Here is something that I am posting because I feel it is appropriate given the age of most people I talk to on here.

This is something that was in an article by a Mr. Paul Graham - just an insightful kind of guy for the most part.  This blurb was taken from this article: http://www.paulgraham.com/lies.html

I found this prudent to post here because we get so much of this arguement here: "But my teacher in biology told me this.." or "My cross country coach (who is really an english teacher) told me that running heel-to-toe is best".

I would like to see some hard evidence to support this.

For one, it is difficult to make any sort of claim about "US public school teachers" as a whole because every state has different licensing requirements. Some states have extremely high standards, others not so much. While some states may have very lax standards for teacher licensing, including lax standards about a teacher candidate's performance in his/her subject area, not every state does. Some states have incredibly rigorous standards for teacher preparation, both in pedagogical training and subject-area training. So to claim that "[all or generally all] US public school teachers" share any characteristic, whether good or bad, is a difficult one to support, and sounds to me like another example of the general public's obsession with bad-mouthing America's teachers as a hobby.

The NEA surveys all US teachers every five years. The most recent one was in 2003 (data for 2008 will be collected this coming academic year). In its most recent survey, the NEA found that nearly 60% of all public school teachers in the US have a Master's degree or better. I find it difficult to believe that someone who "doesn't understand the stuff they're teaching very well" can successfully earn a Master's degree or a doctorate in their field.

Paul Graham's claim that "...as a rule people planning to go into teaching rank academically near the bottom of the college population" is a heavy one that sounds a lot like it has data to support it. If it does, I would like to see it. I know what I and my colleagues had to achieve, academically, to enter the teaching profession, and it was certainly not 'near the bottom' or even 'near the middle.' Perhaps there are some states where this is the case, but again, to make the claim that "as a rule" this is the case, based either on personal emotional impressions or data from fewer than all 50 states, is a pretty poor academic standard if you ask me. Which makes the claim even doubly offensive. It says, "I am going to make a claim about the quality of one group's academic performance, and in so doing I am not even going to bother to do my academic due diligence and support my claim with strong research."

Furthermore, your post seems to be more about younger posters saying their physical fitness training information is correct because their English (or Science or Home Ec) teacher said so; and not about teachers' competencies in their subject areas, which is what Mr. Graham's statements are about. It stands to reason that, say, an English teacher who also happens to coach track would not be as knowledgeable in running technique and training methods. This is no excuse, certainly, for a teacher to avoid saying "I don't know;" nor does it make it any more excusable for that teacher's students to accept everything he/she says as gospel. However an English teacher's lack of relative knowledge in track & field has no relationship to that English teacher's knowledge or performance in English.

Understand also that most teachers who coach extracurriculars do so because they happen to like the sport/activity, and they need extra money. There are no real requirements, that I know of, for a teacher to be a track or football or forensics coach. What matters to the school district is that the teacher is qualified to teach his/her subject area, and that's all. If the teacher has the time and inclination to coach an extracurricular on top of that, great. But it is true that teachers generally have no more expertise to coach a sport beyond perhaps having played it themselves in high school. So yes, students should absolutely keep that in mind when making a training claim and citing their high school coach as an expert opinion on the matter. However this fact is only barely connected to the excerpt you posted as support for it, at best.

Should teachers be more mindful of what they do and don't know, and should they be willing to say "I don't know" more often? Absolutely. Without question. Should students realize and accept that their teachers aren't all-knowing fonts of information? Most definitely. However, to claim that this is happening less often than some of us might like because of inadequacies and deficiencies in teachers, or their credentials, overall, is poor scholarship and an utterly disrespectful and unfair judgment of those of us who do take our professions seriously, and who did exemplify high levels of scholarship to earn our teaching license. We may not know everything, but I challenge you to find anyone in any field who truly does. Learning is lifelong.

Respectfully,

Alissa J. Bratz
French/Spanish teacher, grades 6-12
Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction
B.A., Linguistics, 1998, University of Wisconsin-Madison
B.A., French, 2003, Edgewood College, Madison, summa cum laude
B.A., Education, 2003, Edgewood College, Madison, summa cum laude
National Board of Professional Teaching Standards Certification candidate, 2008

ohhhhhh don't give me -1!  I am glad I opened up this discussion now, because i can see im going to learn more than I intened to!

