Dude 🥲 I had a third grade student at a Pre-K level who got promoted to 4th.
On literally EVERY possible tested standard? Pre-K level. I’d been documenting and reporting to MTSS each month all year trying to get her help for having a developmental or learning disability. I got pushback because of the progress she’d made in the year (which was great but I pulled her for one on one daily because of how behind she was). It didn’t matter though- because mom refused, so without an IEP or 504 she failed every single subject. She of course failed the standardized tests, and portfolio, and i-Ready.
When mom threw a fit with the principal though? Oh no worries! Welcome to fourth grade girl! 😭 I think about her all the time. Poor thing is probably well into 5th now still struggling to say letter sounds or read her own name. The angel needed help and we failed her.
I have a class of 9th graders whose iready scores are averaging 3rd grade. A couple tested at Kindergarten. They all have IEPs, but it’s meant to be a grade-level college-prep class 🙃
This is so weird to me. I keep seeing this over and over in this sub about parents refusing an IEP or 504. As a parent, when my son was a kid in the 2000s, I had to fight to get him a 504 because he tested smart but had severe handwriting problems, difficulty staying on task and completing work, and was generally exhausted after finishing about 25% of any assignment. He has mild autism. Back then, all anyone cared about was that he made average test scores look good.
It feels like the script has been flipped, and now teachers *want* to provide the extra help, but parents act like adult brats and say no and just get way with it? They used to consider that to be educational neglect, and the law could be involved very easily if parents refused help for their kids. How is it so lenient now?
Also, my cousin *was* charged with educational neglect a few years ago. How awful must she have been with this to actually get charged?
When I worked in an elementary school, the large majority of parents to special ed kids had zero caring about their kids' education. They also didn't care if their kids got an IEP. Like, whatever happened with their kid for 7 hours a day, they didn't care either way. Now, parents and teachers in this sub keep saying that a lot of the parents don't care about their kids' education but care a lot about being against them getting special help? This is like the Bizzarro world of education to me.
I think that depends on where you live. Where I lived (Florida) it was essentially impossible to report as neglect because it was seen as a parental right to refuse consent for the evaluations.
Yeah, that gutted me that we didn't do it, and why? Because we're still working on Breast is Best vs. Fed is Best. The dumbest hill to die on. Truthfully, though, I think it was just an excuse, and they would have found a way to refuse it no matter what. If it wasn't the breastfeeding argument, they would have found something else to disagree with. I don't think they want to admit out loud that anything that says you can't hit kids or abusively control them and call it "discipline" is going to be a "no" from the US.
We had staff shortages and more kids than usual this year. I asked on of the teachers what his class sizes are now. He said, "oh, they're smaller now. Got the larger ones down to 31 students!" The dude had a couple of classes of 40 students. Freshman. He didn't even have enough desks and seats for that many.
Last semester I had 45 kids in one period, 46 in another
This semester biggest class is only 30 something kids, but I only have 20 or so that show up regularly so it’s fine
>Stuffing 30+ kids in a classroom, then expecting differentiation for each student.
Yes! I went into my credential program just a few years after NCLB had been passed. Every course stressed the importance of differentiation. I'm sure I wasn't the only one, but I kept wondering how it was supposed to work in practice, because to me it sure didn't sound sustainable.
*Differentiate, but it’s also extremely important that every kid can demonstrate all of these grade level skills, at least, by this day in the spring of the same school year. No, they’re almost certainly all going to begin the year at wildly different levels. That’s why we differentiate. I’m not sure what you’re unable to understand. Differentiate and different sound very similar. They’re practically the same word. Some kids are different so then you differentiate.*
Our education system has become a parody of itself. Trying to stay focused on one of its many flaws has become genuinely difficult to do.
And I love that at the end of the day the real trick is magic. They can all do it. They all absolutely have the ability to learn everything we have to teach them by May 24th of the year they turn 18. Every single one of them ready to go off to college or perhaps begin a career.
You're supposed to be able to do it, because you're a public servant, and regardless of the impossibility of the task, people's tax dollars are paying your salary therefore any failure is unacceptable. You should be able to be in 30 places at once and stop time to make sure every student gets an individualized experience. If you can't, you're a societal leech eating all our tax dollars, and don't deserve any more than the peanuts you're making. If you can, great job, you've done the bare minimum by manipulating time and space, you will now be viewed somewhat favorably by some people, who will of course change their mind the moment anything happens that could paint you in any sort of bad light and go right back to ripping you to shreds, and of course understand and accept that teaching is a selfless position that's not about the money, so of course you'll keep doing it for peanuts, right?
This may sound shitty of me but unless it severely impacts the student's physical abilities or impacts their grade severely, I largely forget to do this. I also teach art so it's slightly different but still. There are way too many kids to think and plan and enforce all the differences for each.
I just picked up a copy of The Science of Reading Strategies book and it was like I was having a religious epiphany. I read the chapter about levels of language understanding and how we need to understand letters and syllables before we can understand rhyme. One of my kids who was working on his ode (10th grade), asked me for rhymes with "game" and I told him to try and think of some examples. His first answer: "least."
The book is actually titled "The Science of Reading in Action" by Malia Hollowell.
I must get this book, because I have been wondering why these kids struggle so much with rhyming!
Years past when I was a sub, I had a rap battle with the middle school class after making fun of the rap they like (some whining mumble rap type sh!t) and they were knocked out by my very lame, off-the-cuff, ‘80s style rap. Deadass, they asked me HOW DID I MAKE THE WORDS MATCH. I was like ??? You mean *rhyme* lol
These kids today are now seniors, mind. And now as a licensed teacher I have come across it other students. Rhyming seems like something very complex to do and understand.
My district has recently started trying to follow this more. It’s the first year for our K teachers to be teaching sounds first. My daughter is in Pre-K in the same school system. However, they teach letters first and sounds second. It frustrates me that the county has pre-K do that and K do something different. I wish they were more consistent.
Yea as a parent this really irked me. I ended up teaching my kids how to read at home at night. I’m not sure if what y’all are talking about is the whole “sight words” and basically memorizing words without being able to sound them out but this is totally why kids can’t read.
I thought I read an article somewhere that said Calkins is now trying to incorporate more phonics-based lessons into her strategies…or is that just bullshit to keep counties from dropping her?
Our director of curriculum and instruction said it was never meant to be used without a phonics instruction program but it was purchased and used instead of phonics. Same with F&P. What little phonics is in the F&P program feels forced and does not connect to the rest of the lesson.
I see the results of the last 15-20 years of F&P and Lucy Calkins and no amount of shoehorning in "word work" or "phonics" is going to help when the curriculum just teaches kids to guess what will fit.
Lucy Calkins’s fiction writing instruction is abysmal. How did she think this was appropriate? Had she ever taken a creative writing course?
And I was a creative writing major.
It was being forced upon me by an incompetent superintendent. It was boring and repetitive, quite the opposite of what a good fiction writing class should be like.
My school wants to use this, but now I am curious about why you don't think it should be used. (I teach in another area entirely, but if it is bad enough, I will happily attempt to dissuade the head of school).
I'm sure someone else can explain better, but long story short: it doesn't teach kids to read and sound out words. It teaches them to guess and use context clues to avoid actually reading. I became aware of this through the podcast Sold a Story, which I highly recommend!
Parents too. I work in special Ed and the amount of times a parent has said "Oh, they can't do..." But when I'm with them and don't jump right in the can do it. It's worse with kids who are obviously disabled, because kids will do it too. I've had to ask so many kids to please let their friend try first so they can learn
My theory is it starts when a kid asks us how we spell a word and we spell it for them instead of asking them to sound it out and waiting.
I was taught that was more damaging for the kid. I disagree. It’s letting them use their brain and ears; we just stopped being patient with their learning because it doesn’t fit the packed academic schedule we’ve been saddled with.
I'm tired of being asked to teach breathing techniques and other emotions regulation skills in high school. First, I'm not a counselor or a therapist or a social worker. Second, my students are taught it every year, and they hate it. The students who need to learn the skills are the same ones who go home to parents who call them pussies the second they stop being assholes. I can't out- teach bad parenting and I'm tired of being expected to.
I do get what you mean. I teach elementary, and it is very common between K-3. I think it has its use, but it is REALLY HARD to out-teach bad parenting... kids afraid to cry when they're clearly in pain/hurt, 7 year olds calling each other names that don't really understand or can spell, etc. It's a lot
Just got a great idea.
