Korean Job Discussion Forums

[edwardcatflap]

Interesting article based on a BBC documentary that states only 18 'incompetent' teachers have been struck off in the last 40 years in the Uk. Bloody hell, there were probably more than 18 incompetent teachers in my school alone just in the time I was there.

Former chief inspector of schools in England says the current figure of incompetent teachers is closer to 15,000 - less than 5% of the total number of registered teachers in the UK - but the union says it's still too high. Questions are, how many incompetent teachers did you have when you were at school? (of course standards are much better now) and what percentage do you think it would be in Korea? How many Korean teachers have been/should be struck off for this? Can it happen here?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/10464617.stm

[Chambertin]

Well, there�s no such thing as a teacher "test" and I don�t think there ever will be.

The majority of people with teaching degrees or flawless scholastic records will just keep up the regime as they are more often than not designed to prop up the existing legacy.

Still, there are people who bit the dirt in a bad situation with nothing more than hopes that they could change something. They made it through and may face a firing squad just because the PTA got finneky with their latest lesson plan.

What sucks about life is that it is all subjective. There is no way to "measure" a teacher.
Everyone has a grudge in life. Part of a teacher�s job is to focus that grudge in a way that you can start going beyond it.

Everyone has an ideal, everyone has an opinion, can we test to see what opinion is right? There�s no way to tell.

Also:
Education is a political firebomb only because politicians noticed long before the voters that there will never be a proper answer. Plus politicians need consistent doubt to ensure voter support.
Example: Well I don�t know about (issue A) but my politician makes me happy, WhEE sparkles.

I had a plenty of bad teachers, thats why I try a little bit harder to be a decent one.

[oldfatfarang]

[crisdean]

incompetent teachers...?

well I had a lot of teachers I didn't like going through K-12, but I wouldn't necessarily say they were incompetent or even bad teachers, because I was a horrible student. University was a whole new ball of crap, but expecting a Ph.D. in the sciences to know, or even care about, how to teach is asking a bit much.

Which brings to mind an old saying, there are no bad students only bad teachers, which is, of course, a load of pure... anyways I have to agree with Chambertin's point about it being subjective. A lot of it comes down to personality, if the personalities of the teacher and student mesh, class is great, if not, then class sucks. The bigger the class the more likely there'll be issues with/for a handful of students. some of my students love me and my classes, others absolutely despise me and my classes, most seem to be relatively indifferent, I should probably try to do something 'bout that next term.

But I will say that there is at least one incompetent teacher in my school.

[Seoulio]

[edwardcatflap]

The one guy they mentioned in the programme who got 'struck off' gave no homework, made fun of students' physical characteristics and locked a student in a cupboard. Such behaviour is bordering on assault and of course would have to be dealt with severely. However, the inspector guy said all the head teachers he interviewed had several teachers at their school who they knew were 'incompetent' but instead of doing anything drastic about them, just shuffled the classes around so no kid had one of those teachers two years on the run. When a parent complained about an incompetent teacher, the head even told her about this practice. It seems like the culture is just, 'they exist but we try to limit their damage'. According to research in the UK, the damage can be high. In the research 'incompetent' teachers were found to be much more of an issue than class size and students on average got one grade lower at GCSE (national exams taken at 16) if they had one of them at that level.

[seonsengnimble]

I've had several, but the majority of my teachers were competent.

My first one was Mr. D, my fourth grade teacher. He would have been right at home in a hagwon. I hated him because I was a bit of a nerd in elementary school. He neglected history/social studies.

His math "lessons" were having us do the same sheet of multiplication problems every day and making us do them faster and faster. I understand his idea to get us to memorize our times tables, but the result was just memorizing the answers on the sheet rather than the actual information. So instead of memorizing 4x7=28, we memorized "number 5 is 28."

Science was playing an "educational" computer game on an apple 2gs where you mined for minerals and just chose the pulley every time.

The rest of his class was singing.

My 7th grade Science teacher was pretty incompetent. Although she was an okay teacher, she didn't really grasp the scientific method.

My 9th grade Health teacher was pretty incompetent, but it's not like her class was an important one. She didn't really understand modern medicine very well, and her sex ed lessons were pretty inaccurate. She was also very fond of homeopathy.

