EPTThe things about teaching that draw people to it only makes up like 25% of the job.
What Your Kid's Teachers Think - Page 3
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micronesia
United States24680 Posts
The things about teaching that draw people to it only makes up like 25% of the job. | ||
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phiinix
United States1169 Posts
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Frostfire
United States419 Posts
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Redmark
Canada2129 Posts
On March 01 2012 10:29 Frostfire wrote: Thank you for this post. At 14, still in middle school, the picture you've shown is 100% accurate. The straight A students and I are the only one's who get grounded and yelled at from their parents for getting bad grades. Some of my friends get straight F's, and blame it all on the teachers for their teaching habits. I don't understand what's wrong with my generation. Quite literally what's wrong with any generation is the last generation, no? Their genes and their parenting. The same goes for the previous generation and so on. As another post before said, there's no point in assigning blame. Bad parenting/teaching is a vicious circle. Unfortunately there's a lot of things you can't without infringing on the parents' territory, which is fair enough I suppose but quite frustrating when you see parents teaching children dumb things. | ||
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Josealtron
United States219 Posts
 I'm a high school senior right now, planning on going into vocal music education in college.This is an issue I've thought about a lot, and like others have mentioned, it's all about motivation. The problem is that every person is different and will have different things that motivate them, and as a teacher, I think you need to do your best to inspire as many of them as possible. Of course this is more difficult said than done. Since I'm still in high school, maybe I can help a bit to provide some insight to how students think. I feel like in middle school/high school, kids are "drained" by the education system. What I mean by this is that it's all about getting enough grades to pass and passing the standardized tests that are required every year(this is in the US, not sure how the system is in Canada). Until the later years of high school, kids have little choice in what classes they can take, and to them, it feels like there's no rhyme or reason to anything they're learning(and there are some things I've been required to learn that are totally pointless for most people. Texas History, lol) . As a result, they just do what it takes to advance to the next grade, and it doesn't take that much to do so. To motivate me, the thing that's helped me most is understanding WHY I'm learning about a subject. I think that should be a goal for every teacher-explain WHY, as much as possible, so that hopefully the students realize that there IS a point to what they're doing. For example, I'm taking an Anatomy and Physiology course right now, and even though it's by far my easiest class, I have the lowest grade in it because I have absolutely no motivation to work in there. We just copy down notes and memorize shit and then go to the next test. There's no why-I'm just doing it because I had to take a class. My teacher is completely uninterested in the subject, and as such we are too. On the other hand, my macroeconomics teacher is full of energy and always explains to us the importance of everything he teaches and how it impacts our lives(though in reality, I doubt macroeconomics would REALLY be needed by most people, except maybe to understand politicians and make informed votes a bit better). Still, it keeps me awake despite it being my first class of the day, and I've learned a lot in that class. And of course, my personal passion is music, much like the OP(though I'm a vocalist, not a instrumentalist). In my choir, though, there's a lot of people that simply will not shut up and it really detracts from the choir. I've almost yelled at people several times in the class. My choir director is a fantastic teacher, and he's done a great job at motivating me and helping me discover my passion for music, but I think there's also a point where you need to be more strict. That's another thing-students need to develop a respect for their teacher as an authority figure. For some students it's more difficult than others, and sometimes, harsher punishments are needed I think. In choir you pretty much get an automatic A. I think a useful way to get people to shut up and work would be to actually give them Bs and Cs for disrupting rehearsal, and damage their GPA(my district has a weird GPA system-it's on a 7 point scale). Also, I think it would benefit the choir if from time to time he played some recordings of phenomenal high school choirs and said: "this is what you can do if you work at it. There is a point to what we are doing." This similar concept could be applied to other classes as well, I think. There's many other things as well, but these are just some of my immediate thoughts about teaching and motivating students. | ||
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TanKLoveR
Venezuela838 Posts
I know you can only connect with those kids and students who care to do so, but even if you only get through a few of them then i think that's a success. Not all kids were born to be mathematicians, artists or musicians, we all have our little niche that we feel comfortable in and that makes us happy. I bet most of the kids that you cant connect with are just there cause their parents made them or cause they had to pick something, these are the kids whose parents will blame the teacher for their little angel getting bad grades. They don't get involved in the lives of their kids and expect the school to raise them and make sure they get perfect grades, they don't talk to them and encourage them to pursue the things they really like. Most education system's are very "One size fits all" so all kids are supposed to go through the same classes and have the same interest. But reality is far different. It's the blame of the parents and the school system, i believe most teacher's start out very hopeful that they will change the lives of these kids but then reality comes and they become bitter and stop caring about changing anything and just go with it. I think if i had an understanding and helpful teacher i would have done a lot better in high school, i dropped out of high school like 7 years ago because i lost all motivation to study. Just a year ago i woke up from this limbo of not knowing what im supposed to do in life, i finished high school recently and got all my credits to go to college and study Electrical engineering. I was never particularly good at math, physics and chemistry but now that i see just how much use they have in the real world and how much they help me understand things about what i want to do, my mindset has changed a lot, so now im heavily motivated to study hard and really understanding everything my teachers can teach me. If all else fails you can open a khan academy type of site to teach music and you wont have to deal with parents , i really wish you good luck cause your job is really hard but is also very noble and can be very rewarding. | ||