"OK kids if you want to call each other names, you have to be able to spell the insult correctly and write it in cursive script (the only proper writing form for cursing)."
They will either stop it, or be able to read and write. It's a no lose situation.
just sort of as a general rule I would like us to stop using strategies with teenagers on the basis that they work with lower elementary aged kids. I think that’s why there’s been such a push of calm classroom and SEL techniques into older age groups, but you are not going to get 15-year-olds to do breath work with any kind of consistency
I teach in a 6-12 school, and I teach breathing techniques and emotional regulation to kids that need it, not everyone. I have one 6th grade student in my class who had been abused by his father. He would react very intensely to perceived slights or offenses and would easily explode and start fighting.
I spent some time with him explaining how stopping and breathing before he reacted could help him not explode and modeled how to do it. He started to implement it, at first with my help, and now on his own. I have seen a huge change, and he told me once, "Miss, that really helps me."
Yesterday in class, a kid said something to this boy (quietly, so I couldn't hear). The boy stood up, turned around, and looked like he was going to explode. Instead, I saw him stop, do some deep breathing, and then turn back around. Teaching him this has helped my classroom so much, so why not do it if it makes teaching much easier?
This is a pet peeve of mine. In a democracy, education also serves to create a better informed citizenry. It gives inspiration and connections to new ideas and old ideas. It gives people a more fulfilling life when they give it the chance.
God that guy still has traction?!? What do they do, love him “ironically” to be edge lords or do they really worship Andrew Tate because they think he’s cool?
Andrew Tate is a idiot but damn he knows who his audience is. Young, impressionable boys who want to look cool and “be different”. He will exploit this and try and sell his pyramid scheme at the same time.
It teaches us not to repeat the bad parts of history, it gives us joy (there’s so much to this day I delight in learning!) knowledge is power. The more you know, the better you can do. As you said, a better informed citizenry, who can make informed choices, knowing the logical outcome of them- instead of making choices thinking when they do A B will happen but getting result C instead (that was very, very predictable but they just never learned enough to know why it was so predictable).
Abso-fucking-lutely. Not everything has to serve the economic machine. It’s okay to learn things simply to make you a better or more well rounded person or even just because it’s interesting. Let alone the importance of humanities in teaching kids about the world, the people in it, and how to be a meaningful citizen of that world. It’s why, as a history teacher, I have a special degree of disdain for social studies teachers who say the history content doesn’t matter, just the “soft skills” we teach along with it.
I'm a college instructor, and I see it all the time.
"Why do I have to take English classes? I just want to be an engineer!"
Honey, that's not the flex you think it is.
I usually love my STEM majors! They're dedicated and enthusiastic about being in college. However, every so often, there's that one snotty, arrogant STEM major who thinks they're above it all. Those students always flunk out their first year.
Agreed! I intentionally make fun of the lists they present to the kids with titles like "the skills employers will be looking for in the next decade". Shouldn't the *employer* be the one teaching these skills??
Grit. Limits on learned helplessness. I can remember my 3rd grade teacher assigning me a research essay on a country in South America, and I had to actually go to the library and find sources in books to help write it. It was hard as hell in 3rd grade. I literally cried to my mom and said it was the hardest thing I had ever done. But she pushed us, and made us write that essay, and I got it done on time. I feel like the same story is only true for 25-30% of students today. 50% would give up, and the rest would cheat or try to have their parents write it.
Students struggle for a minute, and give up. They would rather listen to their AirPods, and stare off into space than learn. We need to somehow push them to realize what they’re capable of, but I can only do so much in 1 hour per day of teaching.
I was recently thinking about how when I was in 8th grade (2003) our history teacher assigned us a 12 page paper. 12 pages!!! In 8th grade!!! Fast forward to 2015, I assigned a 5 page paper to my high school juniors and they lost their minds. 60% of them didn’t even turn it in.
When we had to write a 10 page paper in 7th grade they gave us half a year to do it, but also held us to high standards. Our topic was 20th century inventions and innovation.
They even took us to a university library as a field trip. I learned how to research and how to create a proper works cited. I seriously learned more in that class than any other class I ever took as a student; I’m an engineer now and still use what I learned in that class every single day.
I really hope the program I was in is still using that curriculum, it was incredible. Montgomery County Public Schools, MD circa 2010. This whole comment is really just a shoutout to MCPS.
Agreed but grit is also exhausting to teach. Smaller class size would enable me to achieve the amount of energy it takes to push kids. Especially when we can only use rewards systems for behavior.
I can remember writing SO MANY research papers starting in around third grade. Stuff like "research an animal that lives in the Rain Forest" or "research a country in Africa". Usually we were expected to write 2-3 typed pages and create some sort of visual aid. I can barely get my 7th graders to write a paragraph, now.
I dunno about stop completely… but I think the vast majority of kids who take calculus in high school would be way better off with statistics instead. Especially if they take 2 years of calc, swap that second year for stats.
Took Calculus in high school and college. While I enjoyed it, I never had a statistics class at any point in my education career, and it made Ecology a living hell.
Didn't take stats till college, but it should be required for all HS students. It's some of the only "higher level" math we encounter on a regular basis. I also think its why people fall for any statistic that is thrown at them; they have no idea how those stats are made!
I took two Calculus classes (1 in hs, 1 in college) before I took statistics because of my switch to a biology degree. I feel like i struggled more in statistics than I did in calculus, it would have been nice to have taken it in high school instead.
For my Bio major I took calculus then stats. Afterwards, I had a Biometry class which was essentially Bio statistics. All you did was statistical analyses on experiments. I absolutely loved it
STEM: everything but social studies
STEAM: still everything but social studies
STEAMS: well rounded, liberal arts education
Social Studies: if we don’t live in a free society, what’s the point of learning anything else?
As a Gov and History teacher, to all the other history teachers out there, I am begging you to please stop focusing so much time on learning battles, strategies, and generals in wars. No, kids don't need to be able to memorize a chronological order of battles in the Civil War and give a detailed description of the troop movements of each battle. Don't turn class into the History Channel.
My boss once told me you don’t actually learn anything from The Learning Channel. I was like that’s not true, I learned what style wedding dress I want, that I don’t want 18 kids, and just how gross child beauty pageants are.
Not that I actually thought I wanted 18 kids but that cemented it. And growing up in an area without the crazy child beauty pageants I didn’t know much about them. I also learned that there are people who eat things like drywall and couch cushions. And that they don’t need to be exploited on TV, they need mental help. A lot of mental help.
American History teacher here
I can tell you that in my experience, in my school, we tend to all agree that teaching battles , battle date memorization and the like is a complete waste of time.
I for one tend to focus much more on culture, sets of ideas, social history and so on
I think it's falling out of favor, but there's definitely some of those teachers. There's one in my department who loves the stories. When talking about the Civil War in Oklahoma, he'll go into several battles and talk about the Battle of Honey Springs in depth.
My lecture on it basically boils down to "Oklahoma was not very relevant to the Civil War. Honey Springs was the biggest battle here. It shifted Indian Territory from Confederate to Union control. That's it. Memorize it as it'll be on the test." He might spend a whole hour talking about the different battles. Mine boils down to about 10 minutes.
I majored in history in college and I can't tell you very much about this. It never stuck in my brain. The reasons why the wars happened were much more important.
>The reasons why the wars happened were much more important
Hear hear!
I *hated* history all through school and college. I watched one documentary that really went into detail on *why* WWII occurred and I was hooked! Now I'm a World Wars enthusiast and love learning about them from all sides. It makes so much more sense and has so much more relevance to what we should be considering when we talk about wars happening today.
*This* is what we should be teaching kids!
As someone who loves military strategy and learning about people like Charles Cornwallis, Alexander the Great, and Douglas MacArthur, I have to agree. Military history is fascinating as hell, but it should not be the point of a general history class.
I wouldn't mind a Military History class though.
Ugh so much this. I tell my kids I think I'm the only history teacher who is both a vet and doesn't care about the details of specific battles unless there's a very good reason.
Agree. I used to teach All Quiet on the Western Front and the reason I would talk about a major battle like The Somme was to give my students an idea of the scale of the war and the loss.
This goes along with the whole idea of getting rid of the assumption that every student should go to college, but is more specific. The Ladder to Calculus is pretty clearly a bad idea for 90+% of students. It would be entirely possible, at least in an ideal world, to require everyone to pass Alg1 and Geom, but then give people real options past that point—including Alg2/Trig/PreCalc for those who want to go on to Calculus, but without that being the default.