The reason why I posted this particular quote is because it struck a nerve with me.  It hit very close to home and I will tell you why, respectfully (because i respect you very much)


Reviewing his statement, and yours, I can say with confidence that I agree with you 100%.  Blanket statements are a bad thing to say about anyone and anything at any time.

However, in my experience, in review of how much i know now and looking back on my high school, junior high and elementary school educations (even my college education) - I would say that enough teachers ARE miguiding to the point that it should make a student question everything that comes out of their educators mouths - and thats not a bad thing.

Thats not to say anywhere near all of my teachers were this way - some of them were quite fantastic who I *still* look up to.


This is where I disagree with you pretty strongly.  Master's Degrees, even Ph.D's, in my experience, are more correlated with bloated egos than enhanced knowledge (no offense intended at all.)  

Once again, some Ph.Ds, M.D.s and Master's degree holders are brilliant and deserve credit for their great intellect.

I don't know how others with these degrees passed their review boards.  I have had Ph.D professors in fluid flow not know/understand the simple equations they were teaching.  I deal with Ph. D's who do use EMG signals in their research on muscle function but "confuse" EMG signals with ECG signals (if you know anything about these two signals, they look drastically different and are almost impossible to "confuse").  I have read countless studies on diet by people with Ph.Ds in nutritional science that don't understand some of the most basic principals of dieting, like the fact that one needs to acclimate to a diet before any results are valid.

To say that 60% of people have a Master's degree is not such a compelling argument to me :\


No idea where he got the balls to make such a claim, quite frankly.

I agree he should have supplied some sort of evidence.

Most of the people who I knew who wanted to be teachers, though, struggled in classes and generally didn't care so much about school.  When I was studying 17 hours a day they were smoking pot and playing video games.  Then again, that's just my experience of education majors I personally knew - which is not by any means a representation of said population.  

You have every right to be insulted and I personally apologize for even implying that this section of his view is aligned with mine.


I think I can sum up a response to the rest of your post quite briefly.

Personally, I think that the student-teacher relationship is one that is often abused without realizing it.  Teachers often tell their students things that are speculative, especially in the classroom setting.  This is highly inappropriate.  Many teachers are bombarded with questions daily from students - this is why there is school.  Many teachers, however, think that its ok to speculate without telling their students they are speculating.  

This relationship is misunderstood by many educators, in my opinion - and therefore abused - whether that be intentional or unintentional.

Really, the main point is you should be questioning EVERYTHING that comes out of EVERYONE'S mouth, ever.  The fact that the teacher is in an authority position for so many children just makes children more vulnerable when they slip a half truth - whether innocent or malicious; intentional or unintentional.

No worries. As mentioned, my issue is more with Mr. Graham than with you.

Re: Master's degrees & Ph.D.'s...

You, and Mr. Graham, are confusing intellect with academic performance, and using them interchangeably to suit your argument when they are, in fact, very different things.

I agree, advanced degrees are not always representative of intelligence. In many cases they are simply representative of one's stamina at jumping through the hoops of convention and administration. However, I brought up the academic statistic (60% Master's degrees or better) in response to his statement "...as a rule people planning to go into teaching rank academically near the bottom of the college population."

In this sentence, Mr. Graham's argument was one based on academic performance (which is measured in grades and degrees), not intellectual performance (which is measured in countless other ways and is not always easy to measure; nor, as you pointed out, is it necessarily correlated with academic degrees).  Whether or not one is intelligent, it is absolutely impossible to get an advanced degree without being "academically near the top of the college population." Most graduate programs have a minimum GPA requirement for entrance and maintaining candidacy, even if that minimum is simply "the top 50%". Not the most rigorous, to be sure; but certainly not "near the bottom."


This makes me very sad. I certainly am nowhere near "God's gift to teaching" or anything like that, but I do care very much about what I do and by many measures over the course of my short career, I have been told I am good at what I do. I hold myself to an extremely high standard and many of my colleagues approach their profession similarly. I feel I have a LONG way to go before I can feel like I am "a good teacher" but it is something I strive for on a daily basis, including during my summers "off." I consider myself a Teacher 24/7, and it saddens me to hear that there are people intending to enter the profession who aren't "pulling their weight" as I see it.

