MEANWHILE: In Wisconsin:
Gov. Scott Walker on Thursday announced that he is proposing that people with work experience be allowed to take a competency test to gain a teacher license. Walker's spokeswoman says the Department of Public Instruction will be charged with creating a competency exam that will allow someone with "real life experience" to gain a teacher license.It's not too late, perhaps, for Bob and all the many others who look at their career and say "If I had to do it all over again, I'd be a schoolteacher..." You never have it to do it all over again. You can only do the next thing. How many people with real life experience would like to take that experience and bring it into the classroom? Too many, of course, but if we have the right exam (and other screening), maybe some highly competent and skilled individuals could flow into teaching.
A spokeswoman for the statewide teachers union... did not immediately return messages seeking comment.
Posts
36 comments:
"If I had to do it all over again, babe, I’d do it all over you" http://bit.ly/1z9sD26
I know an ivy-league scholar of government and then international business who then had kids and decided to become a nurse practitioner.
I'll never be a professional skydiver, and I can't be Ray Charles, though I'd give up eyesight to do that. It'd be nice to cure cancer, but I haven't the mind or discipline for that. Maybe I should take up making Poopets.
If you were to throw off your current career, Professor, would you go photographer? I know two women who did that later in life and are quite successful at it.
I'd still like to be a piano-lounge player. Nobody listens, and they don't have to, so you can play what you want.
just wait until they open this program so anyone can teach at UW.
It's funny the guy without a degree is the one pushing this.
I would humbly teach the Great American High-School Cheerleaders a course in Self-Esteem. Of course, their parents would have to sign 'Spanking' waivers: I am specific in my methods.
I am Laslo.
Terrific idea. And the Lefties tried to recall this man.
Good thing for us all that there weren't enough of them.
This is an excellent consequence of the Left's takeover and practical destruction of the institutions that were supposed to deliver competent teachers.
Nature abhors a vacuum, after all.
How about we get rid of state certification and allow schools to hire and promote the people they believe are best. What you will hear now from the unions and other outposts of the ed blob is that- "just because you are good at math doesn't make you a good math teacher" True enough, but that assumes that certification makes you a good teacher. Give folks a chance- they'll (the schools and the individuals) will find out soon enough if they can handle a classroom.
By the way, watch the Feds try thier best to stop this.
Credentialism run amok. BHO has Ivy degrees but had never actually run anything but his mouth until 2009. The results speech for themselves. People that can and have run things, like Walker, who despite HAVING NO DEGREE, are given short shrift because they lack one.
Anyone can teach at UW. You just need to have UW want you to teach.
This topic gives me the opportunity to loudly gripe once more that the decline in American public education tracks perfectly with the rise of teaching as a profession -- with the attendant credential ladder and exclusivity -- unto itself.
KK Kraska said... Credentialism run amok. BHO has Ivy degrees but had never actually run anything but his mouth until 2009.
His mouth continues running unabated, but everything else is being run into the ground.
No member of the NEA will ever respond to Dylan except to smile patronizingly and say how nice his sentiment is.
Life experience is anathema to the entire theory of education which is the core orthodoxy of the NEA. In essence the theory is this: Anyone can successfully teach anything given that an approved textbook and syllabus exists and is properly applied, a battery of standardized tests exist to measure achievement, and most importantly the prospective course instructor holds at least a B.Ed. from a school duly accredited by the NEA.
I like Walker but this idea seems 1990 to me.
Today we need volunteers to tutor in the park or at a restaurant while most learning is done at home online. The days you shove your kids out the door for Daddy Government to raise ARE OVER.
Turn schools into liquor stores with giant strip clubs* and have the socializing take place wherever parents want it to without input from schools.
This $90,000 a year in compensation for fat babysitters and administrators is ridiculous. The fact we have 50% drop out rates in some communities of color shows this bloated corpse of a system needs numerous conflagrations at once with salt waiting patiently to cover the remains.
Every dollar spent on babysitters and capital is taking food out of the mouths of hungry kids, excepting basic Internet service and basic desktop Internet-access devices.
*Steel Panther
There was a time when preparation for a law career in England consisted of having eaten three dinners at one of London's inns of court. The rationale behind this seemingly bizarre example of life experience was the fact that only admitted barristers and their students could take a meal at an inn of court. For example, If a young man hung around Grey's long enough to get three invitations to dine (and pay for the privilege!) one could not help but hear readings and commentary from learned counsellors, and participate in the mock trials that were often staged there.
haahahahahahahah
Also, i laughed a bit when I read Dylan's take on job creation in AARP (hsahahaha, not rolling stone) magazine
WALKER IS ON FIRE, says the headlines from Iowa. Now that mild mannered Clark Kent is picking a fight with the teachers Unions again.
Walker has the smile factor going for him. I hate to say it but Walker's campaign has a whiff of the unknown Governor Jimmy Carter's campaign...and that won.
The life experience theory of legal training as practiced by the Inns of Court in olden days has its obvious faults, not least of which is gross incompetence among its alumni:
M'lud, the prisoner at the bar is a notorious villain, who if not guilty of this offense, is certain guilty of worse. So take him down or no; it's no concern of mine since I've already gotten my fee.
However, since grossly incompetent people get admitted to the bar every day (how else to explain the grossly incompetent John Dean, Web Hubble, and the sitting President?) I don't see the current system as a huge improvement.
Before I retired, I was a licensed professional engineer. Fore several years my agency tapped me to be an instructor. And I have tutored several people both youth and adults in math. Yet I can not teach math in the school system.
Between the results of my tutoring and seeing our last, mathematically gifted, son take math in public school I weep.
