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otis
Joined: 02 Jun 2006
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 Posted: Tue Jan 16, 2007 9:24 pm Post subject: |
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| djsmnc wrote: |
| otis wrote: |
| khyber wrote: |
they don't need a good ass beating. That is too far. They just need attentive parents who PUSH them to study; you know, the kind of people who spend time with their kids and MAKE their kids do the work.
The kind of parents that "stand up" to their children.
When I go back home and teach, it will be crucial for me to set up a good relationship with parents. I think that is something that is TOTALLY lost to high school students. But dang it, spend twenty minutes a day calling a few parents; try to talk to each set of parents twice during the semester. SURE that is a lot more work but it encourages the parents to get involved in their child's life (and provides a window for the teacher). |
Look, my friend. I hope you have a great career.
But if you're teaching in America, don't count on it. There wasn't one teacher in my school who actually enjoyed the job. The enjoyment has been sucked right out of it.
Furthermore, wait till you meet some of these parents. Scary.
And talk about violence. I taught five years in the swamps of Louisiana. We aren't talking urban problems here.
I've taught a murderer. He shot some dude in the head with a rifle outside a bar.
I taught a guy who shot a state policeman in the neck. The cop lived.
The cases are too numerous to mention--drugs, violence, etc.
And if you happen to be a guy, it's even worse. They couldn't give the classes I taught to a woman. A woman might have lasted five minutes.
I'm saying this to you right now. If there is something else you are qualified to do, then stay as far away from teaching in the United States as possible.
There's no money, and it sucks.
Hell, you might as well stay in Korea if you are planning to continue teaching.
Do you want to know what's really shameful. 90 percent of my Korean students could read English better than 90 percent of my American students. |
That's scary, but at least we know we've got plenty of men to weed out and ship off to war in other countries! |
You're wrong. The military has standards.
In my high school, over 75 percent failed the test to get into the military.
You have to remember one thing: America is a nation of 300 million.
Our armed services number just under 2 million.
They don't take idiots. |
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gmat
Joined: 29 Jan 2003
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| Posted: Tue Jan 16, 2007 11:00 pm Post subject: |
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The best advice I got as a new teacher searching for a job was to establish a good relationship with the parents by sending out a handwritten note at the beginning of the year telling the parents hello & how to get in touch with you if they have questions. Follow it up with phone calls--a few per week until you've talked to as many parents as possible.
Most teachers wait until there's a problem to contact parents, which means that their first (and often only) interaction with them is negative. In that light, it's no wonder that so many parents of American schoolkids see & treat the teacher as an enemy (speaking from personal experience here). If the first contact is, instead, positive, parents are more likely to see their relationship with the teacher as a collaborative one, rather than a contentious one.
It's not going to work with everyone, but I think it goes a long way... |
 
krats: I wish you the best, but something tells me you are going to be "slightly" unprepared for the reality of teaching in a public school in the US (unless you have a job lined up in Atherton, Ca  ) |
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otis
Joined: 02 Jun 2006
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| Posted: Tue Jan 16, 2007 11:19 pm Post subject: |
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| khyber wrote: |
they don't need a good ass beating. That is too far. They just need attentive parents who PUSH them to study; you know, the kind of people who spend time with their kids and MAKE their kids do the work.
The kind of parents that "stand up" to their children.
When I go back home and teach, it will be crucial for me to set up a good relationship with parents. I think that is something that is TOTALLY lost to high school students. But dang it, spend twenty minutes a day calling a few parents; try to talk to each set of parents twice during the semester. SURE that is a lot more work but it encourages the parents to get involved in their child's life (and provides a window for the teacher). |
Look. I was reading over my advice to you, and perhaps my words were a bit strong.
I taught in the USA for about seven years.
Students have threatened to burn me alive. They have threatened to shoot me. They have threatened so many things that it's almost impossible to list.
But here's the truth: They didn't kill me or my family. I was never physically assualted. Threatened but not assualted--perhaps because they knew old Mr. Kevin would kick their little asses.
I'm such an alpha male that teaching in America would just never work out for me. It's freaking torture.
But if they have someone who actually gave a damn about them, perhaps you could make a difference.
Get ready for some freaked up crap. Classes with over thirty students and ten of them have modifications. Learning disabilities. Behavioral modifications. Etc.
