Loss of Privacy

Given the lively discussion over at reddit, it’s hard to imagine an educational system that will be getting rid of lessons on Churchill and Hitler, but that’s exactly what the British school system is going to do.

Secondary schools will strip back the traditional curriculum in favour of lessons on debt management, the environment and healthy eating, ministers revealed.

Even Winston Churchill no longer merits a mention after a drastic slimming-down of the syllabus to create more space for “modern” issues.

Along with Hitler, Gandhi, Stalin and Martin Luther King, the former prime minister has been dropped from a list of key figures to be mentioned in history teaching.

Without a basic understanding of where we’ve come from and where we are, we can never understand where we are going.  We will be destined to repeat the mistakes of the past because we will never learn what happened in the past.  We will lack the basic skills necessary to think and reason and comprehend the world around us.

Critics warned traditional subject disciplines were being stripped of key content and used to promote fashionable causes and poorly-defined “life skills”.

They said that while the two World Wars remain on the curriculum as broad topics the failure to specify teaching on Churchill – while naming other individuals – downgraded his importance.

If you don’t understand what Churchill or Hitler did in WWII, you will never be able to discern why these men did the things they did.  It opens the door to ignorance, antisemitism, and government propaganda.

Among other cutbacks, are the slimming of lessons because, apparently, students can only learn at a few minutes at a time.

Schools are also being told to tear up the timetable of eight lessons a day and introduce classes lasting a few minutes – or several hours – by mixing different subjects together.

Five-minute lessons on spelling, French or German could be “drip-fed” throughout the day.

Ah yes, the students are confused enough, now they will be fed half-assed lessons with no real comprehension.  How would you enjoy walking around all day, changing what you are doing every five minutes?  Is that really teaching a person the “life skills” that the British government seems to think is so vital?

Key subjects such as history and science will be cut back to allow teachers to spend a quarter of the day helping pupils who struggle with literacy and numeracy.

In other words, join the Americans in becoming stupid in History and Science.  They aren’t all that important anyway.  And redefining Science to teach the “moral and ethical implications of science” seems to skirt the line of allowing religion into science.

The British government seems to be content with the constant changing of the curriculum.  It’s as if they want young Britons to be ashamed of their history.  No, they’ve never been the perfect nation, but eliminating anything that isn’t within the current party line is a little too 1984 for me.  It is apparent that they do not want the next generation, or those after them, to question anything.

If individuals don’t understand the basics of science or the history of anything, then it is easy to tell the people whatever you want.  They won’t be learning the past.  They’ll simply be conditioned to believe whatever the government tells them to be true.  Knowledge is something that can never be taken away, however, if you’re never given the opportunity to gain knowledge, then you’ll never know the harm your government is really doing to you.

I’d laugh right now if this wasn’t so sad and I fear young Britons will become like young Americans, largely ignorant of the world, only with funny accents.

America faces a shortage of teachers, especially in fields such as math and science.  Yet, despite the fact that people are fleeing the profession, school districts continue to make prospective teachers jump through more hoops in order to obtain employment.

Because of the shortage of teachers, school districts have made it easier for people to become teachers through lateral entry.  This occurs when a person wishes to become a teacher but did not go to college to study education.  These people are college graduates and will require more classes to meet the specific requirements to obtain a teaching license.  Teachers from other states have also found it easier to move to another state and obtain a teaching license through reciprocity, a process that may entail one or two specialized classes for the new state to obtain a teaching license.  This is a good way to get new teachers into the profession and decrease the shortages but, it does not address the enormous hassles required to become a teacher.

For anyone, whether you attended college to specifically become a teacher, been a teacher for many years, or are moving, laterally, into the profession there is a lengthy application process, which deters many from applying.  Often, newly graduated teachers see the process and decide that it is not worth the hassle to jump through the numerous hoops only to be underpaid, under appreciated, and overworked for the rest of their lives.