To be fair, when I was in undergraduate I goofed off a lot (notice in my first post I didn't list any academic ranking after my Linguistics degree, because I most definitely "did not work up to my potential," when I got my first degree) . Your observations may have more to do with the age/maturity level of the people you observed, than of teacher preparation programs as a whole. That said, as mentioned before programs are different all over the country and can vary widely. Regardless, your comments about what you've observed sadden me.

It is a sad truth, however, that there are lots of half-assed teachers out there. Part of this has to do with the fact that in the earliest days of American public education, when the economy was highly agrarian, school was viewed as an inconvenient interruption of the necessary work on the farm. So it was the public's belief that school should interfere as minimally as possible (hence summers off so as not to interfere with the growing and harvesting seasons), and should simply provide the basics, the "Three R's." As such, teachers were culled from young unmarried women and the role of 'teacher' was not viewed as a profession at all, but as a way for woman to pass the time before she found a husband. Furthermore, because "true education" (or what was considered "true" education at the time: i.e. a college, or even high school, education), and a life beyond simply inheriting the family farm or mercantile, were beyond the imagination and reach of most Americans at this point in history, public school teachers were viewed as being simply an extension of maternal responsibility, rather than as being educators in the classical sense of the word. As such, early teacher-preparation programs were not terribly academically rigorous.

Over time, as society became more educated, and public school grew in breadth and scope to cover vastly more than grades 1-8, and subjects far beyond the "Three R's," teacher preparation programs had to grow more rigorous. Following the Industrial Revolution, public school became critical to students' success in the workplace. The addition of high school to American education was a response to this need and American education grew and standardized extremely rapidly. Education was seen as a means to prepare a workforce, and since the "workforce" at this time was understood to mean "assembly line factory workers," the model developed to respond to that: students coming and going based on the ringing of bells, compartmentalized subjects, grades based on ability to memorize and regurgitate information, etc. The school itself became a factory because this was the new basis for the American economy. During this period of massive growth, all that was expected of teachers was that they could be "factory foremen": maintaining order, filling in numbers on a spreadsheet, and dumping a finite set of information into empty receptacles within a specified period of time. Teaching was still largely a "female" profession, due to the legacy of teacher preparation in our agrarian economy, but since women weren't expected to be "professionals" at this point in our history, it was still considered a 'substandard' career: something to do while waiting for Mr. Right to appear. And of course women weren't taken very seriously in academic circles at this point in history anyhow.

Teacher preparation programs at this point weren't even full college programs. Teachers went to "normal schools," where, as the name implies, they went to learn how to deliver a finite set of information, according to grade-level "norms," to students. These norms were established based on what an average American factory worker would need to know to succeed at his/her job. As such, teaching got a reputation as being a non-serious, "easy" profession, and to be honest, although in the 1940s and 50s, most teaching programs became full-fledged college programs, it is only within the last 30 years or so that the standards have been raised to where we as a society should demand them to be.

Most of the growth of American public education happened during the period immediately following the Industrial Revolution, which meant that many of these norms fossilized into massive bureaucratic legacy programs, which, as we are now discovering, are extremely difficult to change. Although our society and our economy have changed drastically, our school systems are having a hard time moving away from that "factory" model and catching up. So yes, there are a lot of half-assed teachers out there; thankfully most of them are retiring, and the teachers coming up in the new ranks are products of teacher preparation programs that, while they vary in quality from state to state, are vast improvements over earlier models. That said, there is still a perception out there that teaching is an "easy" profession, which may be why you observed the things you did. I very much hope that your "pot-smoking, video game-playing" acquaintances did not 'make the cut' in their licensing program.

