Do you keep track of how you come to think the way you do?

Posted by Roger Fuller
on the on the Teacher Chatboardhttp://www.teachers.net/chatboard

History can give insight into how forces come into play in directing events of a country. Personal history shapes how we act and react in our own lives and thinking. Therefore, unless we are aware of these forces, our actions are prisoners of the past.

Teaching is filled with rituals and hidden agreements with our students. Finding out what these are is easier when we can see what has been done in the past. Why do most schools have desks? Look to the past and see a famous book that diagrams an ideal classroom. Look to furniture manufacturers and the pride of a community in wanting a real school.

The complaints of so many teachers about discipline in the classroom are unconscious sounds of the changes in society. Curriculum changes in math become easier to understand when you survey math texts over the last hundred years.

Ignorance should not be the secret advisor of teachers. If you can't answer the how and why of what you do today, and do so with focus beyond the circle of now, you have closed your mind within a glass wall of blindness. How far you can see depends a lot on how far you look?

Posted by Dave
on the on the Teacher Chatboardhttp://www.teachers.net/chatboard

We have a teacher shortage in much of this great land, much in specialized areas such as bilingual and special ed. We need sign language interpreters and Spanish speaking assistants. Why? How can we improve this situation?
Dave

We will begin to improve this situation when we awaken to the reality that certification is, for the most part, meaningless; when principals accept as their primary duty their constant visitation to classrooms to observe the teaching there; when teachers are hired for their knowledge of their subjects and their love for them; when buildings, programs, extra-curricular activities, "enrichment" courses and improving technology are put at the bottom of our lists of priorities and good teachers and solid subjects are put at the top thereof; when we begin asking ourselves important questions (like, "What are we demanding of our students and why?"); and when the teacher unions take seriously the age-old duty of unions: to monitor and grade teachers in their competence - just as trade unions monitor and grade their members.

When any of these things happen, you will see dramatic improvement.
L. Swilley