A teacher needs to teach outside of the subject material

Of all the things on the planet that would remotely never occur to me that is somewhere way out in left field!

 

I was the only one where I taught that actually lived in the town. A metropolis of some 400 people with with about 3 times the national average for kids with learning disorders of one sort or the other. Iowa test scores ranged from the tenth to the ninetieth percentile. And I had a 13 year old boy with an IQ of 90 pull a knife on me on the play ground. There was only one black kid in the entire school and it wasn't him.
And he was a damn sight smarter.

I still remember one lesson. It was a lovely spring day and we were just beginning a section on plane geometry. We went through circle lines and triangles just as smooth as silk. No on had a problem dealing with the idea that triangles coul have all sorts of shapes obtuse, isosceles, equilateral, right triangles no problem. Then we moved to quadrilaterals suddenly it was like quadrilaterals had to always be irregular. Quadrilaterals, in these kids minds, without regard to intellectual acumen, could not also be rectangles, squares, parallelograms, trapezoids, rhombi, or any other four sided figures and worse squares could not just be a special sort of rectangle and the same with rhombi or diamonds and parallelograms. To this day that hour stills pops into my head and I go over yet again what I could have done differently to help them bridge that gap.

 

Of all of the reasons that I am glad that I do not have children, not having children in the public school system has to rank right up there at the top of the list.

It appears that we now need an agency who sole purpose is to monitor the curriculum that teachers are teaching children to make sure they are actually teaching the children the subject that they are supposed to be taught.

I suppose that is one silver lining of the pandemic people are now much more aware of what's going on in classrooms in America. We need more transparency in the classrooms. The public needs to know what's being taught and the school boards need to be held accountable for propaganda and indoctrination which is passing as education these days.

 

The other day I felt so helpless. I was subbing for a teachers aide and there was this kid crying. We were doing basic money math and I asked him what 50 cents plus 50 cents was. And he kept telling me 10 cents. He couldn’t wrap his mind around the idea that there was a tens and one hundreds column. I’m trying to teach this kid the idea but I didn’t know how to reach him. He wasn’t my kid I was supposed to watch over, but he was still struggling and I tried my best.

 

I’m willing to say that makes sense but I don’t think that’s the angle TT was going for.

 

Why not? Why can’t we first establish that teachers need to be able to relate to things students might want to learn about or are interested in?

 

Are they your kids in the sense that you had sex with someone to produce them? Which would be alerting to other people about your sex life?

 

That’s a title. Pronouns are he/her/they and then we got neoprouns too.

 

What’s alerting about it? If I see a picture of someone without kids it likewise tells me nothing about their sex life. A picture with kids also means absolutely nothing about sex life. The fact you even chose to laugh in response shows how shallow you think. Kids can be adopted as well. A family photo states nothing about sex life. Why you would even choose to think about that is a bit disturbing.

 

In the UK where I spent nearly 40 years teaching high school English lang/lit, there was a legal responsibility to teach the national curriculum as minimum.
The best teachers made transitions from the material to examples of real life. The best students did it for themselves.
This is what defined quality of teaching and learning and was a feature of "extra points" in exam scoring.
On the whole, schools offer material which is meant to be fleshed out throughout life and all knowledge is interlinked. Some see the connections better than others. They are the intelligent creative population who see one and one and then see the potential for three or more.

 

So, your teacher used a non-political, non-subjective example of economics (which is based partly in math no matter how you spin it), and you equate it to wanting to bring up race, a political subject that is subjective, and highly controversial, into math?

And NO ONE said that examples cannot be given. What people do NOT want is subjective political things being taught to our 6-7-8 year old kids. That is the parents job full stop. Not a teachers job.

Sorry, your spin will not work with this.

 

Or perhaps the government should enlist a company to make an operating system that isn't Microsoft, Linux, or Apple. One that is made specifically for schools and can only access a network designed for school usage and not the wider use of the internet.

Also, ban the use of phones in class. If the parent needs the child for an emergency then they should be calling the front office, not the child. If that is too much trouble then I guess it wasn't that big of an emergency eh?

 

We considered it unprofessional and could be sacked for expressing personal political or social opinions.
The most I did was to raise an eyebrow when one of the students pushed at what was publicly acceptable. What they thought and did at home was the responsibility of the parents.
If a student insisted, after warnings and discussions, to be overly controversial, we made contact with the parents/ guardians.
Education includes how to be a socially acceptable adult. It is up to them to decide in detail and within their peers and general associates, what that means.