The process starts as any other job.  You must fill out an application.  This, depending on the school district, is done online or by paper.  You must also send in your resume.  This is where the redundancy begins.  The application has the usual name, address, universities attended, etc.  Then there is the awards, recognitions, qualifications, endorsements, student teaching, references, etc.  Your resume already lists these items, yet you are required to duplicate this information.

The next part of the application is the questions.  These range from 5-15 handwritten questions asking you about how you would approach a particular subject or problem, how you deal with students, and why you want to teach in their particular school.

There is also the criminal background check authorization and the fingerprint card.  Every teacher has to have a background check to make sure they aren’t dangerous to students.  You must also have your fingerprints taken by an authorized member of law enforcement.  You must pay the fee ($10-20 depending on the state) to have your fingerprints taken.  Then, you must pay another fee ($85-100) so that the school district can investigate you.  These fees must be paid in each state that you apply to, regardless of the fact that the FBI already has this information from your last teaching job.

More frequently, schools are moving to an additional online questionnaire, aimed at getting to know you better.  There are typically 25-40 questions and range from how you act in the classroom, to conflict resolution, to gaging your personality.  There is no particular right or wrong answer to these questions.  They are completely subjective to the school you are applying to.  Many of these questionnaires you take once and then give all the schools in a particular state access to them.

One school may be looking more towards an authoritarian type of teacher, while another school may be looking for someone who excels at conflict resolution.  You may be a dream teacher in one district and a nightmare in another.  You also never find out the results of the questionnaire, nor do you know how a particular school district scores or what kind of person they are looking for.  The only thing you can do is answer the questions honestly and hope for the best.

If this hasn’t deterred you from becoming a teacher, there is still more to the application process.  After you have finished all of the above, you’ll get a call for an interview.  Your interview will consist of more questions, some are identical to the handwritten questions you already completed.  Now you must answer them, and more, in front of the hiring committee.  The hiring committee has 3-5 members of the school and can include principals, vice-principals, teachers, and sometimes superintendents.

Once you have finished this, there is the mini-lesson that you must perform.  This consists of a typical daily lesson plan, shortened from the usual length to about fifteen minutes.  Those interviewing you will pretend to be the students while you conduct your lesson.

By this point, you are exhausted.  You hope that you only have to do this once but, more typically, you will do this many times as you interview at school district after school district.  This is only the beginning as you learn that, by the time you’re hired and the next summer comes, you’re too tired from jumping through even more hoops all year long, being away from your family, and spending 50-70 hours per week at work to enjoy a proper vacation.  You just want to sit on the couch and sleep for several weeks so that you can refresh yourself and gear up for another school year full of hoop jumping.

You never actually got to teach your students all they should know.  Instead, you pushed them through, like cattle to a slaughter house, with cursory knowledge that is “good enough” to pass state exams so that the state can get more money from the federal government.

At some point during the summer, you start to think, “Why the hell did I ever pick this as a career?” and you seriously debate a career change where you can actually have peace in your life for longer periods of time other than the eight weeks you get off in the summer, a summer which is spent entirely in finding your sanity again.

We’ve all used it. Some love it. Some hate it. We know that Wikipedia has a wealth of information but, there are inherent dangers in relying on accurate information on a website that allows its users to edit that information. Many college professors forbid their students from using it precisely because there have been too many errors in submissions and spam vandals continue to flood the site.

The founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, admitted in 2005 that there are online quality issues, many of which still need to be resolved. Two main issues with Wikipedia remain the garbled mess that passes as facts on the site and that it is difficult to check every little detail.

Those who favor Wikipedia say that if you see something wrong, then edit it yourself. This merely puts the responsibility onto you to make sure items are correct. This disregards the fact that you came to Wikipedia in the first place to verify the accuracy of something you heard or to learn something new.

Wikipedians also point to the few errors in Encyclopedia Britannica, claiming that paper versions of encyclopedias aren’t always correct either. First, Encyclopedia Britannica has only a handful of errors, all of which have been corrected in their online version. Second, putting the attention on someone else’s mistakes is no way to claim that your are better. Wikipedia continues to be full of badly written prose, factual errors, and endless apologies for the errors that needed to be fixed.