Set the tone! There's an old cliche among teachers. Don't smile till December. And that's true.
Also, don't send too many of them to the office. That's a mistake first year teachers in America make. The administration will look at you like a whimp and your office referrals won't get respected.
Look at an office referral as this: If I don't write this kid up, could I expect legal action in the future? If the answer is yes, write him up. If the answer is no, let it slide.
Good luck.
Teaching is a vocation in America--not a profession. I hope you have the patience of a priest. |
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otis
Joined: 02 Jun 2006
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| Posted: Tue Jan 16, 2007 11:29 pm Post subject: |
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God bless, my friend.
Go and make a difference.
It's funny. But American kids need you a hell of a lot more than Korean children. Korean children actually have families. |
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krats1976
Joined: 14 May 2003
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| Posted: Wed Jan 17, 2007 2:02 am Post subject: |
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| gmat wrote: |
krats: I wish you the best, but something tells me you are going to be "slightly" unprepared for the reality of teaching in a public school in the US (unless you have a job lined up in Atherton, Ca ) |
I've already taught in American public schools. |
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SuperFly
Joined: 09 Jul 2003
Location: In the doghouse
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Zebra12
Joined: 18 Jan 2006
Location: Ottawa
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| Posted: Thu Jan 18, 2007 2:24 am Post subject: Analog Cultures are being eclipsed by the digital age |
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I've enjoyed reading many of the informative and insightful commentaries about educational developments (or lack thereof) that we've been experiencing in the first years of the 21st century--whether in SK or North America. We really do have a lot in common across the great divide. I find the SK experience most interesting, sort of an early phase of the curriculum that I knew as a boy in Canada back in the 60s era--full of idealism and utopian wishful-thinking about the future of Korean society as a whole. A place where concrete is piled on top of concrete; digital rapture on top of hand-phone babble... in my community, Gunsan City, an amazingly [exotic] pedestrian bridge has just been completed--spanning the Umpa lake like a neon swan of sorts--a place for people to enjoy one another, and gaze at the beautiful ring of apartment buidings, surrounding the naturalness of the setting. But, when I ask many of my Korean friends about the floating debris in the lake and/or the piles of post-weekend party garbage strewn along the lake's shorline...I get a rather dumb-founded look that seems to say, "garbage"--it's so clean--and we have many machines and people to take care of that problem. Millions are spent here locally on educational needs...yet pennies (wonnies?) are spent on environmental needs. The kids run to local bookstores to buy the latest English text or [electronic] dictionary...they enjoy eating in all the American-style eateries...and then it's off to the PC Bang for more flash and score-gore edutainment.
The bias that has given rise to this so-called civilized culture we find ourselves in is the "eye"--reading the alpha-numeric signs from left to right: print culture and now electric culture...the 'mechanical bride' of the industrial revolution--was the printing press, and the speed of the 'eye' to "read the scientific news" at ever faster rates...allowed us to invent the computer and electronic culture. So, now 'the eye' is being replaced by 'the ear'--digital culture has allowed ancient oral cultural attributes to re-emerge in the digital electronic 'global village'. The kids that I work with in many Korean schools (and back home in Canada) are hyper-literate visual savants...now caught between the emerging visual-spatial paradigm of the new age and, the more static and lineal age of words, still led by many dull grammarians. I expect this to begin to change soon, though, as ubiquitous computing and WiFi mobile technologies improve...in the world we will soon have 'classrooms without walls' and inter-communication collaborative-knowledge-building spaces that are virtual and spatial...the new grammars will be visual in nature and hyper-geometric. Books, of course, will still be around, albeit collecting dust, scattered among the halls of ancient libraries and on museum shelves. (Universal langauge translator devices will one day be common items in the world of hyper-CMC.)
I believe that many of these kids are doing most of their critical learning by navigating among these new digital worlds that they enjoy playing so much--often at a million times faster than we can read a book--it's the world that they are entering soon. VR. The Internet is really much more like a giant "finger-painting" activity--wherein everyone is [re]discovering their creative potential....rather than like some grand big old antiquarian book that's sits silently on the shelf. The WWW is a Place of Creation and experimentation (with an awful lot of digital-garbage thrown in too, I might add!). The human sensorium is not an amalgam of bits of text and numbers...it sings and speaks...an oral culture [sometimes] caught in a web of signs and symbols.