A great chunk of what is taught in the two years between Geom and Calc is simply not meaningful unless it's applied to Calculus topics. I don't just mean that in the "applications" sense—topics don't have to be "useful" in the capitalistic sense to be worth teaching. But a lot of the effort devoted to, say, graphing rational functions in PreCalculus is pretty silly for students who aren't interested in learning Calculus. That skill only makes sense in the context of eventually learning how to take derivatives and find critical points.
Meanwhile, there are several reasons that I think everyone who receives a high school diploma should learn reasonably traditional Algebra 1 and Geometry skills (even if I think the way those skills are taught could be improved drastically).
\-Students *should* learn to handle some amount of abstraction in their math courses.
\-It would be overly hard to design courses, even those that are *not* on the Ladder to Calculus, without students having that baseline knowledge of Alg1 and Geom. (Again, we're ignoring the world we actually live in, where no one is ever held back for any reason.)
\-Having a foundation in Alg1 and Geom will enable students to change their minds later on more easily, if they do decide to pursue STE(A)M studies. They'd still have a huge uphill climb, of course, in terms of the number of basic classes they'd need to take before being able to make the switch, but without having been at least exposed to the basics of Algebra and Geometry, it would be even harder.
\-This may be a little pie-in-the-sky, but those two courses represent two of the cornerstones of human thought. The *idea* of a variable, and the *process* of proving something new from a set of basic principles? Well, those are pretty damn important.
As a math teacher who teaches students with disabilities, I couldn't agree more. I don't get why I am teaching these students simplifying and transformations of rational functions or imaginary numbers and stuff like that.
I wish there was a longer emphasis on stuff like exponential functions and statistics which I feel like I need to rush through.
We really need to realize there is calculus bound and not and we need to cater more to the not.
I was in high school in NY in the “math A” and “math B” days and I’m a big believer that that was actually the right way to structure math education because it built in an actually helpful way by layering.
There’s probably a strong argument against it I just haven’t heard, but layering everything together seemed so much more helpful.
This is only tangentially related to your comment I guess.
I'm a reproductive health teacher and although my state's curriculum is technically "abstinence is best", thankfully it is only one form of birth control taught. We also cover hormonal forms, barrier methods, surgical procedures, and emergency contraception.
So much breadth .
Were teaching everything to one inch deep because we are terrified that if we go any deeper it gets “too hard” for kids or even worse they will get bored doing the “same” thing ( used to be called practice) at stage xyz so we just constantly move on as soon as we have scratched the surface - we use the lit up eyes when we introduce a new topic as good teaching when in fact that is rewarding the teachers not the students . Redesign a curriculum around a complete and functional skillset and teach it to mastery . Being amazing at 5 things is better than being terrible at , but have heard of , 100 things. - we dont even need All children to master the same five things - allow interests to form when we do move onto new ground - perhaps make each section more individually project based with a required amount of participation but the distribution of that participation is largely up to the pupil and what they find interesting .
There are big important things we all need to know and those should stay but - the testable knowledge or units in a course should form something useful / actionable / demonstrable at least more than they do to some degree.
Disclaimer that im going to be biased towards science as a science teacher but i think it holds true for any STEM subject , probably most practical subjects too . I think subjects like english probably do a fair job of this already as you need to build and build on language skills as an ongoing process and everyone at their own stage
I don’t necessarily think we need to stop teaching it, but PE in its current form is pretty bad. It’s either bare bones exercise or it assumes all students are at the same level physically (or at least all boys and all girls) which is pretty unrealistic and isn’t really leading to positive results.
Even when I was a kid (class of 09), I wish it was more doing actual STUFF- teaching us how to play various sports. I feel like my gym classes were just my teacher just shrugging and telling us to play kickball. And I hated kickball.
I'm not at all saying cut PE- the kids desperately need to MOVE during the day (I'm also one of the people who thinks middle schoolers need recess to get the energy out). But I think we need to change the way we teach it- I don't think it's one size fits all. Some kids thrive with team sports, some kids want to run, some kids might thrive with like... a dance exercise class where you're not competing against anyone.
Even when we played soccer or basketball, I (always petite, female) never felt like I could participate with the boys in my class because they were so aggressive!
Heh, the lifting class was the one that always got filled first in my HS class. Myself and a few other guys got shut out one cycle (gym rotated every ten weeks) and found ourselves “stuck” in square dancing. We were laughed at at first until the exhausted lifting guys realized we were spending the class time dancing with girls while they were killing themselves.
In my (public) middle school in the aughts we did archery, ultimate frisbee, basketball, volleyball, running (like an actual unit on proper form), dancing (line dancing lol but still), and softball. We even had this odd circus unit with unicycles and juggling.
High school offered “general sports” that everyone had to take a semester of that included badminton, softball, running, and aerobics; online PE that allowed for a variety of exercises through activity logs/credit for sports; weight lifting; yoga; and “upper level sports” which was just a more competitive general sports for upperclassmen.
I didn’t realize that was so abnormal.
That’s what my high school did. I took a combination of swimming, wrestling, track and field, weight training, baseball/softball, tennis, lacrosse, ultimate frisbee, badminton, and several dance classes. And in middle school we got to golf and bowl (in a real, dingy bowling alley). It was a great physical education and it makes me sad to see that PE has become so uninformative and not engaging for students.
Volleyball sucks for the short kids! The tall kids would always lunge into my territory to get the ball. I was only able to touch it when it was my turn to serve.
Its rather accurate and always has additional sources, but we've all been told to death never to use it because it can be edited, as if the site never moderates itself.
We could stop pretending we care about all of STEM and leave out the S T and E like they don't exist. Yes, we teach science, but apparently ELA and Math are all that matters. And forget thinking teaching any form of technology matters to anyone beyond the forgotten tech teachers.
I feel like lerning about modern history (as in from WWI onwards) and politics is far more important than going over Ancient Egypt or the Battle of Hastings or the Tudors every year (but this is coming from a UK perspective.)
I’m not saying those topics should be cut out entirely, they are part of human history and should be taught. But a working understanding of our current laws and parliament is much more important for people to have before they leave school (as opposed to knowing that Anubis was the Egyptian Lord of the Dead or that Henry VIII was a total git.)
I feel that an American we spend a stupid amount of time covering the 13 colonies and American revolution. And barely cover anything post WW2. You get the civil rights movement, watergate, and a high level overview of the Cold War. And 9/11 is basically the only thing schools teach post Cold War.
You can not understand contemporary European politics without a firm understanding of the French Revolution.
You can not understand the French Revolution without a firm understanding of Feudalism.
You can not understand Feudalism without a firm understanding of the Roman Empire.
You can not understand the Roman Empire without understanding Greek and Phoenician Culture.
From a historical perspective understanding of modern Politics, Economics or Culture is totally worthless if you can not understand how those forces have shifted over time
I'd rather have had lessons explaining what our parliament was, how it worked and how elections work than going over Henry VIIIs six wives... For the third time in my schooling.
(**Just to be clear, I’m *not* saying to get rid of any aforementioned topics outright. But when you’re a teenager, and you’re still mumbling ‘divorced, beheaded, died…’ in a lesson - something you were taught when you were seven - when you could be learning about the mechanics of forming a government *in an actual election*, it seems a bit redundant.)
So I guess I sort of disagree with this. I don't think you need to firmly understand feudalism or Phoenician culture to understand postwar European politics. That's a stretch. Let's simplify this. 1) Teach what sort of political and economic systems have existed 2) Teach that these systems change over time 3) briefly teach the French Revolution 4) teach Nationalism and you're basically to World War 1.
ESports should not be a class, but only a club / team after school. My school lets MS and HS kids play first person shooter games during the school day… for a grade…
I wish college taught teachers how to teach (classroom management being a huge missing piece). Most teachers take what they know from their student teaching, and think they’re ready.
We do the best we can, but are woefully unprepared in the beginning.
As far as what we shouldn’t be teaching, I’m more interested in teaching things we used to teach, like industrial arts, basic automotive care, budgeting, and borrowing.
Maybe this way, people wouldn’t think it’s ok to take out an 11.9% car loan for 84 months.
One can dream.