Also, claiming that Wikipedia is faster than the alternatives doesn’t make it accurate. It is merely saying, “use us, we’re faster” and does not touch on the numerous problems their site faces.

There is also the issue of the quality of submissions, even when they are 100% accurate.

As a delicious illustration, Wikipedia appears to have a quality problem with the word “quality” itself. While Merriam Webster online offers us eight major definitions, including “a) degree of excellence : GRADE … b : superiority in kind”, and the Cambridge Dictionary three, of which two are “how good or bad something is and of a high standard” Wikipedia’s sister project Wiktionary definition begins this. “1 – (uncountable) general good value”

Is it acceptable to only have one definition for the quality? Shouldn’t it have more definitions? Why is this considered acceptable on Wikipedia?

More arguments are listed over the submissions of Bill Gates and Jane Fonda. In February, 2006, the Times Online wrote a piece about saboteurs who stalk Wikipedia, sometimes making daily changes over and over again to the same articles. John Seigenthaler found his biography entry to be riddled with mistakes that he described as “false and malicious” in 2005. The most recent problem that I have come across was Barack Obama‘s entry.

Then we have the issue of paying for the “correction” of entries on Wikipedia. Microsoft tried to hire people to adjust entries. Wikipedia has also begun a policy of tagging all external links on its site as “nofollow,” rendering those links invisible to search engines. It is still unclear if this is a positive or a negative. There is also problems with admin and how they manage to keep their positions.

Wikipedia is an enormous undertaking and it strives to be the reference on the web but it has to work harder at creating content that is easy to read, understandable, and correct. You will probably never be able to use information from Wikipedia for your college papers or PhD. thesis precisely because there is no way of telling from one moment to the next whether or not the information is accurate. Colleges rarely allow you to quote from any type of encyclopedia because the information contained in it is also short and general. If you are looking for more detail, Wikipedia is not the place to go. However, it is a great quick and dirty tool for people who just need to know a few simple things and use it as a jumping off point for more detailed, referenced, and fact-checked material.

The problem of America’s schools is a tough challenge to fix.  There are a myriad of problems that combine to the almost comical excuse that is education today.  Many people want to blame the teachers when, in fact, it isn’t always teachers that are the main problem in the system.

My husband is a high school teacher and I have had the “joy” of listening to the problems of the educational system on almost a daily basis.  There is not one single thing that will fix schools but there are many little things that can change the thought process of those that run education.

Teachers Are Not Always To Blame
Many would like to institute a policy of merit pay for teachers.  The theory is that this would eliminate lazy teachers and reward good teachers.  The problem with this lies in the fact that a teacher, good or bad, could, one year, get a group of students who do really well, have large amounts of support from parents, and have a general desire for learning.  The next year, they could have a group of bad students who don’t care about school and their parents are practically non-existent.  This can also happen within a school year for those that teach more than one subject.  A teacher can only do so much motivation.  If there is no parental support, it is more likely that the student will fail to achieve.  Merit pay would penalize teachers unfairly based on random additions of students in a given class.

Federal Intervention is Making Things Worse
The No Child Left Behind Act is unconstitutional.  All federal education programs, including the Department of Education is, in fact, unconstitutional.  Read your Bill of Rights.  The 10th amendment states that “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.”  Public education is a States’ rights issue.  Although the elastic clause allows the government to circumvent this, I strongly believe that education should have remained a States issue.  Every single time the federal government has gotten involved with education it has only made things worse.  Students get the shaft and are dumber with each new generation.  Right now, public education is only slightly above institutional babysitting.

