Comments on: The Science of Making Up Stuff

By: John Morgan

John Morgan — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 22:00:10 +0000

Not only children should go to schools but parents too! they are miseducating children

By: Sandra

Sandra — Fri, 28 May 2010 19:44:16 +0000

It has always astonished me that no one ever thinks of treating teachers as if they had common sense, knowledge and experience. As a teacher, I wouldn’t mind being evaluated on my students’ performance if I had time to actually spend teaching and planning. We are expected to do so many things–including clerical ones–that prevent us from having enough time for the important things. I think teachers should teach either morning or afternoon only, have a secretary and an office, be treated as if they are actually professinals by being given respect and responsibility, have class sizes of no more than 15 and have input into how the school is run.

In my 30 years of teaching, I have seen a cascade of paperwork befall us that intrudes on our goals of teaching. It’s like being in a meeting all day and being unable to do any of the myriad of jobs that keep the classroom going–calling parents, grading papers, etc., etc., etc.

By: Mark Bushek

Mark Bushek — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 22:09:40 +0000

Aren’t we all average teachers by definition? If we grade according to the bell curve, the average student gets a c. Does proficient mean average or is it another symptom of grade inflation?

By: Claire Noonan

Claire Noonan — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 22:32:19 +0000

I loved the way state tests are described in this post. Made me laugh. My thing lately after reading many articles about evaluation is that 3 levels of evaluation would give a better picture of why a school is low-performing: look at the school board–is it focusing on student achievement; look at the superintendent–is that person offering advice and following through; and then look at the school principal and teachers–are they working as a collaborative group? Then whatever assessments the students take will improve over time, after a lot of relentless work by the entire school community. A test is only one tool to evaluate a school’s improvement.
I hope ESEA reform realizes that.

By: Patrick Crabtree

Patrick Crabtree — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 15:11:44 +0000

As President of the Atlanta Association of Educators, I have take this message to the community. Every where I go, I have my research and ammunition ready. We have to be ready to shoot down the ‘diddly poop.” I am a believer in Edward Deming. Like him, I ask, “What makes a teacher inneffective?” Bad and teacher are not synonynous. We are our own worst enemies. The problem in education is not ‘who’ but rather ‘what.’ If we sit back and whine, we deserve all we get. GET EMPOWERED AND LET YOUR VOICE BE HEARD! and DON’T do it QUIETLY!

By: Erika

Erika — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 05:24:27 +0000

Teachers ARE evaluated. Teachers CAN be fired. There are two problems: 1. administrators are often not trained in how to evaluate and they don’t want to be “the bad guy” and tell a teacher that they don’t “Meet or exceed” on a teaching standard (if they are messing up, teachers need to be told how to improve). 2. The profession is treated so badly that it’s difficult to attract enough people willing to do this kind of work (maybe we could get illegal immigrants to do it for cheap…);being treated as subhumans after getting a minimum of 6 years of university completed, makes for a small and shallow pool of candidates. If you want truly high quality teachers, you need to make it attractive enough that getting the job is competitive and administrators have several candidates from which to choose.

By: Adrienne Pilon

Adrienne Pilon — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 14:28:52 +0000

Thanks, Lily, for this concise and cogent response to the testing obsession.

By: mclaren

mclaren — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 13:48:34 +0000

Of course you mean to nitpick, Javagamal, nitpicking remains the entire focus of your little diatribe. You want to distract us from the content of Lily’s essay by nitpicking its presentation.

In fact, Lily’s essay qualifies as superb writing. And guess what? Yes indeedy, Lilly writes well…which means that she uses sentence fragments. And run-on sentences. Dangling modifiers. All the rule-breaking a truly excellent writer enjoys, the better to produce prose that sizzles and sparkles.

But you wouldn’t know anything about good writing, would you? You clearly can’t write your way out of a pay toilet. You haven’t got a ghost of a clue what constitutes good writing. Your prose sticks to the ear like congealed bacon fat, your sentences plod along like spavined knock-kneed hunchbacks, and your inability to slice your thoughts into digestible paragraphs bespeaks the kind of crudely cartoonish amateurishness one seldom encounters outside of fifth graders failing their remedial English classes.

I find it astounding — but entirely predictable — that your lumpen prose and decerebrated syntax gussies up a rant complaining about (of all things!) bad writing. Your arguments drown with the desperation of rabid paraiah dogs in the rancid cesspool of your prose. Your incessant use of “to be” constructions cripples your already hobbled writing, and your entire post stands as a sinister monument to the inadequacy of our educational system.

Scrutinizing your fetishistically rulebound yet altogether necrotic prose, we learn a profound lesson in the intellectual bankruptcy of an educational system which values trivial superficialities over genuine excellence. We see in your grotesquely inadequate writing the apotheosis of the ability to follow some made-up textbook grammar rules (which excellent writers systematically ignore) rather than valuing the verve and brio, the panache and elan, of excellent writing like Lily’s.

For shame, sir. For shame!