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The Teachers We
Need
vs.
The Teachers We
Have
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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.
Book available now through Amazon, Rowman & Littlefield website, and other booksellers.
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“The actual secrets to the path to happiness are
determination, effort and time.”
Dalai Lama
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Articles |
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Presentations |
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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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articles |
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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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