Showing 246 posts tagged teaching
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I was taking an advanced calculus class and my instructor was reputed to be a fabulous researcher, but he barely spoke English. He was a very boring and bad teacher and I was absolutely lost and in despair.
So I went to the campus tutoring centre and they had Betamax tapes of a professor who had won teaching awards. Basically I sat with those tapes and took class there. But I still had to go to the other one and sat there and wanted to kill myself.
I thought at that time, in the future, why wouldn’t you have the most entertaining professor, the one with the proven track record of getting knowledge into people’s heads?
We’re still not quite there. In university you’re still likely to be in a large lecture hall with a very boring professor, and everyone knows it’s not working very well. It’s not even the best use of that professor’s time or the audience.
”Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales argues the boring university lecture will be the first casualty of the online education revolution.
Pair with Don’t Go Back to School, Kio Stark’s fantastic manifesto for lifelong learning outside the system.
(via explore-blog)
Teacher Pay Hurt by Recession, Report Says
During the recession and its aftermath, public schools took a hit as both state coffers and local property taxes shriveled. That showed up in shrinking employment, but also in teacher salaries.
According to a report being released Tuesday, the vast majority of teachers in the nation’s largest school districts took a pay cut or saw their pay frozen at least one year between 2008 and 2012.
The report by the National Council on Teacher Quality, a nonprofit group that advocates for tougher teacher standards, looked at salary data across 41 of the country’s 50 largest school districts. Average annual teacher pay increases, which included cost-of-living and contractually negotiated raises as well as increases awarded for extra years of experience, dropped from 3.6 percent in the 2008-09 school year to 1.3 percent in the 2011-12 year. (The report did not include increases that teachers may have received for extra degrees or certifications.)
» via The New York Times (Subscription may be required for some content)
“Digital technologies create new opportunities for accelerating, expanding, and individualizing learning. Our members and students are already actively engaged in building the schools and campuses of the future—including quality online communities. Increasingly, teachers, faculty, and staff are becoming curriculum designers who orchestrate the delivery of content using multiple instructional methods and technologies both within and beyond the traditional instructional day. Teaching and learning can now occur beyond the limitations of time and space. NEA embraces this new environment and these new technologies to better prepare our students for college and for 21st century careers.”
Grading the MOOC University
The professor is, in most cases, out of students’ reach, only slightly more accessible than the pope or Thomas Pynchon. Several of my Coursera courses begin by warning students not to e-mail the professor. We are told not to “friend” the professor on Facebook. If you happen to see the professor on the street, avoid all eye contact (well, that last one is more implied than stated). There are, after all, often tens of thousands of students and just one top instructor.
Perhaps my modern history professor, Philip D. Zelikow, of the University of Virginia, put it best in his course introduction, explaining that his class would be a series of “conversations in which we’re going to talk about this course one to one” — except that one side (the student’s) doesn’t “get to talk back directly.” I’m not sure this fits the traditional definition of a conversation.
On the other hand, how can I really complain? I’m getting Ivy League (or Ivy League equivalent) wisdom free. Anyone can, whether you live in South Dakota or Senegal, whether it’s noon or 5 a.m., whether you’re broke or a billionaire. Professors from Harvard, M.I.T. and dozens of other schools prerecord their lectures; you watch them online and take quizzes at your leisure.
» via The New York Times (Subscription may be required for some content)
“In the prosecution’s disciplined prose, Atlanta’s cheating conspiracy reads like something of a textbook case of municipal-level corruption. But what the indictment vividly describes is far more troubling, the inevitable outcome of a test-score obsession imposed by America’s self-described ‘school reform’ regime: harried educators teaching, and now cheating, to the test.”
“I believe that deeper professor-student shifts are in store for us. It’s not controversial to say that the Web has significantly eroded the special claim that professors have as unique repositories of knowledge. That doesn’t mean we’re useless in the classroom. Quite the opposite, in fact. “It’s not about memorizing the structure of the periodic table,” I tell my students these days, “because that’s all on Wikipedia. It’s about communicating to me that you can solve problems. Because the world has a lot of problems.” In short, the information age makes it easier to make it clear to students that the central pillar of their college education is what we have always believed it to be: their responsibility.”
“I asked what a teacher’s salary was. $100 per month. So I went to an ATM and bought them a second teacher for the next year.”
mind blown
(via fred-wilson)
(via fred-wilson)
“In Florida, 97 percent of teachers were deemed effective or highly effective in the most recent evaluations. In Tennessee, 98 percent of teachers were judged to be “at expectations.” In Michigan, 98 percent of teachers were rated effective or better. Advocates of education reform concede that such rosy numbers, after many millions of dollars developing the new systems and thousands of hours of training, are worrisome. “It is too soon to say that we’re where we started and it’s all been for nothing,” said Sandi Jacobs, vice president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, a research and policy organization. “But there are some alarm bells going off.”
Beleaguered? Not Teachers, a Poll on ‘Well-Being’ Finds
Recent battles over school funding, performance evaluations and tenure have given rise to public perceptions of a beleaguered teaching corps across the United States.
But a new analysis of polling data from the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index that examines “well-being” as measured by a number of indicators, including physical and emotional health, job satisfaction and feelings of community and safety, found that teachers ranked second only to physicians.
In addition, teachers ranked above all other professions in answers to questions about whether they “smiled or laughed yesterday,” as well as whether they experienced happiness and enjoyment the day before the survey.
» via The New York Times (Subscription may be required for some content)
Harvard Asks Alumni to Donate Time to Free Online Course
Alumni of elite colleges are accustomed to getting requests for money from their alma mater, but the appeal that Harvard sent to thousands of graduates on Monday was something new: a plea to donate their time and intellects to the rapidly expanding field of online education.
For the first time, Harvard has opened a humanities course, The Ancient Greek Hero, as a free online class. In an e-mail sent Monday, it asked alumni who had taken the course at the university to volunteer as online mentors and discussion group managers.
The new online course is based on Professor Gregory Nagy’s Concepts of the Ancient Greek Hero, a popular offering since the late 1970s that has been taken by some 10,000 students.
» via The New York Times (Subscription may be required for some content)