Discipline Is All But Gone From Schools
In the past, discipline was not a problem.  There were clear cut rules to follow.  Some pushed the limits to see what they could get away with but there were far less discipline problems than there are today.  There were, of course, students who were expelled in the past, and there will always be students that will be expelled, but the numbers continue to grow as discipline decreases.  Children will do whatever they can get away with.  They know that there are no consequences for their actions so they continue to push the envelope as far as they can.  The more discipline problems you have, the less time there is for teaching and the easier tests must be made so that everyone, including the discipline problems, can pass the tests.  This is all in an effort to appear to be taking an interest in the students.  The logic, though faulty, follows that, if students pass the tests, they get more federal money, so make the tests easy, everyone passes and we get more money.

Emotions Rule in School
Public school administrators are more concerned with how a student feels than if they are actually learning something.  They’ve made the tests easier so that students can feel good that they passed a test but they really haven’t learned much more than cursory facts.  Schools worry about self-esteem more than understanding the concept of slavery and its role in history.  It’s better to think you are special than to understand how to write compound sentences.

Too Many Administrators Taking The Money
Public education spends more per student than most private schools because there are so many administrators that need to be paid huge salaries.  While some school districts aren’t big enough to warrant the number of administrators, the administrators are, unfortunately necessary most of the time.  This is because they spend a great deal of time tracking students’ progress and filling out report after report so that they can meet the goals set by the state and federal governments.  If public schools do not jump through these hurdles, then they do not receive funding.  These administrators make 2-3 times what a teacher makes, yet it is always the teachers who are blamed for getting paid too much money.

Favoritism
Despite the fact that this is supposed to be a professional setting where teachers are treated as professionals, there is immense favoritism in many schools.  This leads, again, to the problem of good teachers.  A teacher who may be good but doesn’t quite fit in with the current clique of teachers, can, and often does, get handed the problem students.  This is the traditional passive-aggressive approach to getting rid of teachers that are different from you.  Often, because they are saddled with loads of poor performing problem students, test scores are low and the teacher is released.  A teacher could go on to another school where they are considered fabulous or are, at least, given a fair chance at performing their job skillfully.  In turn, favoritism can lead to poor teachers being kept on and given tenure.

Now, while these problems may not be indicative of all schools, they are some of the bigger problems that face a good portion of schools throughout the United States.  Under the current system, teachers are evaluated several times per year, though less often once tenure is achieved.  This is supposed to eliminate things, such as favoritism, but the deck can still be stacked against a teacher.

Education boils down to the need for parental involvement, student curiosity, teacher enthusiasm and the administrators keeping their hands out of it.  I have only listed a few of the major problems that I have seen in the last five years in the American educational system.  If even one of these could be tackled, it would go a long way to changing the way public schools work.

I believe most people see it as too large a problem to fix and, instead, only offer short-term solutions.  This leaves students ill-equipped for the real world and even life at college.  Many college students are taking up to six years to obtain their degrees because there is so much remedial information that they must obtain before they can pursue college level work.

We must allow teachers to actually educate students and instill in them a sense of learning, curiosity, and desire for more knowledge instead of sticking with the status quo of passing exams to get money.  Fixing the problems I mentioned above, which are only a few of the many that exist, will help and will start to put America back on the list of high achieving nations.

New York City school officials have had their phones ringing off the hook lately with parents who are angered by the enforcement of a ban on cell phones in the schools. While the cell phone ban has been in place for several years, New York City schools only started enforcing the ban last April with random searches. Parents claim the policy is “unreasonable, irresponsible, and hints at ‘thoughtless fascism.’”

While parents claim that they need to keep tabs on their children, Mayor Bloomberg and school officials claim that the phones are disruptive because they enable students to send text messages, play games and cheat on exams.

Many parents say that their number one concern is being able to contact their children should another 9/11 event take place. What they forget is that on 9/11 cell phone towers were quickly overloaded, leaving many unable to contact one another for most of the day.

“The reality is that the NYC subway system is vulnerable to terrorist attack,” said the parent of a ninth-grader. “When we have so little control over these horrific incidents, and must continue to live our lives (as Mayor Bloomberg suggests we do), something as simple and basic as cell phone contact with our children should not be up for negotiation.”