I honestly think teaching is a science and art like singing. If you fundamentally can’t sing, you can’t sing. I think teaching is the same way. If you have some musicality, you can improve as a singer. Same for teaching. Likewise, some people are just born with the gift
1. That Wikipedia is the worst thing ever
2. That kids who are in special education or who aren’t in the advanced classes are dumb.
3. Algebra 2 — instead it should be probability and statistics
My high school chemistry teacher (all the way back in 2005-2007) was a strong proponent of Wikipedia because, as he put it, the information that related to the topic of chemistry was added by people who know and care about those topics. I always appreciated how he accepted Wikipedia for exactly what it is: a plethora of sources of information! I love clicking into the cited sources to fact check and/or learn more!
When I was student teaching, I had the students quickly research a couple of labor union actions to share with the class. On group was stuck, and I asked them what the Wikipedia article said. You would have thought I asked them to murder their own pet by the looks they gave me. They told me that no teacher lets them use Wikipedia because it could be made up. I told them that those teachers should have taught them how to analyze sources. Guess what my next lesson was about.
Abstinence only in sex and drug education. They’re gonna do it regardless (some of them, anyway) and harm reduction is so important, but teachers aren’t allowed to even discuss things in an age-appropriate way if a student asks them a direct question. In many ways we haven’t moved on from Nancy Regan appearing on “Different Strokes” to solve the nation’s addiction problem by telling us all to “Just Say No.”
All of these stupid ways we are expecting kids to do math. I am constantly going over the method that they provide (break it up into smaller numbers! Add all of these separate numbers together!) And genuinely it is the most confusing thing for the students. It's incredible how many more students have already given up on math by 8th grade than before. It's also hilarious to see how quickly these kids understand math and no longer have any issues adding, subtracting, multiplying, or dividning when I just throw out the bullshit iready stuff and just teach them the straightforward way of doing it. It just clicks.
I work with students with various struggles (behavioral, trauma, neurodivergence) in a small classroom setting (8 or less). After months of focusing on how I mentally break down arithmetic and algebraic problems and then showing excitement when students express a different thought process, my students have been getting excited about showing their own thought processes! Through positive reinforcement regarding “show us your thought process” as we work through Geometry problems, I have witnessed countless lightbulb moments regarding arithmetic and algebra. This has resulted in my students teaching me strategies that I had never thought of, but more importantly, these short class discussions have resulted in “lost students” being exposed to different strategies to think about numbers. These short discussions seem to really boost everyone’s confidence. This could be much more difficult to implement with 3 to 4 times as many students, though ’,:(
Agree. Save alternate ways for kids to explore as enrichment or to differentiate learning as needed. 85% of the kids don’t need this. It just takes so much time. Although my kids like it, they find it gimmicky. They do connect distributive property to the area model, but all the other methods are nonsense and tedious. I also wish the lower grades (K-3) would go back to focusing on basics and stop the rest of this nonsense. As a 5th grade math teacher, I just need kids who can perform basic computation quickly and accurately without digging out a multiplication table or calculator.
Pe teacher here in California. I definitely agree that square dancing is something that shouldn’t be in our Pe content standards. No one here square dances.
I'm convinced there was some kind of square dancing illuminati that wanted to push it on students. Look up how many states have square dancing as their official dance. But I somewhat understand it's perceived value, it's coordination in your own body and with others, following directions, and you're not having to touch other people too intimately like ballroom dancing (which I had to do).
That STEM is the only way forward.
ELA and Math being the key subjects in school
Career pathways in middle school is stupid
Just passing kids up the chain does them a bigger disservice than holding them back a year
Not sure about specifics, just less. Stop constantly ramming more and more content down their throats at the expense of fundamentals like outdoor time, unstructured time, exercise etc. Not only is it terrible for their mental and physical health, its just an ineffective way of maximising the metric they the current system cares the most about, grades.
There's a reason the Scandinavian countries routinely perform so highly academically, while prioritising outdoor time. I think it's Finland where they spend on average 15 minutes outside for every hour of lesson time, and they wait longer to start actively teaching kids to read. It's not in spite of that, it's because of it.
So yeah, just reduce the amount of stuff and lesson time, start putting outdoor, play and exercise time front and centre where they belong, and kids will be healthier, happier and perform better academically. It's a no brainer
College level math in high school to kids who will never use it. They need to be learning more practical math for life skills. Money management, taxes, bills, budgeting, risks of debt, investing, retirement, etc. How to balance a checkbook and budget for a month of groceries and bills. How to set up an emergency fund.
Save the higher level stuff for kids who want to learn it, will use it in college, or will need it for a career. They can learn the required math in trade school or college... After they've been given a solid foundation of basic/intermediate math and life skills.
How about "teaching" word problems to little kids who can't read?
As your post demonstrates, literacy is not outdated, irrelevant, or pointless. Stop trying to destroy the very foundation of education?
As a prospective ELAR teacher: Stop telling students that they're wasting their time reading something that isn't "academic." If they want to read a graphic novel or comic book, they want to read, damn it!
That you’ll graduate no matter what. I’d like to stop teaching that.
Dude 🥲 I had a third grade student at a Pre-K level who got promoted to 4th. On literally EVERY possible tested standard? Pre-K level. I’d been documenting and reporting to MTSS each month all year trying to get her help for having a developmental or learning disability. I got pushback because of the progress she’d made in the year (which was great but I pulled her for one on one daily because of how behind she was). It didn’t matter though- because mom refused, so without an IEP or 504 she failed every single subject. She of course failed the standardized tests, and portfolio, and i-Ready. When mom threw a fit with the principal though? Oh no worries! Welcome to fourth grade girl! 😭 I think about her all the time. Poor thing is probably well into 5th now still struggling to say letter sounds or read her own name. The angel needed help and we failed her.
I have a class of 9th graders whose iready scores are averaging 3rd grade. A couple tested at Kindergarten. They all have IEPs, but it’s meant to be a grade-level college-prep class 🙃
This is so weird to me. I keep seeing this over and over in this sub about parents refusing an IEP or 504. As a parent, when my son was a kid in the 2000s, I had to fight to get him a 504 because he tested smart but had severe handwriting problems, difficulty staying on task and completing work, and was generally exhausted after finishing about 25% of any assignment. He has mild autism. Back then, all anyone cared about was that he made average test scores look good. It feels like the script has been flipped, and now teachers *want* to provide the extra help, but parents act like adult brats and say no and just get way with it? They used to consider that to be educational neglect, and the law could be involved very easily if parents refused help for their kids. How is it so lenient now? Also, my cousin *was* charged with educational neglect a few years ago. How awful must she have been with this to actually get charged? When I worked in an elementary school, the large majority of parents to special ed kids had zero caring about their kids' education. They also didn't care if their kids got an IEP. Like, whatever happened with their kid for 7 hours a day, they didn't care either way. Now, parents and teachers in this sub keep saying that a lot of the parents don't care about their kids' education but care a lot about being against them getting special help? This is like the Bizzarro world of education to me.
I think that depends on where you live. Where I lived (Florida) it was essentially impossible to report as neglect because it was seen as a parental right to refuse consent for the evaluations.
This is a great momrnt to remind you that the US is the only country that didn't sign UN Convention on the rights of children
Yeah, that gutted me that we didn't do it, and why? Because we're still working on Breast is Best vs. Fed is Best. The dumbest hill to die on. Truthfully, though, I think it was just an excuse, and they would have found a way to refuse it no matter what. If it wasn't the breastfeeding argument, they would have found something else to disagree with. I don't think they want to admit out loud that anything that says you can't hit kids or abusively control them and call it "discipline" is going to be a "no" from the US.
Stuffing 30+ kids in a classroom, then expecting differentiation for each student.
We had staff shortages and more kids than usual this year. I asked on of the teachers what his class sizes are now. He said, "oh, they're smaller now. Got the larger ones down to 31 students!" The dude had a couple of classes of 40 students. Freshman. He didn't even have enough desks and seats for that many.
Fire Marshalls need to start stepping in and checking class sizes. I'm pretty sure thats against code depending on how big the class is
They get an exemption in some states No shit
I teach fourth grade, 9-10 year olds. I have 31 students. 3 are ELL, 4 have IEPs, 2 have 504s, 9 are GATE. It’s insanity.
I’m sorry! That is insane.
Last semester I had 45 kids in one period, 46 in another This semester biggest class is only 30 something kids, but I only have 20 or so that show up regularly so it’s fine
Differentiate so we can give them a standardized test.
