruin Christmas” for these kids? If so, their whole enjoyment of Christmas was founded on a lie. If the legitimacy of Santa is the only thing a 7-year-old can take out of Christmas, then they are missing a hell of a lot.

Was this “stunning behaviour”? No. It was a mere lapse in judgement.

Does she deserve to be “roasted like a chestnut over an open fire”? Absolutely not! Whoever wrote that line was being quite unfair and should have been made to delete it.

Did she “strip children of their innocence”? Hardly. Innocence isn’t just about believing everything adults want you to believe, it’s about seeing the good in people. It’s about not being judgemental and giving everyone a chance.

Apparently this teacher rang all the parents in the class and apologised. I think this is a fair consequence for her improper behaviour.

But I think this story is about more than a teachers conduct.

Is it possible that the mad scramble to make kids believe in Santa eclipses the very heart and soul of what the holiday is supposed to represent?

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Posted in Dealing with Parents | 3 Comments »

Crying in Front of Your Students

November 20, 2011

I have never cried in front of my students.  However, in my first years of teaching, there were times when I felt completely out of my element and had to keep my resolve and try by best to pull through.

I’ve just read a brilliant piece by Caitlin Hannon, a first year teacher, whose introduction to teaching reduced her to tears.  And who can blame her?

I broke a cardinal rule of teaching several times last year: I cried in front of my students.

Sometimes it happened out of frustration. Just as often, I was overcome during very honest conversations about the struggles my students face within and beyond the school building. At least twice the tears were brought on by uncontrollable laughter at a student’s joke.

As a first-year teacher, I figured tears (of some kind) were inevitable.

I knew I wanted to make a difference, and I thought that difference needed to start in the classroom — not in an office as a policymaker, with little or no connection to, and understanding of, what happens inside schools.

This desire, and my nontraditional education background, led me to Teach For America, a program that trains recent college graduates from various backgrounds to teach in public schools. I spent my first year teaching English at Tech High School, which served a predominantly low-income, minority population. This year, I am teaching seventh-grade language arts at Emma Donnan Middle School.

By the end of that first year, I realized that the life I’d changed the most was my own.

Who is prepared to read a child’s disclosure of abuse in a journal entry?

Who is an expert at helping a student handle the loss of several close family members in a bout of gang violence over the weekend?

I experienced both of these scenarios and more during my first year, and it’s hard to imagine a traditional route to the classroom making it any easier to deal with such heartbreak.

Above is just an excerpt of the article.  I encourage you to read the entire piece. It strengthens my long-held position, that teachers are not fully prepared for the rigours of a classroom due to the failings of the teacher training programs. I also feel that new teachers are left to their own devices when they really need a non-judgemental mentor to help show them the ropes and counsel them through the tough times.

Ms. Hannon may not have had her last cry at school, but her passion and teaching philosophy suggests that she is going to have a great future. Her students are going to be the great beneficiaries of her blood, sweat and, yes, tears …

 

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Posted in Teacher Training, Teacher Welfare | 6 Comments »

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