America's Unchallenged Youth...

[Halon451]

I...so we went to the local pizza joints, which served better quality food than the mystery meats served in school.

Ah, I'm beginning to see your thought process, which led to the formation of your 'Best Pizza' thread. Man, you ARE bored! LOL...

 

[stratman]

Ah, I'm beginning to see your thought process, which led to the formation of your 'Best Pizza' thread. Man, you ARE bored! LOL...

Out of my gourd! And he still hasn't arrived!

 

[Tomorrow]

Out of my gourd! And he still hasn't arrived!

Oh....I know. You're just really really anxious to get on with your vacation to Canada to meet the Sheepstar!

Signed,

The Gnat Shark

 

[stratman]

Oh....I know. You're just really really anxious to get on with your vacation to Canada to meet the Sheepstar!

Signed,

The Gnat Shark

LOL!!!!!!! Always good for a laugh!!

 

[Pheaton]

So what is the answer? Since you are a teacher I'd love to hear what you think.

I wish I had an answer to give you. I am not sure what the answer is but I frequently hear the 'corporate model' as the fix and I just don't think it will work.

As for merit pay- I think it needs to be a mix of quantitative and qualitative measurements... just the same as the rest of the working world gets measured. A small portion of it can be linked to test scores, because those are the only good quantitative measures that we have.

I have a hard time with using student test scores in an attempt to evaluate a teacher. There are just too many issues why that would not be a valid measurement.

The rest should be done through observation by superiors and peer review. No more of the planned observations either where the teacher knows about it 2 weeks in advance and can plan a lesson for the day- each teacher gets observed a set number of times a year with most of them being a surprise. Then teachers get reviewed on a set of qualitative measures by their school department head, district department head, and a sampling of peer reviews from fellow teachers. For elementary school teachers I think a small element (very small mind you) can come from simple surveys filled out by parents.

I cannot speak to how teachers get evaluated in other school districts, but in my district a new teacher is observed by either the principal or an assistant principal twice a year. The date of the observation is set up between the principal and the teacher. This is done for the first four years of employment. If the teacher is found to be satisfactory then they recieve tenure.
Why are there not more evaluations? In my building I can tell you that the principals are too busy. I may not like everything my principal does or the decisions he makes, but I will say that they are always busy.
Is this a good system? IMO, no it is not. With that infrequent of a observation it is difficult to get a sense of the interaction between the students and the teacher. The principal is also placed in a bad situation because they may have to evaluate an effective lesson in a subject area that they know nothing about. I teach physics, I bet you can guess the number of principals that I have had that know anything about physics, yep a big fat 0. So how valid is an evaluation if the evaluator does not understand the theory behind the lesson?

Look, I'm not saying this is perfect, but I'm just throwing out ideas. The only way things will actually improve is if we can get people in charge who start looking for a way to say yes to new ideas, not people who are looking for a way to always say no (and yes- I just ripped off the West Wing there )

I don't think there is one magic bullet solution here. But thank you for engaging in the discussion. I think there is real value in an open dialogue where we care about coming up with a solution. It may lead somewhere.

Pheaton

 

[Pheaton]

I would hazard a guess that many people line up for teaching jobs because of the job itself, more so than the money - they have big aspirations of helping to shape and educate these young minds, and these notions are very noble and shouldn't be taken lightly.

I can tell you that I did get into teaching because I wanted to help students, not because of the salary. I wish I could say the same for all of my fellow teachers, but sadly several teachers that I work with become teachers because its 'easy', 'anyone can do it', and for June, July, and August. There are some bad apples in the bunch, and to be honest I would like those individuals to leave the profession. Why? To make my job easier. If the standards of some of my colleagues were set higher, then I can focus on the curriculum and less on remediation.

But I do feel that because of this, and because of the profound influence that these positions hold and how they have such a great responsibility with these young impressionable people, they should be compensated as such.

Won't get an argument out of me. Who would not want to get paid more for what they do?


Pheaton

 

[Pheaton]

Right, my bad - I forgot they were actually in school right now.

Well, I ran the numbers - I'll admit I may have been slightly off-base, because the last time I heard the salaries were in the mid $30's for this area. Nevertheless, here you go:

(Taken from Monster Salary Reports)
Teachers Average Salary in the Tampa, Florida region: $39,302 - $52,518, with a median salary of $45,081.

Hi,
My district in Michigan starts at $38,478 and tops out at $73,842 after 11 years with a Bachelors

For a masters degree the salary scale is $41,485-$83,922.
For PhD it is $43,924-$89,602.