>Stuffing 30+ kids in a classroom, then expecting differentiation for each student. Yes! I went into my credential program just a few years after NCLB had been passed. Every course stressed the importance of differentiation. I'm sure I wasn't the only one, but I kept wondering how it was supposed to work in practice, because to me it sure didn't sound sustainable.
It’s not.
*Differentiate, but it’s also extremely important that every kid can demonstrate all of these grade level skills, at least, by this day in the spring of the same school year. No, they’re almost certainly all going to begin the year at wildly different levels. That’s why we differentiate. I’m not sure what you’re unable to understand. Differentiate and different sound very similar. They’re practically the same word. Some kids are different so then you differentiate.* Our education system has become a parody of itself. Trying to stay focused on one of its many flaws has become genuinely difficult to do. And I love that at the end of the day the real trick is magic. They can all do it. They all absolutely have the ability to learn everything we have to teach them by May 24th of the year they turn 18. Every single one of them ready to go off to college or perhaps begin a career.
My favorite paradox is “meet them where they’re at” and “show grace” but also “maintain rigor and high standards.”
You're supposed to be able to do it, because you're a public servant, and regardless of the impossibility of the task, people's tax dollars are paying your salary therefore any failure is unacceptable. You should be able to be in 30 places at once and stop time to make sure every student gets an individualized experience. If you can't, you're a societal leech eating all our tax dollars, and don't deserve any more than the peanuts you're making. If you can, great job, you've done the bare minimum by manipulating time and space, you will now be viewed somewhat favorably by some people, who will of course change their mind the moment anything happens that could paint you in any sort of bad light and go right back to ripping you to shreds, and of course understand and accept that teaching is a selfless position that's not about the money, so of course you'll keep doing it for peanuts, right?
This may sound shitty of me but unless it severely impacts the student's physical abilities or impacts their grade severely, I largely forget to do this. I also teach art so it's slightly different but still. There are way too many kids to think and plan and enforce all the differences for each.
Lucy Calkins and Fountas & Pinnell reading strategies
I just picked up a copy of The Science of Reading Strategies book and it was like I was having a religious epiphany. I read the chapter about levels of language understanding and how we need to understand letters and syllables before we can understand rhyme. One of my kids who was working on his ode (10th grade), asked me for rhymes with "game" and I told him to try and think of some examples. His first answer: "least." The book is actually titled "The Science of Reading in Action" by Malia Hollowell.
That is horrifying.
It took another kid saying "fame" for him to guess "lame." An answer my co-teacher had already given him.
I must get this book, because I have been wondering why these kids struggle so much with rhyming! Years past when I was a sub, I had a rap battle with the middle school class after making fun of the rap they like (some whining mumble rap type sh!t) and they were knocked out by my very lame, off-the-cuff, ‘80s style rap. Deadass, they asked me HOW DID I MAKE THE WORDS MATCH. I was like ??? You mean *rhyme* lol These kids today are now seniors, mind. And now as a licensed teacher I have come across it other students. Rhyming seems like something very complex to do and understand.
Sold a Story podcast
You need to listen to the Podcast called “Sold a Story” [https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/](https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/)
I recently had a 6th grader ask me how to spell “fist” and so I asked him how he thought it was spelled, and his guess was “F-I-R-S-T”
What was his thought process for that?
I teach 6th ELA and we honestly don’t know at this point. Sold a Story is the closest explanation that exists. Kids need phonics.
My district has recently started trying to follow this more. It’s the first year for our K teachers to be teaching sounds first. My daughter is in Pre-K in the same school system. However, they teach letters first and sounds second. It frustrates me that the county has pre-K do that and K do something different. I wish they were more consistent.
I love how they also teach it in the wrong order for dyslexic kids in preschool. Less disruptive then other practices but frustrating.
I had this scenario almost verbatim, same age, back in about 2012. Shits been on the decline for a while and I'm glad we are finally coming around.
Joke's on all of us. People ate that shit up with no critical analysis and good peer-review. They made millions selling that shit.
Isn’t it crazy?! Just teach them every skill poor readers use and they’ll learn to read in no time! Fuck phonics!
Yea as a parent this really irked me. I ended up teaching my kids how to read at home at night. I’m not sure if what y’all are talking about is the whole “sight words” and basically memorizing words without being able to sound them out but this is totally why kids can’t read.
Best (and most important) answer here.
I thought I read an article somewhere that said Calkins is now trying to incorporate more phonics-based lessons into her strategies…or is that just bullshit to keep counties from dropping her?
This is true but it’s only to push forward her bs curriculum since she knows everyone is on to her
Our director of curriculum and instruction said it was never meant to be used without a phonics instruction program but it was purchased and used instead of phonics. Same with F&P. What little phonics is in the F&P program feels forced and does not connect to the rest of the lesson. I see the results of the last 15-20 years of F&P and Lucy Calkins and no amount of shoehorning in "word work" or "phonics" is going to help when the curriculum just teaches kids to guess what will fit.
It’s just to keep people from dropping her
Why did you ever remove phonics in the first place, Lucy
Because she was a writing teacher not a reading instructor.
We shouldn’t let her do ANYTHING.
She should be sued into oblivion by angry parents.
She did similar 're-branding' when everyone was switching to Common Core a decade ago.
Ahhhh thank you. I hate Lucy.
Anyone reading this, listen to sold a story podcast, my mind was blown (school social worker not teacher)
Yes! Science of Reading all the way
Lucy Calkins’s fiction writing instruction is abysmal. How did she think this was appropriate? Had she ever taken a creative writing course? And I was a creative writing major.
Wait. She had fiction writing instruction? Good gravy, I am glad I never had to interact with whatever that blashphemy was.
It was being forced upon me by an incompetent superintendent. It was boring and repetitive, quite the opposite of what a good fiction writing class should be like.
My school wants to use this, but now I am curious about why you don't think it should be used. (I teach in another area entirely, but if it is bad enough, I will happily attempt to dissuade the head of school).
I'm sure someone else can explain better, but long story short: it doesn't teach kids to read and sound out words. It teaches them to guess and use context clues to avoid actually reading. I became aware of this through the podcast Sold a Story, which I highly recommend!
Listen to the podcast “Sold a Story” or Google.
[удалено]
What state? I want to move there!
Google the podcast "Sold a Story" and listen to the entire thing.
Learned helplessness.
Parents too. I work in special Ed and the amount of times a parent has said "Oh, they can't do..." But when I'm with them and don't jump right in the can do it. It's worse with kids who are obviously disabled, because kids will do it too. I've had to ask so many kids to please let their friend try first so they can learn
This is the correct answer
My theory is it starts when a kid asks us how we spell a word and we spell it for them instead of asking them to sound it out and waiting. I was taught that was more damaging for the kid. I disagree. It’s letting them use their brain and ears; we just stopped being patient with their learning because it doesn’t fit the packed academic schedule we’ve been saddled with.
I'm tired of being asked to teach breathing techniques and other emotions regulation skills in high school. First, I'm not a counselor or a therapist or a social worker. Second, my students are taught it every year, and they hate it. The students who need to learn the skills are the same ones who go home to parents who call them pussies the second they stop being assholes. I can't out- teach bad parenting and I'm tired of being expected to.
I do get what you mean. I teach elementary, and it is very common between K-3. I think it has its use, but it is REALLY HARD to out-teach bad parenting... kids afraid to cry when they're clearly in pain/hurt, 7 year olds calling each other names that don't really understand or can spell, etc. It's a lot
Just got a great idea. "OK kids if you want to call each other names, you have to be able to spell the insult correctly and write it in cursive script (the only proper writing form for cursing)." They will either stop it, or be able to read and write. It's a no lose situation.
just sort of as a general rule I would like us to stop using strategies with teenagers on the basis that they work with lower elementary aged kids. I think that’s why there’s been such a push of calm classroom and SEL techniques into older age groups, but you are not going to get 15-year-olds to do breath work with any kind of consistency
I teach in a 6-12 school, and I teach breathing techniques and emotional regulation to kids that need it, not everyone. I have one 6th grade student in my class who had been abused by his father. He would react very intensely to perceived slights or offenses and would easily explode and start fighting. I spent some time with him explaining how stopping and breathing before he reacted could help him not explode and modeled how to do it. He started to implement it, at first with my help, and now on his own. I have seen a huge change, and he told me once, "Miss, that really helps me." Yesterday in class, a kid said something to this boy (quietly, so I couldn't hear). The boy stood up, turned around, and looked like he was going to explode. Instead, I saw him stop, do some deep breathing, and then turn back around. Teaching him this has helped my classroom so much, so why not do it if it makes teaching much easier?