A great read is The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) and the The Laws of Media (1998), by Marshall McLuhan...his insights really point out the nature of the [hypermedia] world we now find ourselves in. McLuhan, examines why and how Humankind still remains tribal, in the face of an ever-evolving 'skin of electronic global culture etc.' CNN is the 'eye' through which we peer into the noisy fray of the Postmodernist drama.
Mind you I like to read--cute technology  But in VR I can soar about the planet...maybe even to the stars. Virtual Light - by Gibson - anyone ever read the book? |
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sundubuman
Joined: 04 Feb 2003
Location: seoul
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| Posted: Thu Jan 18, 2007 8:41 am Post subject: |
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| otis wrote: |
| khyber wrote: |
they don't need a good ass beating. That is too far. They just need attentive parents who PUSH them to study; you know, the kind of people who spend time with their kids and MAKE their kids do the work.
The kind of parents that "stand up" to their children.
When I go back home and teach, it will be crucial for me to set up a good relationship with parents. I think that is something that is TOTALLY lost to high school students. But dang it, spend twenty minutes a day calling a few parents; try to talk to each set of parents twice during the semester. SURE that is a lot more work but it encourages the parents to get involved in their child's life (and provides a window for the teacher). |
Look, my friend. I hope you have a great career.
But if you're teaching in America, don't count on it. There wasn't one teacher in my school who actually enjoyed the job. The enjoyment has been sucked right out of it.
Furthermore, wait till you meet some of these parents. Scary.
And talk about violence. I taught five years in the swamps of Louisiana. We aren't talking urban problems here.
I've taught a murderer. He shot some dude in the head with a rifle outside a bar.
I taught a guy who shot a state policeman in the neck. The cop lived.
The cases are too numerous to mention--drugs, violence, etc.
And if you happen to be a guy, it's even worse. They couldn't give the classes I taught to a woman. A woman might have lasted five minutes.
I'm saying this to you right now. If there is something else you are qualified to do, then stay as far away from teaching in the United States as possible.
There's no money, and it sucks.
Hell, you might as well stay in Korea if you are planning to continue teaching.
Do you want to know what's really shameful. 90 percent of my Korean students could read English better than 90 percent of my American students. |
you were definitely not teaching in the Midwest..... |
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Bibbitybop
Joined: 22 Feb 2006
Location: Seoul
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| Posted: Thu Jan 18, 2007 7:14 pm Post subject: |
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Program to identify most dangerous schools misses mark
http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2007-01-18-dangerousschools_x.htm
| Quote: |
WASHINGTON � The schools identified as the nation's most dangerous during the past five years can't be found in Los Angeles, Chicago or most of America's other urban centers.
They're in communities such as Vineland, N.J., Augusta, Ga., and Todd County, S.D.
The federal No Child Left Behind Act requires states to identify "persistently dangerous" schools and give parents the option of moving their children to other schools. But it gives so much leeway to states and school districts that only those schools diligent about reporting ever come close to making the list.
States can penalize districts by withholding money if they don't do enough to improve safety.
What's evolved, safety experts say, is a system where states have made it very hard for schools to be classified as unsafe and schools can report incidents as they see fit. Fewer than 100 of the nation's 90,000-plus public schools have ever been slapped with the label since the law took effect in 2002. Although studies indicate school crime has been declining since the 1990s, many experts say schools underreport incidents.
"It's unfair," said Allan Bernardini, a school board member in Vineland, a working-class city in southern New Jersey where Solve D'Ippolito Intermediate School made the list two consecutive years before coming off in July. "Generally, we have good children in Vineland. We got 10,000 kids in the district and maybe 75 that give you a problem."
He said the school got on the list because administrators wrote everything down: "hair pulling, punching, wrestling on the ground." They got off by improving discipline, implementing new safety programs involving students and redefining what incidents are serious enough to be reported, district officials said.
No Child Left Behind requires schools to test their students, improve teacher training and provide free after-school tutoring. It also includes a lesser-known provision directing states to draw up safety standards but leaves it up to them to decide what is a dangerous school and how to enforce it.
It has produced a mishmash of definitions.
