Re: Re: Re: Re: Life Choices... Passion vs Practical


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Posted by Kenneth Sloan on March 11, 2004 at 15:53:27:

In Reply to: Re: Re: Re: Life Choices... Passion vs Practical posted by Thomas Dodd on March 11, 2004 at 15:23:52:

the key words were "rare bird".

You can't design the entire educational system around the "rare bird"s.

some of the *worst* teachers I've had have been domain-specialists who didn't have the slightest clue how to transfer their knowledge.

If I'm running a private school, where either the students are bright and strongly motivated, OR I can throw the bums out, then I hire domain specialists who *want* to teach, and hope that I can train them on the job. I take a "high risk/high reward" approach - and I get some *great* results while expelling my failures.

If I'm trying to provide *universal* public education, then my goal is to avoid abject failure. By necessity, this means that I also give up some (not all) chance of a *great* result. That means that "wonderful lesson plans..." come first

Sometimes, you can do both. My kids have gone through a school system where I see both types of teachers. The "lesson plan wizards" teach the middle-of-the-road kids. Kids who are doing poorly get specialized, individual attention (this is expensive). Kids who are 2 std dev above the mean get teachers who love the material (but, in fact, generaly have no clue how to "teach'). Alas, kids 3 std dev above the mean still have to make their own way - but the, they are well equipped for the task.

It's a pyramid, and in the USA the conceit is that the huge mass of students at the bottom of the pyramid must still be educated to an acceptable level. To a large extent that means desigining lessons, keeping order in the class, slogging through the basic material, and worrying more about disciplinary problems than academic material.

That's not "broken" - that's national policy. And a good one, in my opinion.


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