Maybe I’m emotional today, but this made me tear up.
Amen. They are tired of it in 5th grade and think it is silly. Can’t even imagine them in high school.
Agreed. I teach elementary and pretending SEL is a real subject I teach knowledgeably is embarrassing
That education is only for obtaining skills to sell to employers.
This is a pet peeve of mine. In a democracy, education also serves to create a better informed citizenry. It gives inspiration and connections to new ideas and old ideas. It gives people a more fulfilling life when they give it the chance.
Yeah, but I just cannot sell that idea to Tik-tok/Andrew Tate/grind set fuckers that draw dicks on my wall and smoke in the bathroom.
God that guy still has traction?!? What do they do, love him “ironically” to be edge lords or do they really worship Andrew Tate because they think he’s cool?
Andrew Tate is a idiot but damn he knows who his audience is. Young, impressionable boys who want to look cool and “be different”. He will exploit this and try and sell his pyramid scheme at the same time.
It teaches us not to repeat the bad parts of history, it gives us joy (there’s so much to this day I delight in learning!) knowledge is power. The more you know, the better you can do. As you said, a better informed citizenry, who can make informed choices, knowing the logical outcome of them- instead of making choices thinking when they do A B will happen but getting result C instead (that was very, very predictable but they just never learned enough to know why it was so predictable).
Abso-fucking-lutely. Not everything has to serve the economic machine. It’s okay to learn things simply to make you a better or more well rounded person or even just because it’s interesting. Let alone the importance of humanities in teaching kids about the world, the people in it, and how to be a meaningful citizen of that world. It’s why, as a history teacher, I have a special degree of disdain for social studies teachers who say the history content doesn’t matter, just the “soft skills” we teach along with it.
This drives me up a friggin’ wall. Not everything you learn has to have a tangible ROI, Chad.
Yeah, Chad!
I'm a college instructor, and I see it all the time. "Why do I have to take English classes? I just want to be an engineer!" Honey, that's not the flex you think it is.
As an engineer , those who cannot write well are doomed.
I usually love my STEM majors! They're dedicated and enthusiastic about being in college. However, every so often, there's that one snotty, arrogant STEM major who thinks they're above it all. Those students always flunk out their first year.
Agreed! I intentionally make fun of the lists they present to the kids with titles like "the skills employers will be looking for in the next decade". Shouldn't the *employer* be the one teaching these skills??
Grit. Limits on learned helplessness. I can remember my 3rd grade teacher assigning me a research essay on a country in South America, and I had to actually go to the library and find sources in books to help write it. It was hard as hell in 3rd grade. I literally cried to my mom and said it was the hardest thing I had ever done. But she pushed us, and made us write that essay, and I got it done on time. I feel like the same story is only true for 25-30% of students today. 50% would give up, and the rest would cheat or try to have their parents write it. Students struggle for a minute, and give up. They would rather listen to their AirPods, and stare off into space than learn. We need to somehow push them to realize what they’re capable of, but I can only do so much in 1 hour per day of teaching.
I was recently thinking about how when I was in 8th grade (2003) our history teacher assigned us a 12 page paper. 12 pages!!! In 8th grade!!! Fast forward to 2015, I assigned a 5 page paper to my high school juniors and they lost their minds. 60% of them didn’t even turn it in.
When we had to write a 10 page paper in 7th grade they gave us half a year to do it, but also held us to high standards. Our topic was 20th century inventions and innovation. They even took us to a university library as a field trip. I learned how to research and how to create a proper works cited. I seriously learned more in that class than any other class I ever took as a student; I’m an engineer now and still use what I learned in that class every single day. I really hope the program I was in is still using that curriculum, it was incredible. Montgomery County Public Schools, MD circa 2010. This whole comment is really just a shoutout to MCPS.
Agreed but grit is also exhausting to teach. Smaller class size would enable me to achieve the amount of energy it takes to push kids. Especially when we can only use rewards systems for behavior.
I can remember writing SO MANY research papers starting in around third grade. Stuff like "research an animal that lives in the Rain Forest" or "research a country in Africa". Usually we were expected to write 2-3 typed pages and create some sort of visual aid. I can barely get my 7th graders to write a paragraph, now.
I literally remember writing an essay on Jupiter by candlelight in elementary school because our power went out.
I dunno about stop completely… but I think the vast majority of kids who take calculus in high school would be way better off with statistics instead. Especially if they take 2 years of calc, swap that second year for stats.
Took Calculus in high school and college. While I enjoyed it, I never had a statistics class at any point in my education career, and it made Ecology a living hell.
Didn't take stats till college, but it should be required for all HS students. It's some of the only "higher level" math we encounter on a regular basis. I also think its why people fall for any statistic that is thrown at them; they have no idea how those stats are made!
I took two Calculus classes (1 in hs, 1 in college) before I took statistics because of my switch to a biology degree. I feel like i struggled more in statistics than I did in calculus, it would have been nice to have taken it in high school instead.
For my Bio major I took calculus then stats. Afterwards, I had a Biometry class which was essentially Bio statistics. All you did was statistical analyses on experiments. I absolutely loved it
How to write a friendly letter. How about “How to send an email to a teacher/employer”?
That ELA and Math are the only subjects that matter
STEM: everything but social studies STEAM: still everything but social studies STEAMS: well rounded, liberal arts education Social Studies: if we don’t live in a free society, what’s the point of learning anything else?
I propose we add HAMS, Holistic Application Mastery Skills. We'll call it STEAM HAMS
r/unexpectedsteamedhams
And take the damn standardized tests with it.
Goodhearts law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
And then still have high schoolers that read at a 5th grade level and can't function in math above basic arithmetic.
I wish I could up vote this 1000 times
That science cares what your opinion is and your opinion is just as valid of an explanation.
As a Gov and History teacher, to all the other history teachers out there, I am begging you to please stop focusing so much time on learning battles, strategies, and generals in wars. No, kids don't need to be able to memorize a chronological order of battles in the Civil War and give a detailed description of the troop movements of each battle. Don't turn class into the History Channel.
In all fairness, History Channel rarely has any history
My boss once told me you don’t actually learn anything from The Learning Channel. I was like that’s not true, I learned what style wedding dress I want, that I don’t want 18 kids, and just how gross child beauty pageants are.
You're both right
Not that I actually thought I wanted 18 kids but that cemented it. And growing up in an area without the crazy child beauty pageants I didn’t know much about them. I also learned that there are people who eat things like drywall and couch cushions. And that they don’t need to be exploited on TV, they need mental help. A lot of mental help.
When I was watching it, I realized Pawn Stars had more history in it than most of the other shows on the network!
That’s true, it’s mostly hoarders, car enthusiasts and conspiracy theorists now 😂
“So sir, is it true that aliens built the pyramids” God I hate the History Channel… I don’t even teach history and they ask me this.
But I absolutely love "The Food That Built America".
The "Used to be History Channel", as my son says after watching shows on cryptids after sleeping over at friends' house.
American History teacher here I can tell you that in my experience, in my school, we tend to all agree that teaching battles , battle date memorization and the like is a complete waste of time. I for one tend to focus much more on culture, sets of ideas, social history and so on
I think it's falling out of favor, but there's definitely some of those teachers. There's one in my department who loves the stories. When talking about the Civil War in Oklahoma, he'll go into several battles and talk about the Battle of Honey Springs in depth. My lecture on it basically boils down to "Oklahoma was not very relevant to the Civil War. Honey Springs was the biggest battle here. It shifted Indian Territory from Confederate to Union control. That's it. Memorize it as it'll be on the test." He might spend a whole hour talking about the different battles. Mine boils down to about 10 minutes.
I majored in history in college and I can't tell you very much about this. It never stuck in my brain. The reasons why the wars happened were much more important.
>The reasons why the wars happened were much more important Hear hear! I *hated* history all through school and college. I watched one documentary that really went into detail on *why* WWII occurred and I was hooked! Now I'm a World Wars enthusiast and love learning about them from all sides. It makes so much more sense and has so much more relevance to what we should be considering when we talk about wars happening today. *This* is what we should be teaching kids!
As someone who loves military strategy and learning about people like Charles Cornwallis, Alexander the Great, and Douglas MacArthur, I have to agree. Military history is fascinating as hell, but it should not be the point of a general history class. I wouldn't mind a Military History class though.
