Bobby sent me a really interesting article that breaks down how one's
college major translates into various measures of intelligence and academic aptitude. The hard sciences come out on top in every single measure and no surprises there. And on the bottom?
Education majors.
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Dawn Talks Shop )
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I don't even know how that works. I got my B.A. in English lit. and then fiddled around taking courses to piece together the teaching credential after graduation (maybe I never even finished it?). I taught in private schools only which (surprise! surprise!) actually had lesser requirements relating to the education courses than the public schools. Then I decided I did not want to teach--I put too much into it--it was making me nuts. That was a lifetime ago anyway. So I am sure everything is different now.
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I went your route, more or less. Well, I had the writing coursework to teach high school English; I had to do the literature and linguistic courses and only then could do the education coursework. The fact that I had a degree in psychology counted for jack shit on the latter. Apparently, an intense course on the science of learning can't stand in for the cutesy "educational psychology" requirement. But I digress!
In Maryland, your friend would have a hard road because elementary and secondary certifications are completely different.
Bobby taught at my current school for as long as he did because he could teach there without a certification until he could complete the coursework. A lot of people go that route.
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I must have been doing that. I was teaching days and taking education courses at night (sleeping or reading through them). Then I'd skim the texts before the exams--straight A's! No papers or if there were I wrote them in one night. Utterly forgettable. But then there was a semester of student teaching at the end.
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I don't think I ever had to write a paper aside from the disastrous "group paper" I had to contribute to in educational psychology. I did have to write for the Content Reading II class I took over the summer, which was by far the most rigorous (and valuable) ed class I've ever had. The instructor was superb. People complained about the workload.
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Laura and I are freaking out about how to give Alex what he needs because it might as well be written in Urdu for as much as we understand about science, math, or the other mechanical/engineering kind of things that fascinate him. On the other hand, he totally grasps the shit that interests us--makes me feel like half a person. (Laura like me is fascinated with history of science and results but no aptitude at all for the hands-on side of it.)
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Believe it or not, that is a huge relief! He does explain a lot of things to me nowadays--he gets a huge kick out of explaining Fictitious Science of Dr Who and movies to me--he loves to play those head games in addition to real science. I can tell he can tell the difference by the gleam in his eye and the little half-suppressed grin he has when explaining such things. He loves the mad-quasi-logic of fake science also.
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Providing good education to the tiny citizens does pay off in building a fairer society but hey, tell that to the people running the show - the budget for education is always lower than other ministries'.
Yep. Same here. Education is always the first to get the ax. Or, as a bumpersticker from one of my favorite progressive catalogs reads, "It will be a good day when our schools get all the money they need and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber." :)
There is a lot of lip service paid to helping schools in disadvantaged communities. My husband teaches as such a school: Title 1, as we call it here, where 40% or more of the students live in poverty. These schools are supposed to get first dibs on the best resources. My husband's school currently doesn't even have enough copy paper. TPTB don't care about giving those kids a leg up; to do so would only mean more competition when their own children apply for colleges and jobs. /cynicism
Anyway, for us, only people teaching up ( ... )
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Kids knew they'd go to work on Dad's farm and just didn't care about anything that might go on inside a classroom; they were just biding their time. I knooowwww. :( I had students like that, and there are still lots of them around, according to my friends who still teach and they are not all from farmer families, but also from other poor backgrounds, rural and urban. It used to infuriate me when I was in my 20s. One time I made a small explosion in the lab just to get them interested. lol, it worked for like a week. Now I just find it so sad. Curiosity is the greatest intellectual gift and giving up before you even begun... I am comforted, however, that some of them turned out really well. One of them, an orphan living in an institution is now a policeman, when he could have easily slid into crime or permanent unemployment, etc. Others are doing fine too, but sadly not all. My secret plan is that when Tiago is bigger maybe I'll get involved in a tutoring-cum-mentoring program that is ( ... )
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http:// bookriot.com /2015/02/04/ texas-student-suspended-for-lord-of-the-rings-terroristic-threat/
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The ironic thing is that it happened in Texas! If he'd brought an AR-15 to school, someone would have argued for his Second Amendment rights to openly carry, but when you start getting into that satanic magic from a pagan novel written by an idol-worshipper? Oh no no, we can't be having that!
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Imagination is *scary*! I just hope that his parents decide to homeschool because he's going to be ruined if they leave him in the TX school system.
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http://www. kansascity.com /news/government-politics/ article9352574.html
The mind boggles. :/
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I did some teaching while getting my MA, but discovered I really didn't enjoy it enough to stick with it, so I guess it was a good thing that I didn't bother with that Ed certification.
They just released $ amounts per student that our state and the main Twin Cities spend and I'm rather amazed. The mean for the Twin Cities per student is $14,000+ and state-wide is $11,000+ Given the deplorable state of education that our students are receiving, I am appalled at the dollars spent for such a lack of life education for our students. *sigh*
- Erulisse (one L)
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The cost per student is probably skewed high by the special-ed students (assuming it's a mean average?). For example, tuition at my school is about $70,000/year, which is paid by the public school district that the student belongs to, so that student is going to pull the whole average much higher. Even if a student doesn't attend a separate school, a self-contained classroom or one-to-one aide can nonetheless raise the cost per year of educating that one student into the tens of thousands of dollars.
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That's quite possible, although it wasn't broken out in the original data or in the followup data. That would make a bit more sense to me since so many programs in our schools have either been eliminated or have been altered to carry high price tags for the families since the funding supposedly isn't there.
I can easily see where special needs and special education students could move those per-student numbers quite a bit higher.
- Erulisse (one L)
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