My district is the third highest paying district in the county. The median home price in 2005 in the county was $228,500.

Michigan is a union state, so my salary follows a union negotiated contract. Are the Tampa schools unionized?

Pheaton

 

[cbraver]

As a 22 year old from Miami, I've been quietly watching this thread. I certainly have many thoughts on what you guys have said, but simply don't have the time to get into it. But, since I've become so relavent ... I'll answer any questions you have about my generation to the best of my ability (from my view, at least).

Political Interest? Drug use? Violence? Motivation?

 

[TLS Guy]

My word quite a thread!

My word we have opened the proverbial can of worms with this thread.

We seem to be focusing on teachers right now. Just one aspect of a complex problem.

I think Halon in his original query was wondering as to human motivation, the current youngsters in particular. Human motivation is a really tough one. There obviously has to be at the least a modicum of self motivation. However parents teachers and others should and can be inspiring motivators. I have only mine and my families experiences.

However to get on subject of this site, this great hobby can be a motivator. It certainly was in my case.
I started rigging up speakers with my farther at age 7. With his help I built my first speaker a Voight quarter wave pipe. Those of us interested in audio in England back in the fifties were under the spell of the consummate showman, founder and managing director of Wharfedale Wireless Works, none other than the great Gilbert A Briggs (GAB). He just wanted to get everyone involved in audio, especially speaker building. He was also a superb pianist. He was one of the greatest motivators I have ever encountered. He always had time for inquisitive kids at the Audio Fair, and I might say so did Peter Walker of Quad and Donald Chave of Lowther. Both he and Peter invited me to their works. GAB's works was a little far afield up in Yorkshire. His protege Raymond Cooke however, who founded KEF just 15 miles from where I lived was a great help.

Any way, the upshot of it all was that I was highly motivated, especially in Physics and math classes. The reason was simple to me, I wanted to build better speakers amplifiers, pickups and tape recorders. Yes my father and I actually built our own pickup arms and moving coil cartridges back then. It wasn't until Stan Kelley produced the Decca fffss and Ortofon the SPU series that we felt outclassed, until then quite the reverse. Not only was this a motivation for me but some of my friends also.

Not only did this motivate me in the sciences , but opened to me the whole world of the musical arts.

But for this hobby, I'm certain my life would have taken a different course, and I think it highly unlikely I would have become a physician. I know one thing, I would not have had nearly as much fun. So what I'm getting at is that we can use our avocation to motivate kids along productive lines. That is why I spent so much time with the young man who wanted to build a sub for Christmas with his father.

As far as my experience with the school system with my children, I have to say that in the main they had fine teachers, some of them excellent. The school used to hold science fairs, and my children and their friends used to freqently congregate at our house and we would out together cool projects to demonstate various laws of nature, usually physics.

All my children have done well. My youngest son used to coach math to failing Students in high school. He graduated Suma *** Laude in electrical engineering.

After graduation he did some teaching for Sylvan in the Twin Cities teaching remedial math. Eventually the teachers union objected and so he had to leave. He has now founded his own non profit organization to teach remedial math to disadvantaged children. He is a senior development engineer at Seagate, working in a think tank doing some very interesting work the nature of which I can't divulge here. He is also patiently trying to teach his old man how to design digital circuits.

I have to say I think the teachers union, like a lot of unions are obstructionist. I'm now a retired physician, or to be truthful on long extended sick leave after a series of extensive surgeries. However the local school systems are very short of money and resources, and I could easily volunteer to help teach science classes. But I know the teachers union would nix anything of that nature.

As Margaret Thatcher once remarked, "the veneer of society is very thin". I think this makes it all very difficult for parents and teachers. Some how we have to get the kids to listen to Bach and not the in vogue perverted rapper.

 

[TLS Guy]

As a 22 year old from Miami, I've been quietly watching this thread. I certainly have many thoughts on what you guys have said, but simply don't have the time to get into it. But, since I've become so relavent ... I'll answer any questions you have about my generation to the best of my ability (from my view, at least).

Political Interest? Drug use? Violence? Motivation?

OK we get the point! It's time for us old codgers to call it a rap. I'm glad you don't have time to get into it. I trust it is a sign of a purposeful life.

 

[cbraver]

OK we get the point! It's time for us old codgers to call it a rap. I'm glad you don't have time to get into it. I trust it is a sign of a purposeful life.

Thank you.

Purposeful life? Nah, I'm off to grab a bag of herb.

 

[Sheep]

Just throwing this out there...