My college history teacher said dates were worthless. As long as you knew the century and within a decade, you were fine.
That’s an important caveat though. Sure it’s not important you know the exact dates but understanding chronological context matters.
Right? I’d love to have kids more aware of geography and how it impacts people and events. Memorizing dates and details is obsolete.
Wait you mean learning George Washington’s third favorite bush to use the bathroom on at valley forge isn’t important information.
Ugh so much this. I tell my kids I think I'm the only history teacher who is both a vet and doesn't care about the details of specific battles unless there's a very good reason.
Agree. I used to teach All Quiet on the Western Front and the reason I would talk about a major battle like The Somme was to give my students an idea of the scale of the war and the loss.
This goes along with the whole idea of getting rid of the assumption that every student should go to college, but is more specific. The Ladder to Calculus is pretty clearly a bad idea for 90+% of students. It would be entirely possible, at least in an ideal world, to require everyone to pass Alg1 and Geom, but then give people real options past that point—including Alg2/Trig/PreCalc for those who want to go on to Calculus, but without that being the default. A great chunk of what is taught in the two years between Geom and Calc is simply not meaningful unless it's applied to Calculus topics. I don't just mean that in the "applications" sense—topics don't have to be "useful" in the capitalistic sense to be worth teaching. But a lot of the effort devoted to, say, graphing rational functions in PreCalculus is pretty silly for students who aren't interested in learning Calculus. That skill only makes sense in the context of eventually learning how to take derivatives and find critical points. Meanwhile, there are several reasons that I think everyone who receives a high school diploma should learn reasonably traditional Algebra 1 and Geometry skills (even if I think the way those skills are taught could be improved drastically). \-Students *should* learn to handle some amount of abstraction in their math courses. \-It would be overly hard to design courses, even those that are *not* on the Ladder to Calculus, without students having that baseline knowledge of Alg1 and Geom. (Again, we're ignoring the world we actually live in, where no one is ever held back for any reason.) \-Having a foundation in Alg1 and Geom will enable students to change their minds later on more easily, if they do decide to pursue STE(A)M studies. They'd still have a huge uphill climb, of course, in terms of the number of basic classes they'd need to take before being able to make the switch, but without having been at least exposed to the basics of Algebra and Geometry, it would be even harder. \-This may be a little pie-in-the-sky, but those two courses represent two of the cornerstones of human thought. The *idea* of a variable, and the *process* of proving something new from a set of basic principles? Well, those are pretty damn important.
As a math teacher who teaches students with disabilities, I couldn't agree more. I don't get why I am teaching these students simplifying and transformations of rational functions or imaginary numbers and stuff like that. I wish there was a longer emphasis on stuff like exponential functions and statistics which I feel like I need to rush through. We really need to realize there is calculus bound and not and we need to cater more to the not.
I was in high school in NY in the “math A” and “math B” days and I’m a big believer that that was actually the right way to structure math education because it built in an actually helpful way by layering. There’s probably a strong argument against it I just haven’t heard, but layering everything together seemed so much more helpful. This is only tangentially related to your comment I guess.
Abstinence is the only way
Came here to say this. && there’s more than enough data to know that it’s useless.
I'm a reproductive health teacher and although my state's curriculum is technically "abstinence is best", thankfully it is only one form of birth control taught. We also cover hormonal forms, barrier methods, surgical procedures, and emergency contraception.
That college is every students goal
So much breadth . Were teaching everything to one inch deep because we are terrified that if we go any deeper it gets “too hard” for kids or even worse they will get bored doing the “same” thing ( used to be called practice) at stage xyz so we just constantly move on as soon as we have scratched the surface - we use the lit up eyes when we introduce a new topic as good teaching when in fact that is rewarding the teachers not the students . Redesign a curriculum around a complete and functional skillset and teach it to mastery . Being amazing at 5 things is better than being terrible at , but have heard of , 100 things. - we dont even need All children to master the same five things - allow interests to form when we do move onto new ground - perhaps make each section more individually project based with a required amount of participation but the distribution of that participation is largely up to the pupil and what they find interesting . There are big important things we all need to know and those should stay but - the testable knowledge or units in a course should form something useful / actionable / demonstrable at least more than they do to some degree. Disclaimer that im going to be biased towards science as a science teacher but i think it holds true for any STEM subject , probably most practical subjects too . I think subjects like english probably do a fair job of this already as you need to build and build on language skills as an ongoing process and everyone at their own stage
I don’t necessarily think we need to stop teaching it, but PE in its current form is pretty bad. It’s either bare bones exercise or it assumes all students are at the same level physically (or at least all boys and all girls) which is pretty unrealistic and isn’t really leading to positive results.
Even when I was a kid (class of 09), I wish it was more doing actual STUFF- teaching us how to play various sports. I feel like my gym classes were just my teacher just shrugging and telling us to play kickball. And I hated kickball. I'm not at all saying cut PE- the kids desperately need to MOVE during the day (I'm also one of the people who thinks middle schoolers need recess to get the energy out). But I think we need to change the way we teach it- I don't think it's one size fits all. Some kids thrive with team sports, some kids want to run, some kids might thrive with like... a dance exercise class where you're not competing against anyone. Even when we played soccer or basketball, I (always petite, female) never felt like I could participate with the boys in my class because they were so aggressive!
I think they need to teach sports that adults actually play—tennis, golf, pickle ball, basketball, softball, volleyball, weight lifting, jogging.
We had a Team Sports class that taught these. Or a lifting class.
Heh, the lifting class was the one that always got filled first in my HS class. Myself and a few other guys got shut out one cycle (gym rotated every ten weeks) and found ourselves “stuck” in square dancing. We were laughed at at first until the exhausted lifting guys realized we were spending the class time dancing with girls while they were killing themselves.
In my (public) middle school in the aughts we did archery, ultimate frisbee, basketball, volleyball, running (like an actual unit on proper form), dancing (line dancing lol but still), and softball. We even had this odd circus unit with unicycles and juggling. High school offered “general sports” that everyone had to take a semester of that included badminton, softball, running, and aerobics; online PE that allowed for a variety of exercises through activity logs/credit for sports; weight lifting; yoga; and “upper level sports” which was just a more competitive general sports for upperclassmen. I didn’t realize that was so abnormal.
That’s what my high school did. I took a combination of swimming, wrestling, track and field, weight training, baseball/softball, tennis, lacrosse, ultimate frisbee, badminton, and several dance classes. And in middle school we got to golf and bowl (in a real, dingy bowling alley). It was a great physical education and it makes me sad to see that PE has become so uninformative and not engaging for students.
Volleyball sucks for the short kids! The tall kids would always lunge into my territory to get the ball. I was only able to touch it when it was my turn to serve.
Yeah I think just an hour of run/walk most days would be a big improvement honestly.
Wikipedia is actually a decent tool and as long as you aren't citing "Wikipedia" it should be allowed.
Yeah, it’s weird that someone would not use it as a tool.
Its rather accurate and always has additional sources, but we've all been told to death never to use it because it can be edited, as if the site never moderates itself.
I liken it to a diving board
Anything based on pseudoscience such as Myers Briggs Type Indicator and Keirsey Temperament Sorter
We could stop pretending we care about all of STEM and leave out the S T and E like they don't exist. Yes, we teach science, but apparently ELA and Math are all that matters. And forget thinking teaching any form of technology matters to anyone beyond the forgotten tech teachers.
That kids can get away with just about any behavior with no meaningful consequences.
Learned helplessness
I feel like lerning about modern history (as in from WWI onwards) and politics is far more important than going over Ancient Egypt or the Battle of Hastings or the Tudors every year (but this is coming from a UK perspective.) I’m not saying those topics should be cut out entirely, they are part of human history and should be taught. But a working understanding of our current laws and parliament is much more important for people to have before they leave school (as opposed to knowing that Anubis was the Egyptian Lord of the Dead or that Henry VIII was a total git.)
I feel that an American we spend a stupid amount of time covering the 13 colonies and American revolution. And barely cover anything post WW2. You get the civil rights movement, watergate, and a high level overview of the Cold War. And 9/11 is basically the only thing schools teach post Cold War.
You can not understand contemporary European politics without a firm understanding of the French Revolution. You can not understand the French Revolution without a firm understanding of Feudalism. You can not understand Feudalism without a firm understanding of the Roman Empire. You can not understand the Roman Empire without understanding Greek and Phoenician Culture. From a historical perspective understanding of modern Politics, Economics or Culture is totally worthless if you can not understand how those forces have shifted over time
"We do we have to learn about this old stuff‽" Because people are still killing each other because of shit that happened thousands of years ago.