 

Anyone can have an opinion on the matter. It’s called America, we have freedom of thought and speech. We can voice our concerns with or without your condescending approval.

 

grAy, the A is for America. grEy, the E is for England.

 

"Schools are run over with perverts and woke morons who are pushing their social agenda of normalizing the queer lifestyle."

They are? Or you're being made to feel that way by opportunistic pols like DeSantis?

 

Based on what evidence that isn't anecdotal?

 

<- is almost at the thirty-year mark being a public-school teacher, longer if you count being a long-term substitute teacher. I should also point out that Krane herself IIRC has said she is not a teacher per se, but a teacher's aide. There's a difference.

On top of all that, there are other issues. The most important one would be credentials - this may not be an issue in every district but in mine, if you have a single-subject teaching credential to teach math, you can't teach anything else BUT math unless there's some kinda tie-in - like maybe, I dunno robotics (maybe) - but a math teacher couldn't teach social studies. An art teacher could teach a drafting class because art is involved, but not a science class. The union here would have an issue with that, as WELL as the DO.

There's also the fact that certain subjects may be harder for some teachers to teach than another. I've taught single-subject classes before; we're a K-8 district. I'm great at teaching math, art, digital art, and social studies; I can come up with engaging lesson plans on the spot for those. Language arts and PE, I'm pretty good but I wouldn't say I'm inspired. Science? I can't stand teaching that. Ask me to teach that a period a day, I'm gonna feel miserable for an hour that year.

I'm gonna tell ya, there's almost no lesson I teach where I don't start out by saying why the kids are learning it and why it's important to know what the subject is. I've actually said in math that dividing fractions; I couldn't give them a single real-world application for it BUT the state wants you to know this, so just bear with me here while we go over it. Also - remember, I'm K-8 - manipulatives go a long way here. I actually think my best math lesson plan evah involved teaching integers using baggies of Lucky Charms. The oats are negatives and the marshmallows are positives, you got three marshmallows and seven oats - the three marshmallows cancel out three oats, what do you have? Four oats? Oats are negative? So +3 and -7 = -4. Then the kids eat the cereal afterwards. You gotta be hands-on here. The other thing I've learned is, you gotta demonstrate it yourself. There's almost not a single thing I teach where I don't do the work with the kids myself. I made up math bellwork questions on the spot and did them with the kids not knowing what the answer was. I teach an art lesson, I draw it too. I assign reports to write, I also write one and have the kids pick the subject I'm writing about. A bit more work but that way it feels like we're all in as a class AND they see me demonstrating what work is.

 

Your confusion lies in using pertinent examples to teach something like math as opposed to subtly teaching or indoctrinating the example stuff itself while hiding behind math as cover I can easily see how supply and demand is a helpful pertinent example aid to teaching solutions to two equations. I have no idea how CRT, 1619, transgenderism, or homosexuality could possibly be such a relevant helpful example.

A math teacher should teach math and only math, while using relevant real life example as an aid, at an appropriate age

 

History and English are inseparable on many levels. Literature is by its nature written in context and often ABOUT the context. I enjoy reading the language as it was spoken when and where the work was written.
And you cannot possibly appreciate the work unless you know when and why it was written. For example some of the heartwrenchong early English poetry written by prisoners in the Tower the day before their execution. Or the context of Steinbeck's work.
It was the applicability of literature that turned me away from maths. You have all of man's experience shared via the best a language can offer. I refer to it frequently consciously or unconsciously.
But I seriously don't need calculus or advanced maths unless they were all I would do and understand forever. I would never understand people or why we are where we are.
But there are many mathematicians who read assiduously. While I cant understand a third grade maths problem.
Maybe I should follow my own advice!

 

See the op.

 

So the idea is to have all teachers teach something outside their expertise and hope it all pans out.

as you yourself pointed out, teachers are already doing what you suggest…and how’s the results? Oh right…kids are epic failing at core curriculum, in particular minorities.

If you really care about kids becoming more prepared for the world, I highly recommend you think about this subject a lot harder than you have thus far. Maintaining the status quo of failure is not deep thinking.

 

That has to be one of the most absurd statements I have ever seen posted here.
So when you saw a picture of your teacher's family the first thing you thought of was the sex the teacher had and whether they enjoyed it. Utterly absurd.