...but did it occur to any of you that it's NONE of your business what others do with their life? You can disagree with it all you want, but where do you get off telling someone that what they're doing is wrong? It's their life.

Friggin' relax for 5 minutes and just stop caring, it will add years to your life.

SheepStar

 

[NeverSeen]

I fall in the category of 20-somethings so here's my bit for you guys to analyze:

I'm 23.

I was way above average in middle school, average in high school. High school sucked because the teachers sucked. I stopped caring about school around 10th grade. Around that time I went from a 3.X GPA to finishing with a 2.6 GPA.

I thought about college but decided I wouldn't be able to sit for a solid hour and learn (I can barley sit still through a movie), so it'd be waste of my time and money.

From age 14 to current I've worked hard at every job I've held.

Last year I made $10,000 more than a friend of mine that has an Engineering degree from FSU working as a Mechanical Engineer at a phosphorus company. No other friend in my age group (18-25), with or with out a degree (including a finance major from UMiami), comes within $10,000 of me, currently.

My current net worth is in the very low six figure range. I make money, I pay bills. I'm happy where I'm at in life including my career and my salary.

I own a house.

I just got married. My wife wants to start saving to open a salon. She's far more ambitious than I am. Maybe I'll quit my job within the next five years and own a salon.

Did my lack of education negatively impact my life up to this point? Nope.

What's next? Who knows.

Do I care? Not really.

The most important decision I will make in the next 12 hours:
Should I put an over easy egg on a turkey melt sandwich for breakfast?

I must say this thread does sound like the whining I've seen on TV from parents when Elvis first came out .

 

[aberkowitz]

The most important decision I will make in the next 12 hours:
Should I put an over easy egg on a turkey melt sandwich for breakfast?

Only if you want to make me throw up

Seriously though, the tone of your response is part of why this thread was started. The people who have posted are generally not a bunch of old fogies talking about the good old days. I'm personally only 28. But you'd have to be blind or ignorant to say that the public education system in this country is working as well as it could be- particularly in the inner cities. We're also discussing how the current crop of students going through K-12 these days are suffering from absentee parenting. Whether that's due to using technology as a proxy parent or the fact that both parents have to work to make ends meet (or maybe both) doesn't really matter. Nobody is attacking the students for the most part, they're looking at the two most important institutions that kids have- parents and school- and observing that in many cases both are failing.

I'm quite happy that you're successful and doing well without education past the high school level. The gap in career earnings between high school and college grads is growing geometrically, so for your sake I hope it keeps up. However, maybe you could use a little more practice in issue analysis and argument support, because your response showed very little understanding of how to join a debate.

 

[Halon451]

To Sheep and Neverseen,

I appreciate your comments. However, I believe you have both missed the point. The purpose of this thread wasn't to whine - whining is for 2 year olds who have to put away their toys before dinner, and those who have all the complaints in the world but can offer no solutions (maybe a politician near you ).

At any rate - the purpose of this thread was to open up an intelligent discussion on a problem that does exist in this country, whether you like it or not, whether you care or you don't. Ignorance is not bliss in my opinion, but if you choose to live your life in a tunnel and ignore the impending predicament that we as ALL Americans will one day face, then you too - are lost among them. Make no mistake about it, if you don't recognize the situation for what it is, and attempt to analyze and affect it in some way, then sooner or later it will come back and affect you.

Neverseen - I'm glad that you have enjoyed success in your life, and that you are making more money than your Engineer friend. You own your house, and have seemingly not been bothered by what's going on around you. I make twice as much money as my wife who has a four year degree from Penn State University, but you will never catch me holding that above her head, nor using it as an example of how to live. In short, I feel very fortunate, but I have also worked my a$$ off to get where I am, and I can only owe my own success to my hard efforts and dedication.

Let me break this down for you, and attempt to be very clear about this - I am not concerned with telling people how to live their lives. I am not concerned with mandatory reform for a system without due thought process. I am NOT looking at the present, I am looking at the future, and what I see isn't all that rosy. We, as Americans in general have simply become far too lazy, apathetic, complacent and take every single thing we have for granted. Notice I said "We", as I have included even myself in this statement. I am not free from guilt and neither are you.

Our children represent the future of this country. If we are to remain strong, and ensure that our children's children will have the same luxuries that we all now take for granted, we NEED to be thinking about these things. We NEED to start looking at our kids, and how they are being raised. We NEED to concentrate on education reform and somehow re-install that desire to learn and grow within these young minds, both mentally, physically, and spiritually - the kind of substance that leaders are made out of. We NEED to take the blindfold off and realize that dark cloud on the horizon is a hell of a lot closer than we imagined.