In University, I had two pretty incompetent teachers, and one who I just dislike because in a class of four students, his memory of my participation and various other things were way off.

The first incompetent teacher was my Japanese film teacher. I took two of her classes because the first one, while not great, involved being exposed to great movies and doing a film project. Her explanation of postmodernism involved a venn diagram with no information in it other than the two words moduhninity and post-moduhninity. Anyway, she was incompetent because her second class that I took on the differing world views of the east and west consisted of the exact same lectures, movies and assignments.

The second incompetent teacher at my Uni may have been a competent teacher, but I dropped her class after the first one. The class she taught was an alternative medicine class. I was a bit naive and while I knew that a lot of the hippy nonsense I had heard about was in fact hippy nonsense, I was interested in acupuncture and herbal medicine. Her course description mentioned these things, so I figured I'd give it a shot.
The first day involved feeling eachother's auras and having a hole in my aura "fixed" by the "professor" who channeled energy from the sun into the hole in my aura. It also involved a q and a session about astrology.

The Professor I mentioned before was a decent teacher in the classroom, but I received a very unjust grade. I missed one class at the beginning of the quarter because I had to get something straightened out with the financial aid office. I called him before hand and let him know I'd be absent and got the materials for the class from him and made up the work. The rest of the class, I actively participated, completed all of my homework and got an A on all of the quizzes and tests. At my University, when you get your grade, you have an evaluation conference with your professor. Our conferences were scheduled for a couple of weeks after the class ended so that we would have time to take a break. I had a lot of appointments and times floating around in my head, so I forgot when the conference was. I emailed him a week before my conference to ask him when it was. He responded after I missed my conference to schedule a make-up conference and apologized for not checking his email sooner.

At the conference I was told that I missed a ton of classes without notifying him or making up the work, I didn't participate in discussions and that I blew off the conference.

Anyway, the novella I just wrote aside, most of my teachers have been excellent.

[air76]

I had several teachers in high school who definitely should have retired, but there was one guy who took the cake...he took the cake, rubbed it all over his head, mashed the cake back up into a ball....and took it again.

Mind you...this was in the US, and not the UK, but I assume that edward meant any incompetent teachers and not just British ones.

So...I won't say the guy's name, especially since ironically he is a very good friend of mine's father, but that's neither her nor there.

He taught all of the "business classes", which included Business Law, Typing, Economics, and so on......and this is literally how his classes went...every class, every semester...and I swear that this is not an exaggeration.

Day 1 - He gets in front of the class and tells jokes for an hour....the same jokes he tells on the first day of every class, regardless of which course it is. God knows how many years he told the same jokes......at the end of the hour, maybe 5 minutes before the bell rings he hands out the books and a syllabus, a very detailed syllabus which denotes which pages will be studied each day and the exact date of each quiz and test.

Day 2 through the end of the term - He literally never stands up again for the rest of the semester and never addresses the class whatsoever. He sits at his desk and does who knows what while students work through their books, reading the day's chapter and filling out exercises. If a student has a question they go up to his desk and say "I don't understand this question?" or whatever....and so he opens up the teacher's manual, finds the question and says "the answer is C" and then promptly returns to whatever it was that he was doing. I know that he owned a lot of scummy apartment buildings around town, so surely he was doing something related to this business. I have never had a teacher like him...he literally taught us nothing....a lot of teachers teach "nothing" in the figurative sense of the word, meaning that they are crappy teachers, but this guy, he really taught NOTHING, not one thing all term. On test days we of course took multiple choice tests, would exchange papers, and then he would read the answers so we could correct each other's tests.

Needless to say...he had been teaching for 25 years and there was no way that the school was going to do anything. He was untouchable.

So really...I don't know if he was incompetent or lazy....he never tried to teach us anything so maybe he was a very capable teacher when he wanted to be?

[DorkothyParker]

I never had any noticeably bad teachers. But I was slightly above average, shy/quiet, and lazy. I was actually a lot happier with my teachers that would post note "outlines" on the board and have us fill in the answers from our book. Then I would use the extra time (of which there was a lot) to nap. The tests would be taken from these notes so I never had to do any extra studying. They were multiple choice too. Incompetent? Maybe. But as a student I LOVED it.

I did dislike my first-grade teacher, but only because she spoke to me in a stern voice once.