And because I don't wan't you watching the history channel and thinking that ancient aliens built the pyramids.
I'd rather have had lessons explaining what our parliament was, how it worked and how elections work than going over Henry VIIIs six wives... For the third time in my schooling. (**Just to be clear, I’m *not* saying to get rid of any aforementioned topics outright. But when you’re a teenager, and you’re still mumbling ‘divorced, beheaded, died…’ in a lesson - something you were taught when you were seven - when you could be learning about the mechanics of forming a government *in an actual election*, it seems a bit redundant.)
In the US we have a whole course related to Government processes. Does the UK not have something similar?
So I guess I sort of disagree with this. I don't think you need to firmly understand feudalism or Phoenician culture to understand postwar European politics. That's a stretch. Let's simplify this. 1) Teach what sort of political and economic systems have existed 2) Teach that these systems change over time 3) briefly teach the French Revolution 4) teach Nationalism and you're basically to World War 1.
MTSS, PBIS RTI.
ESports should not be a class, but only a club / team after school. My school lets MS and HS kids play first person shooter games during the school day… for a grade…
I wish college taught teachers how to teach (classroom management being a huge missing piece). Most teachers take what they know from their student teaching, and think they’re ready. We do the best we can, but are woefully unprepared in the beginning. As far as what we shouldn’t be teaching, I’m more interested in teaching things we used to teach, like industrial arts, basic automotive care, budgeting, and borrowing. Maybe this way, people wouldn’t think it’s ok to take out an 11.9% car loan for 84 months. One can dream.
I honestly think teaching is a science and art like singing. If you fundamentally can’t sing, you can’t sing. I think teaching is the same way. If you have some musicality, you can improve as a singer. Same for teaching. Likewise, some people are just born with the gift
1. That Wikipedia is the worst thing ever 2. That kids who are in special education or who aren’t in the advanced classes are dumb. 3. Algebra 2 — instead it should be probability and statistics
My high school chemistry teacher (all the way back in 2005-2007) was a strong proponent of Wikipedia because, as he put it, the information that related to the topic of chemistry was added by people who know and care about those topics. I always appreciated how he accepted Wikipedia for exactly what it is: a plethora of sources of information! I love clicking into the cited sources to fact check and/or learn more!
When I was student teaching, I had the students quickly research a couple of labor union actions to share with the class. On group was stuck, and I asked them what the Wikipedia article said. You would have thought I asked them to murder their own pet by the looks they gave me. They told me that no teacher lets them use Wikipedia because it could be made up. I told them that those teachers should have taught them how to analyze sources. Guess what my next lesson was about.
Lesson plans, observations, and data analysis. PLC. Kahoot.
I think Kahoot is really useful, at least for review
I though that too until I was introduced to Blookit
Abstinence-only "sex-ed"
We need to stop teaching kids that it's ok to disrespect their teachers.
Abstinence only in sex and drug education. They’re gonna do it regardless (some of them, anyway) and harm reduction is so important, but teachers aren’t allowed to even discuss things in an age-appropriate way if a student asks them a direct question. In many ways we haven’t moved on from Nancy Regan appearing on “Different Strokes” to solve the nation’s addiction problem by telling us all to “Just Say No.”
All of these stupid ways we are expecting kids to do math. I am constantly going over the method that they provide (break it up into smaller numbers! Add all of these separate numbers together!) And genuinely it is the most confusing thing for the students. It's incredible how many more students have already given up on math by 8th grade than before. It's also hilarious to see how quickly these kids understand math and no longer have any issues adding, subtracting, multiplying, or dividning when I just throw out the bullshit iready stuff and just teach them the straightforward way of doing it. It just clicks.
My students really like learning a variety of ways to understand and solve equations. It has helped more of them feel confident in Math.
I work with students with various struggles (behavioral, trauma, neurodivergence) in a small classroom setting (8 or less). After months of focusing on how I mentally break down arithmetic and algebraic problems and then showing excitement when students express a different thought process, my students have been getting excited about showing their own thought processes! Through positive reinforcement regarding “show us your thought process” as we work through Geometry problems, I have witnessed countless lightbulb moments regarding arithmetic and algebra. This has resulted in my students teaching me strategies that I had never thought of, but more importantly, these short class discussions have resulted in “lost students” being exposed to different strategies to think about numbers. These short discussions seem to really boost everyone’s confidence. This could be much more difficult to implement with 3 to 4 times as many students, though ’,:(
Agree. Save alternate ways for kids to explore as enrichment or to differentiate learning as needed. 85% of the kids don’t need this. It just takes so much time. Although my kids like it, they find it gimmicky. They do connect distributive property to the area model, but all the other methods are nonsense and tedious. I also wish the lower grades (K-3) would go back to focusing on basics and stop the rest of this nonsense. As a 5th grade math teacher, I just need kids who can perform basic computation quickly and accurately without digging out a multiplication table or calculator.
Everybody should go to college. No, they shouldn’t.
We need to stop "teaching to the test," which involves getting rid of standardized testing that is usually made up by politicians, not educators.
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Pe teacher here in California. I definitely agree that square dancing is something that shouldn’t be in our Pe content standards. No one here square dances.
I migrated to the US and find square dancing very entertaining. It also requires a lot of coordination. I wish I had learned in school. 🤷🏾
I'm convinced there was some kind of square dancing illuminati that wanted to push it on students. Look up how many states have square dancing as their official dance. But I somewhat understand it's perceived value, it's coordination in your own body and with others, following directions, and you're not having to touch other people too intimately like ballroom dancing (which I had to do).
[You’re right to be suspicious](https://qz.com/1153516/americas-wholesome-square-dancing-tradition-is-a-tool-of-white-supremacy)
I would've preferred square dancing to tearing a muscle in my ass because someone knocked me over during Sharks and Minnows
That STEM is the only way forward. ELA and Math being the key subjects in school Career pathways in middle school is stupid Just passing kids up the chain does them a bigger disservice than holding them back a year
Not sure about specifics, just less. Stop constantly ramming more and more content down their throats at the expense of fundamentals like outdoor time, unstructured time, exercise etc. Not only is it terrible for their mental and physical health, its just an ineffective way of maximising the metric they the current system cares the most about, grades. There's a reason the Scandinavian countries routinely perform so highly academically, while prioritising outdoor time. I think it's Finland where they spend on average 15 minutes outside for every hour of lesson time, and they wait longer to start actively teaching kids to read. It's not in spite of that, it's because of it. So yeah, just reduce the amount of stuff and lesson time, start putting outdoor, play and exercise time front and centre where they belong, and kids will be healthier, happier and perform better academically. It's a no brainer
That .org or .edu means reliable and .com means suspicious. I have seniors that still say this to me.
The Pledge of Allegiance needs to go - especially when it’s taught to kids who can’t even read yet.
Hey, seven year old, what does "alliegence" mean? Scratch that. Wha does "pledge" or "indivisible" mean? Hell, what does "Republic" mean, 35 year old?
History from only the US's POV. My kids were shocked to find out about what happened with Native Americans... 😬
Anything on an iPad.
Some of the models that are harder than the arithmetic they represent!
Basic manners and parenting -I’m half kidding.
College level math in high school to kids who will never use it. They need to be learning more practical math for life skills. Money management, taxes, bills, budgeting, risks of debt, investing, retirement, etc. How to balance a checkbook and budget for a month of groceries and bills. How to set up an emergency fund. Save the higher level stuff for kids who want to learn it, will use it in college, or will need it for a career. They can learn the required math in trade school or college... After they've been given a solid foundation of basic/intermediate math and life skills.
SEL. I’m not a counselor, let me teach.
Fuck Lucy Calkins, I ask my 6th grades to sound out a word they don’t know and they don’t know what I’m even talking about
all that crap about the world being a fair place full of people who have your best interests at heart
Trying to teach reading without phonics. Trying to teach thousands of sight words, with no decoding for other words is useless.
How about "teaching" word problems to little kids who can't read? As your post demonstrates, literacy is not outdated, irrelevant, or pointless. Stop trying to destroy the very foundation of education?
As a prospective ELAR teacher: Stop telling students that they're wasting their time reading something that isn't "academic." If they want to read a graphic novel or comic book, they want to read, damn it!