Comments on: Just one more way we pay to play

By: 2012 in review « educationrealist

2012 in review « educationrealist — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 02:36:51 +0000

[...] posts, but I’m very happy with the method outlined in Teaching Trig, and thought this post on induction and its crappiness was good. My History of Elizabethan Theater I, II, and III are worth a read, too. I only wrote 4 [...]

By: Roger Sweeny

Roger Sweeny — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 01:38:19 +0000

We make our money by providing credentials. It’s only natural that people in the business think well of them–and that the more the better.

By: educationrealist

educationrealist — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 09:06:12 +0000

hahaha! Great analogy.

It’s all a joke. I had to redo half of my submission the second year because the reviewer didn’t think I had shown my support for second language learners. I pointed out all the language support I had, and he explained that I shouldn’t be focusing on language. Um, what?

Second language learners struggled, he said.

I suddenly realized that he didn’t realize that all the curriculum I had in the manual was for my strugglers, that I taught my top students using very different problems. So I had to add in all the work I taught to my top students so he could see that the original curriculum was something I’d designed custom for my weak students–which, I realized, is what he meant by language learners.

It made him happy, but it made me insane. It’s hard to believe that induction has any value other than an assigned mentor.

By: Paul Bruno (@MrPABruno)

Paul Bruno (@MrPABruno) — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 14:04:52 +0000

This all resonates with me both as an induction coach (presently) and an inductee (recently), in both cases using the very same (I assume) NTC-created materials used in the DoE study. I actually appreciate that the NTC uses a “best practices” sort of approach, as opposed to a results-based approach. At least part of the problem, though, is that the NTC uses the CA “Standards for the Teaching Profession” as the “best practices”, which are often so vague as to be useless to a beginning teacher (e.g., ” Teachers organize curriculum to facilitate students’ understanding of the central
themes, concepts, and skills in the subject area.”) This would be like turning having surgeons’ best practices include “Surgeons minimize bacterial contamination of the surgical cavity” rather than something like, “Surgeons wash their hands to the elbow using antibacterial soap immediately prior to entering the operating room.” (I actually just made that last one up based on what I see on TV.)