Another wrote: “She and I both feel a little less crazy knowing that if something major happens — an accident, a crisis — that she can be in touch with me. If your child went to school blocks from ground zero, you’d know what I’m talking about.”

I hate to tell this parent but the subway system has been vulnerable to terrorist attacks since it was first built. You don’t have control over when such an attack is going to happen and, when it does, if your child is unfortunately on the subway, you’re not going to be able to contact him/her anyway.

If there is an accident or crisis, there are many adults at your child’s school who are responsible for keeping your child safe. Every school classroom is also equipped with a telephone so phone calls are not a problem. There is no reason why, if a parent has an emergency, that they cannot call the school and inform them of the incident. The school needs to know this information anyway and getting it from a hysterical child is the worst way to figure out what is happening.

You would think that parents would enjoy time away from their children instead of scrutinizing their every movement. Your child is at school.  You do not need to check up on them every hour.  If you do, then there is a bigger problem than your child having the ability to have a cell phone.

School should be a time for learning, not a time for distractions that take up valuable class time because Jenny just had to tell Jimmy that Veronica slept with Peter last night.  I never had a phone in school and had to walk to and from school through the roughest neighborhood in town. I made it okay.

You also may think this rule is idiotic until you are in a classroom where the teacher is constantly interrupted, telling students to turn off their telephones, ipods, etc. The entire class is disrupted due to one person, and, when this student later fails the class, the teachers and the schools are to blame.

This rule is no different from many other jobs that ban cell phones in the workplace. Most corporations have more intrusive, yet still legal, policies to follow than these schools. If you whine and complain about not being able to have your phone with you, you are told to shut up, follow the rules or get a job elsewhere. In school, your phone is taken away from you, you’re told to sit down, shut up and get back to learning.

At my husband’s school, cell phones have been banned for several years. You may bring it to school but it must be turned off. If you are caught fiddling with the phone, for any reason, it is confiscated, taken to the principal’s office and returned to the parent, not the student, after the parent is lectured, again, as to why the ban is in place.  If a parent and student refuse to follow this policy, the phone can be taken away for the entire year.  This happened to one student last year and, since the policy is strictly enforced, there are few problems with cell phones in his school.

When you have a cell phone, everything else waits while you answer that precious call. I have been in numerous places where someone on a cell phone made me wait because they just had to tell the caller about Aunt Cindy’s colonoscopy or how funny Grandma was at little Johnny’s birthday party.

Many schools in states across the country have similar bans, though some allow the phones on school property but they must be turned off. New York City, however, felt that the phones were a big enough problem that an complete ban was warranted.  Still, they are open to discussion and the school board is encouraging debate before the final policy is put into place.

The problem is that the children that are screaming that they would never allow this to happen in their school forget that they will, most likely, be subject to this very rule when they get a job and have to live in the real world. They act, and are, spoiled children who want their way, believing that it is a God-given right to use a cell phone whenever and wherever they want. If students want to be treated like adults, then they should begin acting like adults.

Students should have a distractive-free education. School officials are there to enforce this policy. This means no blaring music from an mp3 player, no cell phones ringing in class, no text messages interrupting class time, and no video games, of any kind, in the classroom. It also means that any other kind of disruptive behavior should be banned as well and the student removed from the classroom so that others can get back to the business of learning.

If you allow all the disruptions of life to enter the school, then schools become a chaotic place where it is impossible to teach anyone anything. Students need to be taught that certain things simply are not appropriate to the learning process. Yelling in class, playing an mp3 player so everyone can hear it, talking on cell phones, text messaging, swearing at teachers, fighting, etc., have no place in a school. Without limiting some freedoms, schools cannot teach students and the United States will fall even further behind other countries than they already are.

School is there to prepare you for either college or a job. If you such little respect for yourself or others that you cannot possibly live without a cell phone or mp3 player for a few hours, then, please, don’t come to school. There are children there who genuinely want to learn and do not take pleasure in being distracted everywhere they turn during the school day.