Defining 'persistently dangerous'
Gannett News Service contacted the education agency in every state and most said their schools would get the "persistently dangerous" label if reported crime reaches a certain level for three consecutive years. Most concentrate on reporting serious incidents, such as murder, rape and assault. Few mention bullying, though safety experts say it's a big problem in many schools. And many say incidents that happen on the school bus should be counted.
But the similarities end there.
A school with 1,000 students in Colorado would be labeled dangerous if it reported at least 180 serious incidents per year for two straight years. In Massachusetts, a school is considered dangerous if a student is expelled three straight years for bringing a gun or if at least 1.5% of the student body is expelled or suspended for more than 45 days. Wisconsin schools earn the distinction if, for three straight years, they suspend at least 5% of the student body for weapons-related offenses or expel 1% for "assault/endangering behavior" or weapons.
These policies are aimed largely at urban schools, where security precautions � X-ray machines, cameras and police officers � are in place. The irony, school safety experts say, is that the schools where the bloodiest shootings have occurred, notably Columbine High in the well-to-do Denver suburb of Littleton, Colo., where 12 students and one teacher were killed in 1999, would almost never qualify.
More problematic is the reporting.
The stigma of a "persistently dangerous" label is enough to keep most schools from being completely honest, said Beverly Caffee Glenn, executive director of the Hamilton Fish Institute on School and Community Violence at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.
"There's realty prices to be considered. Would you want to move into a school district where you knew it was unsafe?" said Glenn, referring to the importance schools have on home values. "There's also the issue: Do you want to be the principal of a school where you can't control your kids?"
A U.S. Department of Education committee is exploring the issue and may recommend changes when Congress takes up reauthorization of the law this year. So far, members have debated whether to reword the "persistently dangerous" label to something less negative such as "safe schools option" so schools might be more willing to report incidents.
Accountability at issue
Alan Bersin, a former federal prosecutor who just stepped down as California's education secretary, said the entire issue should be re-examined. None of his state's roughly 9,000 public schools have ever made the list.
"There's a problem with the way the question's being asked, the standard that has been given and the reporting," he said.
Paul Vallas, who once ran Chicago's school system, says at least a few of that city's schools should be tagged as dangerous. As Philadelphia's current school system chief, Vallas has directed schools to report any serious incident that happens on school grounds � no matter the time or day. They also must report any incident involving a student traveling to and from school.
The result: 29 different city schools have made the list since 2002-03, though only nine are still on the list. No district has logged more.
"I would rather be aggressive about identifying schools that do not have satisfactory school climates rather than somehow try to get around the mandate because other states aren't being aggressive about enforcing the mandate or setting the standard," he said.
New York state added 17 schools to its list in August after state auditors found severe under-reporting of incidents at most of the districts they examined.
One that wasn't added to the list was White Plains High School, which has never been tagged as "persistently dangerous." The school reported 22 serious incidents to the state for the 2003-2004 school year, even though school records indicated there were 289 others unreported, including 35 assaults with physical injury and one sexual assault.
David Fattah, a community activist in west Philadelphia who has worked to make "persistently dangerous" Overbrook High safer said the term hurts even though he knows the school has made great strides.
"I just really feel as though these labels need to be kind of put in perspective," he said. "I want to hear (students) say: 'I want to go to Overbrook, Mr. Fattah, can you help me out? I don't want to hear them say 'Overbrook' like we're talking about Iraq."
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Bibbitybop
Joined: 22 Feb 2006
Location: Seoul
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| Posted: Thu Jan 18, 2007 7:14 pm Post subject: |
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http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2007-01-18-dangerousschools_x.htm
Program to identify most dangerous schools misses mark
| Quote: |
WASHINGTON � The schools identified as the nation's most dangerous during the past five years can't be found in Los Angeles, Chicago or most of America's other urban centers.
They're in communities such as Vineland, N.J., Augusta, Ga., and Todd County, S.D.
The federal No Child Left Behind Act requires states to identify "persistently dangerous" schools and give parents the option of moving their children to other schools. But it gives so much leeway to states and school districts that only those schools diligent about reporting ever come close to making the list.
States can penalize districts by withholding money if they don't do enough to improve safety.
What's evolved, safety experts say, is a system where states have made it very hard for schools to be classified as unsafe and schools can report incidents as they see fit. Fewer than 100 of the nation's 90,000-plus public schools have ever been slapped with the label since the law took effect in 2002. Although studies indicate school crime has been declining since the 1990s, many experts say schools underreport incidents.
