Life among the Bottom Feeders?

[dawn_felagund]

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.

Comments

[heartofoshun]

One of Laura's really good friends came over tonight to split some take-out and a bottle of wine to celebrate that she just got admitted to Hunter College to get a degree in math. She's teaching elementary school now and wants to teach math in secondary school. She has the teaching credentials but not the degree in the subject area and she has to have that. I have no idea how it works and have retired to my room now and do not want to go back out and ask.

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.

[dawn_felagund]

It depends on the state, since each state makes their own certification requirements to maximize the complexity of the process! Seriously, getting clear answers when I wanted to be certified was like trying to see a straight pin at the bottom of a mud puddle!

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.

[heartofoshun]

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.

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.

[dawn_felagund]

That sounds about right. Good to know not much has changed. *eyeroll* Bobby didn't have to do student teaching, though, since he was already employed as a teacher. In Maryland, the state Department of Ed will grant you a two-year provisional certification in which to complete certification requirements. (A lot of people don't make it, mostly because of PRAXIS.)

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.

[pandemonium_213]

First, I must state there are some wicked smart teachers out there. I count you and Bobby among them, as well as some truly outstanding teachers I had in grammar and high school and...my late sister. In her case (and now I'm gonna say something rather controversial), she wanted to be an engineering major (she had a strong aptitude for mathematics and definitely a natural affinity for metal and wheels :^), but this was in the late 50s. My parents discouraged her from pursuing the major;they later expressed deep regret over this, and said guilt may have been in a factor in encouraging me to pursue biology and chemistry. At any rate, like a lot of very smart women of that time, she opted for teaching, a more acceptable career choice for those women with scientific and mathematical aptitude. I also wonder if the rigor might have been stronger then, too? She wound up teaching 7th grade math and also got her masters in counseling. If she had to do it over again? She said she would have been an engineer

[heartofoshun]

My mother, a Latin and French major, is the only non-STEM person in the family.

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.)

[pandemonium_213]

Speaking as a STEM kid, my non-STEM mother did a LOT of the same things with me that you're already doing with Alex...taking him to museums, reading, reading, and more reading. It's more of a brain stimulation thing. The best thing you can do is to encourage his interests, which you and Laura are doing so well. My mother definitely encouraged my interests in natural history. The formal stuff will come later and from others. No need to worry that you can't teach him differential equations. :^)

[heartofoshun]

No need to worry that you can't teach him differential equations. :^)

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.

[talullahred]

This was really interesting for several reasons. Education has been a hot topic around here for a long, long time, and some things are different while others are the same. I can't help but thinking that the lack of prestige of education as a field experienced in both countries has a connection with another fact - Portugal is the closest country in Europe, by far, to the US, in income disparity. 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

[dawn_felagund]

Icon in honor of your world-class rant. ;)

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

[talullahred]

That icon is the impersonation of awesome! :D

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

[samtyr]

Kinda OT-ish but did you read this yet?

http:// bookriot.com /2015/02/04/ texas-student-suspended-for-lord-of-the-rings-terroristic-threat/

[dawn_felagund]

I did! Someone posted a link to an article about it in Reason on the Mythgard student Facebook page.

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!

[samtyr]

The sad thing is he probably would have gotten in *less* trouble if he had brought a gun.

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.

[samtyr]

And for another link, this one shared by a hs classmate of mine who also teaches:

http://www. kansascity.com /news/government-politics/ article9352574.html

The mind boggles. :/

[engarian]

Interesting article and discussion. I got my BA in Anthropology and my MA in the same. I wanted to get an Education certification too, but it would have required an additional year of school for my BA and that was economically impossible for me.

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)

[dawn_felagund]

I wanted to get my teaching certification as an undergrad too, but I was already doing a major, a minor, and two certificates, so I had no more room in my schedule and, as a scholarship student, it wasn't worth it enough for me to spend thousands of dollars of my own money to go another year.

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.

[engarian]

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.

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)