 

[Halon451]

By the way, I'm only 34 - and I have a body full of tattoos. I grew up in the inner city, and nearly dropped out of school myself. Far from an old fogey. I wasn't alive back in the "good old days" that my father always speaks of.

Just a concerned citizen...

 

[TLS Guy]

Just throwing this out there...

...but did it occur to any of you that it's NONE of your business what others do with their life? You can disagree with it all you want, but where do you get off telling someone that what they're doing is wrong? It's their life.

Friggin' relax for 5 minutes and just stop caring, it will add years to your life.

SheepStar

A modern heresy right there! Where is your sense of community? It's that reasoning that really will wash us down the drain. If you take your argument to its logical conclusion, any depravity or even criminality is justified by freedom of expression.

 

[stratman]

Well I'm 45, no tatts, suburban cave dweller, no fogey. Hey Sheep, this wasn't about telling people how to live their lives, twenty-somethings are able to do as they please. This was about the failure of two cornerstone institutions in the fabric of our society: 1. education, 2. child rearing
which will affect our country in the not too distant future and already the ramifications of such failure is becoming evident. There are successful people out there that were never institutionally educated, but they are very rare. In the "olden days," parents wanted their kids to get an education in order to have a better job, ie better quality of life. Of course an education doesn't guarantee financial success (if that is what you're after), but it does offer you many options that without a degree you wont generally get. I think we all would agree it's better to work in an air conditioned building rather than picking tomatoes under the midday sun. My wife and I take our kid's eductaion extremely seriously as we want Mikey to have a good quality of life, it doesn't mean he'll succeed, that's up to him as he grows up, but I need to make sure he's ready for his future, when he's twenty he can make his choice. And then live with it.

 

[cbraver]

There are big perceptional differences between these generations. You're generations are just as bad, if not worse. Our generation has laid witness to older generations who generally work jobs they hate so they can afford stuff they don't need. Paying into a battery they claim to want to save, yet seemingly don't have the guts to make a stand and fix while my generation, who was too young to do anything, watched. Our generation has witnessed the closed minded and dangerously safe (and I mean dangerous in the literal sense of the word) that led to things like declaring war on terror and drugs. You can't declare war on terror, you can declare war on a country. When that whole thing started, really the only people I saw weary about it was...drum roll please...MY GENERATION. The older generations put their tail between their legs like usual. The real question is has your generations screwed up the new generations so bad that we won't be able to fix your disaster.

Now, I'm not trying to attack any of you guys. TLS guy said that "We seem to be focusing on teachers right now. Just one aspect of a complex problem." Bring it out even further, we need to focus on our societies problems as a whole. Youth is a product of the old.

 

[Halon451]

Cbraver, stop playing the victim - this is an issue that affects all of us, no matter the age group involved. By merely pointing out the deficiencies of the "older" generation, you are doing nothing to contribute to a solution, and are in effect, hypocritical in the fact that you are pointing fingers at "us", while you claim we're pointing the finger at "you". Re-read some of my earlier posts - this is NOT about playing the blame game, and I am not trying to blame anyone in particular, as THAT WILL DO NOTHING TO SOLVE THE PROBLEM.

I will give you some credit to the fact that you do recognize an undesirable situation exists. Please feel free to offer some examples of anything you have done to further your generations contribution to society, or to our country, other than throwing your hands up and calling out the older generation for thier mistakes.

I agree that many of these problems do exist because of a sweeping trend that has manifested itself in our society, beginning long before any of us were born. I have accepted my own part of the blame, do you have the moral courage to do the same?

Read up on some history, and note the preceding events that led to the eventual downfall of notable empires - the Romans, the English, etc. You are looking at things through a tiny portal, but you are not seeing the big picture.

And since you brought it up - wait until a car bomb goes off next to you when you are out shopping, to tell anyone that we are not in a war on terror. This is the world we live in, in the 21st century - where wars are not fought merely on front lines. Our enemies surround us, and they walk among us. They are you and I, in the sense that you cannot tell them apart from anyone else you meet on the street. The LAST god d**n thing we need to do is ignore this fact - when we will all be standing around one day, wondering what happened to America?

Oh, we were too busy chasing after rainbows and empty promises, and laying down our weapons for the sake of only what the liberal media was trying to cram down our throats, as the enemy (that you apparently deny) was closing in...

And I'll throw this one out there. 8 year Navy veteran, at your service.