"It's unfair," said Allan Bernardini, a school board member in Vineland, a working-class city in southern New Jersey where Solve D'Ippolito Intermediate School made the list two consecutive years before coming off in July. "Generally, we have good children in Vineland. We got 10,000 kids in the district and maybe 75 that give you a problem."
He said the school got on the list because administrators wrote everything down: "hair pulling, punching, wrestling on the ground." They got off by improving discipline, implementing new safety programs involving students and redefining what incidents are serious enough to be reported, district officials said.
No Child Left Behind requires schools to test their students, improve teacher training and provide free after-school tutoring. It also includes a lesser-known provision directing states to draw up safety standards but leaves it up to them to decide what is a dangerous school and how to enforce it.
It has produced a mishmash of definitions.
Defining 'persistently dangerous'
Gannett News Service contacted the education agency in every state and most said their schools would get the "persistently dangerous" label if reported crime reaches a certain level for three consecutive years. Most concentrate on reporting serious incidents, such as murder, rape and assault. Few mention bullying, though safety experts say it's a big problem in many schools. And many say incidents that happen on the school bus should be counted.
But the similarities end there.
A school with 1,000 students in Colorado would be labeled dangerous if it reported at least 180 serious incidents per year for two straight years. In Massachusetts, a school is considered dangerous if a student is expelled three straight years for bringing a gun or if at least 1.5% of the student body is expelled or suspended for more than 45 days. Wisconsin schools earn the distinction if, for three straight years, they suspend at least 5% of the student body for weapons-related offenses or expel 1% for "assault/endangering behavior" or weapons.
These policies are aimed largely at urban schools, where security precautions � X-ray machines, cameras and police officers � are in place. The irony, school safety experts say, is that the schools where the bloodiest shootings have occurred, notably Columbine High in the well-to-do Denver suburb of Littleton, Colo., where 12 students and one teacher were killed in 1999, would almost never qualify.
More problematic is the reporting.
The stigma of a "persistently dangerous" label is enough to keep most schools from being completely honest, said Beverly Caffee Glenn, executive director of the Hamilton Fish Institute on School and Community Violence at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.
"There's realty prices to be considered. Would you want to move into a school district where you knew it was unsafe?" said Glenn, referring to the importance schools have on home values. "There's also the issue: Do you want to be the principal of a school where you can't control your kids?"
A U.S. Department of Education committee is exploring the issue and may recommend changes when Congress takes up reauthorization of the law this year. So far, members have debated whether to reword the "persistently dangerous" label to something less negative such as "safe schools option" so schools might be more willing to report incidents.
Accountability at issue
Alan Bersin, a former federal prosecutor who just stepped down as California's education secretary, said the entire issue should be re-examined. None of his state's roughly 9,000 public schools have ever made the list.
"There's a problem with the way the question's being asked, the standard that has been given and the reporting," he said.
Paul Vallas, who once ran Chicago's school system, says at least a few of that city's schools should be tagged as dangerous. As Philadelphia's current school system chief, Vallas has directed schools to report any serious incident that happens on school grounds � no matter the time or day. They also must report any incident involving a student traveling to and from school.
The result: 29 different city schools have made the list since 2002-03, though only nine are still on the list. No district has logged more.
"I would rather be aggressive about identifying schools that do not have satisfactory school climates rather than somehow try to get around the mandate because other states aren't being aggressive about enforcing the mandate or setting the standard," he said.
New York state added 17 schools to its list in August after state auditors found severe under-reporting of incidents at most of the districts they examined.
One that wasn't added to the list was White Plains High School, which has never been tagged as "persistently dangerous." The school reported 22 serious incidents to the state for the 2003-2004 school year, even though school records indicated there were 289 others unreported, including 35 assaults with physical injury and one sexual assault.
David Fattah, a community activist in west Philadelphia who has worked to make "persistently dangerous" Overbrook High safer said the term hurts even though he knows the school has made great strides.
"I just really feel as though these labels need to be kind of put in perspective," he said. "I want to hear (students) say: 'I want to go to Overbrook, Mr. Fattah, can you help me out? I don't want to hear them say 'Overbrook' like we're talking about Iraq."
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