Lawrence A. Baines

 

    

The Teachers We

Need


vs.

The Teachers We

Have

 

 

From Chapter 6

Currently, the requirements for becoming a doctor, lawyer, plumber, and funeral director are exponentially more exacting than the requirements for becoming a teacher. Medicine, law, and mortuary science require specialized, post-baccalaureate course work, sometimes lasting years. They also require extended practicum experiences, passing scores on national exams, and close mentoring for beginning practitioners.

Programs in medicine, law, and mortuary science typically employ several decision points where aspirants to the profession are assessed and judged. Candidates found wanting are dropped from the program.

Even plumbing requires specialized course work, extended practicum experiences, passing scores on exams, and a lengthy apprenticeship. In contrast, entry to the teaching profession in many states now requires no specialized course work, no practicum experiences, and no mentoring. Today, many teachers are neither assessed nor judged prior to their first day on the job. In teaching, almost no one gets dropped from a program, unless their check fails to clear the bank.

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“The actual secrets to the path to happiness are

determination, effort and time.”

Dalai Lama

Books     Articles   Presentations
gobo2

You know Mike, the guy who groans upon entering your classroom, whose favorite sitting position is “head on desk,” who mutters epithets to himself whenever you announce a new assignment, whose potential is not evident in the nine zeros logged since the last grading period.

You are also familiar with Michelle, the girl who rolls her eyes when your assignments seem to fall short of expectations, who reads an entire novel the first day she gets her hands on it, who seems to attain a 99 average without even trying.

And, of course, there are Felipe and Sanaa, who struggle to understand the fundamentals of their new language; who hesitate to participate in class activities; who remain mostly mute, aloof, and unengaged.

The edgy 40+ lessons of GOING BOHEMIAN: Teaching Writing Like You Mean It
will help you teach writing effectively to students like Mike, Michelle, Felipe, and Sanaa.  Although you might be skeptical of a book on composition with Bohemian in the title, the techniques within these pages have proven effective in some of the most challenging classrooms in America.

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"Reading & happiness," from May 2009 KAPPAN

The average time an Americanteenager spends reading has shrunk every year since 1976 and now sits at an all-time low of six minutes and 36 seconds per day. In 1976, 86% of high school seniors reported reading a book or magazine at least once per week. By 2004, the percentage of seniors who claimed to read at least once per week had dropped 19 points to 67%.  The last time that Americans spent more time reading than playing video games and surfing the Internet was 1996. Since 1996, time spent reading books has declined slightly while time spent playing video games and surfing the Internet has risen 400%. Although
web sites host vast repositories of free books online, research indicates that teens use the Internet for social networking, shopping, music downloading, and image searches. Reading novels online isn’t even on the radar screen (p. 686).

 

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From "Sensorizing reading." American Reading Forum. Sanibel, Florida, 2008.

Today, multisensory devices are in use in a variety of professions. Police officers use video and portable digital assistants to record evidence at the scene of a crime; doctors probe a patient’s internal organs with tiny cameras; economists ponder possible outcomes of fiscal policies through sophisticated computer simulations; lawyers utilize massive databases to uncover nuances of judicial decisions. In contrast, most teachers use no tools, save a piece of chalk or an overhead transparency, and their students are expected to remain sedentary and quiet for seven or eight consecutive hours.

Classroom activities should move back and forth between experience and language....To engage students and teach them something of value, a teacher needs new tools that utilize multisensory and sometimes simultaneous stimuli.

 

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Lawrence A. Baines 2010