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Jedclark
United Kingdom903 Posts
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hummingbird23
Norway359 Posts
On March 04 2012 11:27 Jedclark wrote: A post earlier kind of brought up a point I have. A kid I know revises for like, 6 weeks for tests and gets 60%, while I can revise for ten minutes and get 90%. Yet this kid is in top set. There is such a large range between the top of the top set and the bottom it is frustrating. The teacher spends all lesson assisting these kids and wasting time with them, most of them not interested in even understanding. God, it annoys me. You're talented, that's great, but getting ticked off because a teacher is helping weaker students is way over the top. It's their job to help and you calling it a waste of time is incredibly arrogant and self centred. As you've pointed out yourself, you have so much more time to improve yourself. | ||
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JingleHell
United States11308 Posts
On March 04 2012 12:44 hummingbird23 wrote: You're talented, that's great, but getting ticked off because a teacher is helping weaker students is way over the top. It's their job to help and you calling it a waste of time is incredibly arrogant and self centred. As you've pointed out yourself, you have so much more time to improve yourself. He was probably referring to my situation, and if so, mine was a case of teachers taking helping the bottom of the class too far, to the point that if I'd wanted to even reach the midpoint in the book by the end of the year, I would have been teaching myself, and not getting tested on it. Literally. Instead, I just quit doing the extra homework and failed the class, because I wasn't going to spend all the time writing down the proper steps when I just looked and knew the answers. And I wasn't taking 60-70% on homework for failing to show my work and having everything right. | ||
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babylon
8765 Posts
On March 04 2012 12:55 JingleHell wrote: He was probably referring to my situation, and if so, mine was a case of teachers taking helping the bottom of the class too far, to the point that if I'd wanted to even reach the midpoint in the book by the end of the year, I would have been teaching myself, and not getting tested on it. Literally. Instead, I just quit doing the extra homework and failed the class, because I wasn't going to spend all the time writing down the proper steps when I just looked and knew the answers. And I wasn't taking 60-70% on homework for failing to show my work and having everything right. Self-motivation is, I guess, what separates the wheat from the chaff. And sometimes makes some of the chaff rise above the wheat. | ||
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JingleHell
United States11308 Posts
On March 04 2012 13:17 babylon wrote: Self-motivation is, I guess, what separates the wheat from the chaff. And sometimes makes some of the chaff rise above the wheat. Go back and read my post. It wasn't self motivation or lack thereof. I basically just went on strike. I made a conscious decision not to waste my time on homework for a teacher who was wasting my time in class. It didn't end up having any significant negative consequences, it was just annoying at the time. | ||
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babylon
8765 Posts
On March 04 2012 13:28 JingleHell wrote: Go back and read my post. It wasn't self motivation or lack thereof. I basically just went on strike. I made a conscious decision not to waste my time on homework for a teacher who was wasting my time in class. It didn't end up having any significant negative consequences, it was just annoying at the time. So you didn't have to retake the class, and it didn't affect your subsequent placement into an appropriate math course? What kind of school did you go to? I've always found it a fun challenge to raise the bar whenever I was taking a boring-as-shit class by getting as close to a perfect grade as possible. Going on strike against teachers is idiotic, especially when you're essentially saying "the class was so easy I failed," but that's just my personal opinion. | ||
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skyR
Canada13817 Posts
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JingleHell
United States11308 Posts
On March 04 2012 13:47 babylon wrote: So you didn't have to retake the class, and it didn't affect your subsequent placement into an appropriate math course? What kind of school did you go to? I've always found it a fun challenge to raise the bar whenever I was taking a boring-as-shit class by getting as close to a perfect grade as possible. Going on strike against teachers is idiotic, especially when you're essentially saying "the class was so easy I failed," but that's just my personal opinion. It was Algebra 2, and and I tested out of basically my entire following year, graduated early. I wouldn't call testing out retaking it, really. I didn't want to do homework (showing work, etc, pain in the ass, time consumed), seriously 1-2 hours a night, for a week at a time, on what was supposed to be a day's worth of material. I'm sure you can understand that. It wasn't too easy for me, it was too annoying. Particularly when the teacher spent all this extra time during class and assigning homework, but she ignored the students she was doing this for, in a study hall in HER room, directly prior to the class, doing nothing but reading magazines and BSing. It was a bad teacher, finding an excuse to be lazy, so I did the same. If I'd have failed anything else, I'd have got grounded. I showed my parents what was happening in that one, and they just let me make the call for myself on whether to pass or fail. | ||
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