Re: this newsgroup and k-12 education.....


Bill Lang wrote:
, I've been to one world fair, a picnic, and a rodeo, and that's
the stupidest thing I ever heard come over a set of earphones.

Bill Lang wrote:
, I've been to one world fair, a picnic, and a rodeo, and
that's
the stupidest thing I ever heard come over a set of earphones.

Virtually everyone in here thinks they are experts on k-12
public education. They assume there is a problem and are
often
quite confident that they know how to fix it or that they
could
step into the picture in any capacity and be effective. Yet
except for me for a short time and Harry who posts
occasionally,
I can't think of another person in here who actually has k-12
teaching experience(sorry if I'm leaving anyone out).

Hi ($1)



IIRC after graduating you decided not to teach and instead did
something else. Were employed(ie not a student teacher, thats
a
totally different exp) even 1 year as a k-12 public school
teacher?


Between 2 seperate time periods, I have ~1 year cumulative
experience. Two stints as an extended term temp, 8th grade math
and Algebra 1/Geometry. I don't usually talk about it because I
was a very immature 21/22 and I completely sucked.

were you working as a certified teacher then or sort of a longterm sub
role? That makes a difference too.......



But don't be shocked to find me back in the classroom inside of 5
years.

Do you currently hold a valid clear and renewable teaching certificate
in virginia? And if you didn't like it and weren't very good at it,
what are you going to do differently to make yourself more effective?
I'm just curious because I've seen a lot of people really enter
teaching later in their lives and some have succeeded while others
don't. The biggest factor in my experience is that those succeed
understand that having the personality for it is essential. Teaching
8th grade geom/pre-alg/alg1 is very different(in the type of approach
you have to take) to teaching BC calculus to 11th and 12th grade honors
students...or even pre-calculus to solid 11th/12th grade college prep
students. And then you'll see a lot of fairly decent college prep 11th
graders for example who simply don't care about math in the least and
will struggle with very basic math concepts(like solving even linear
equations for ex)

The problem most teachers have when they first get on with a school is
that they have unrealistic expectations and are mad at the classes they
get.

It's a heck of a lot harder to teach backup algebra 1 to tenth graders
who have already failed it or "concepts of math" to vocational prep
sophmores who are likely to be classroom dispruptions and can't do
anything math-wise than it is to teach pre-cal to a group of honors
sophmores who plan on taking AP calc next year. But of course as
starting out teacher it's not reasonable to expect to start out with
the "best" classes. The only real hope is to find a situation where
for whatever reason there are openings in the higher level AP and
honors classes that none of the veteran teachers wants to teach....and
at good schools this is pretty rare. I know quite a bit about teaching
8-12th grade math(much too extensive to post in a single post), so I'm
always available for more input......




--
wjlmuttatyeahwhodotcom

"Gentlemen! You can't fight in here. This is the War Room!"

.

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