Sounds like Walker is tearing it up for the cheering base in Iowa. Re his teacher certification idea? Count me in. Hard to argue with his logic that skilled workers -- with actual experience and first-hand knowledge of what is useful and valuable to employers -- are less suited to teach than young adults who "learn" their craft in college amphitheaters.
http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/230636-walker-shows-fire-in-iowa
... Walker's campaign has a whiff of the unknown Governor Jimmy Carter's campaign...and that won.
Good point. Carter rode the coattails of Watergate into office on nothing more than the virtue of being a total stranger to Washington, even though his career as Governor of Georgia was completely undistinguished. (Gerald Ford being similarly undistinguished and honest enough to admit it, didn't exploit that weakness.)
While the MSM won't acknowledge the fact that Obama's entire career in office amounts to an affront to the Constitution and to liberty so egregious that Watergate looks penny ante by comparison, Obama's heir apparent is truly undistinguished and without accomplishment, and has the stink of Washington insidership all over her like a miasma. If Walker attacks that with the fortitude and aplomb he used against the education lobby, he'll win.
I'd love to hear his lecture on "Early Roman Kings".
Walker's "life experience accreditation" idea isn't new. I believe GWB proposed something similar, but in that case political cowardice prevented Bush from going tête-à-tête with the vaunted NEA, which until Scott Walker's governorship had made mincemeat out of anyone with the temerity to challenge them. So in Bush's proposal they were called mentors, and their efforts would be entirely voluntary, and whatever money changed hands would be from student to tutor ad hoc. Thus the mentor program went nowhere but onto the ash-heap. If life experience is worth anything it's worth a salary just like any credentialed NEA stooge.
What's interesting is that the credential matters more than ability. Teaching today often requires not simply a college degree, but an education degree, or at least education classes.
The local community college requires a masters degree to be able to teach there. The Japanese teacher is a native speaker, but that doesn't count. Luckily he has a masters (in kinesthesiology I think), so can teach Japanese.
Why does everyone seem to think that they could teach, just walk into a classroom one day and educate the hell out of the students?
I suppose it is because all of us went to school once, but it is annoying. The truth is, it is very hard to teach in the average high school today. Teachers have little or no authority and the students know it. Parents and students have little responsibility, and no accountability and they know it. Every five years or so, someone comes along with a new idea that is going to save education, and I spend the next couple of years getting pulled out of class to get trained on something that will be abandoned for the next new thing.
How would Dylan take me saying..."If I had to do it over again, I'd write hit songs, mumble into a microphone and make millions'?
After Scott Walker becomes President will all butter substitutes be outlawed? Enquiring minds want to know.
After the movie American sniper, we grabbed a quick meal at Chick-fil-A, and even Truett has fallen for using a " Buttery tasting spread" sold under the Land O Lakes brand name. That is so wrong!
Gov. Walker has a great idea.
Law schools might consider this approach in their hiring.
Competent trial attorneys, more often than not, must be able to untangle complex fact situations and present them in clear way to a panel of lay people. Whereas a good appellate attorney must be able to present complex but understandable legal arguments to a panel of busy judges, answer the judges' questions, and do all of this in a short period of time.
These are exactly the skills that a good teacher must have.
Some states allow certified teachers to be certified in other subjects by taking a competency exam. When I was teaching math, I took and passed the certification exam for Spanish. I had never taken a college course in Spanish, but had worked in Latin America and taken high school Spanish.
Knowledge of a subject is necessary, but not sufficient to be able to teach it. While there is a need for pedagogy- it is not always intuitively obvious how to teach a given subject to a given population- Ed schools do a horrible job of it. Instead of instructing prospective teachers on WHAT WORKS in 2000+ years of formal classroom instruction, Ed schools work on the next biggest unproven theory of education or on the politically correct indoctrination of the day.
Bob would last about 30 minutes in the inner city schools I taught in. Gunfire, bullets, random wanton egregious violence in the classrooms and hallways. I've seen hardend 30 year retired Marine Sgts quit before lunch on their first day in the classroom and Bob wants to be a school teacher? Where, Andover Prep. Come the fuck down and sign up Bob. I'll guide you through the process. LMAO
Most of the people who try this will be terribly disappointed. They will find that lots of their students just don't care. Then they will think that since they are interested and since the subject matter is important, they can make their students interested. The problem must be that the kids didn't have the right teachers in the past.
No, the problem is that you are trying to teach something that these particular young people simply are not that interested in.
Schools have a hard time finding teachers for the advanced stuff. Advanced chemistry, Calc III, Accounting, specialty stuff, Agriculture.
There are proffesionals in those fields that would sign on to teach one class, one semester. Take 2 to 3 hours out of their busy day to educate kids that cared.
The unions would never stand for it.
But.......just because 'its for the kids' ya know.
I've seen this battle before. The teachers won the battle. Real chemists and mathematicians were blocked from getting teaching credentials. God forbid they should take jobs away from Education majors, the lowest common denominator among college majors.
It's for the children, we shouldn't let people who don't know how to teach in a class room. Because, Lord knows we couldn't somehow figure if someone with vast knowledge could teach other than through or education degree.
The only down side to Walker's plan is that the competency test will be the biggest political game around.
My daughter got a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Tufts University. She wasn't particularly interested in being an engineer, though, as it turns out. One thing led to another and she is now teaching math in a New England suburb's "alternative" high school - a public school for those kids who for one reason or another couldn't cut it in the regular high school. She's doing a great job. But if she doesn't pass a required number of "education" courses in 5 years she'll get let go, regardless of how good a job she's doing and how hard it is to get math teachers - especially ones who'll have 5 years of experience dealing with those kids. And of course, she had to join the union.
"After Scott Walker becomes President will all butter substitutes be outlawed? Enquiring minds want to know. "
It would take a Constitutional amendment. Which I would heartily support.
Post a Comment