So yes, schools are behind, and the system is far from perfect. It's easy to blame the schools for this, but let's remember that schools are 100% dictated by tax revenues and school board mandates. As most school boards are elected members of the community, schools are the victims (and beneficiaries) of political whims and public opinion from the local level all the way up to the federal level. The majority of state and federal demands on public education, while well-intentioned, are under- or unfunded. A lot of the "catching up" that schools need, and in most cases want (desperately) to do, requires a change in attitude on a massive scale across society. It's not just that schools need more funding, but the whole model, the whole idea behind what constitutes "an educated person" needs to be re-examined. This very thing is happening in a lot of teacher preparation programs across the country, but sadly these newly-minted teachers are entering a very outdated legacy system when they take their first job. So change happens slowly, and "society," at least the population with voting rights, needs to change along with it. Sadly, most of the voting population with enough life experience and perspective to make funding decisions left public education at least 10 years ago, and are themselves products of this outdated legacy system, and therefore have a hard time imagining anything different, not to mention supporting any change. So it becomes a self-perpetuating system.

There is a lot wrong with public education, and I am a passionate advocate for reform. Having said that, however, there is a lot right with public education. In its earliest days, public schools were expected to teach students how to read, write, and do simple math. Most education was only to about 6th or 8th grade, and students learned enough to manage the family farm or mercantile, and that was it. Today, only about 150 years later, public schools provide the following to American students aged 4-18 (and up to age 23 in some cases):

-reading, writing, and mathematics instruction up to levels that were previously only available to college students
-American history
-World history
-biology, chemistry, physics
-physical education
-health
-music
-art
-performing arts
-AP and IB courses
-study in world languages, including: Spanish, French, Russian, German, Mandarin, Japanese, Farsi, Arabic, Latin, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, and many others
-language instruction and support for non-English-speaking students
-psychological treatment
-social work interventions for students in difficult social/family situations
-college preparation, both academic and administrative
-driver's education
-business courses
-computer courses
-first aid/health care instruction
-culinary instruction
-parenting classes
-bookkeeping/financial literacy
-provides at least one meal per day, sometimes two; in many cases provides these meals for free or reduced cost so that poverty-stricken students can have at least one meal per day
-alcohol and drug abuse intervention and support
-access to museums and arts events
-access to travel abroad
-job training/preparation for the "craft" professions
-services to support students with different learning needs
-services to support students with medical needs
-access to volunteering/service opportunities
-access to community internships/business relationships
-and on and on...

Whether or not you agree with the above programs, the fact is that public schools provide a LOT of services to America's kids; services which in many cases have been (in my opinion) abdicated by parents.

Yes, the system is not perfect, and in many ways it's broken; but considering the breadth of services it provides, and in how many different circumstances and funding situations, in how many disparate communities; and the fact that overall there is order in our society, and people are becoming educated and participating in a global economy, and this is more or less happening day to day across our huge country, well, I think that's really something.

But now I'm on a huge tangent. It's just that the American pastime of hating on public education kind of honks me off. It's because it's "free" and universal, and therefore people take it for granted and choose to only see the bad parts.

In any case, back on topic...


I agree with you 100% on the above.



And the respect is mutual, mon ami. Thanks for a great and enlightening/engaging discussion.

yo chris this +1 is from terry HIMSELF! lol, just being funny. +1, ive never met you but i heart you now too. get over it beotch     

I think it is here because so many people say stuff like: "my english teacher told me such and such" or "my cross-country/football/basketball coach told me such and such".

I don't think it is fair to single out school teachers in this respect.  I think a more appropriate quote would be:

"The sad fact is, many people in many fields don't generally understand their chosen field very well."

I know this is true in my field of work (Software Development).  Many people are just in it for the money, or learn just enough to get by without really understanding how stuff works.  It also seems to be true in many fields that people think because they know a little about something in that field, they are an expert in all things in that field, and sometime in other fields.  Paul Graham, whose essay was quoted, is actually a perfect example of this.  His background is in software development and he has written many articles and essays about it and other subjects.  He has written some really good things about software development.  He also written a lot of things that are absolute drivel.*  I think it is important that we have authority figures that we feel we can turn to for understanding, but I think it also important that we recognize that nobody knows everything and that a lot of times there is no general consensus among all the "authorities" in a particular field and that everything is not always as cut and dry as we would like it to be.  I think it is a good idea to take a "trust but verify" attitude.  Use the people that you know and trust as a starting point, but if you really want to know, find out for yourself and understand the arguments for AND against an idea for yourself.

  I doubt (but admit I don't know  ) Graham has anything to back that up.  I suspect Graham himself is abusing his position of "authority" to present his opinion as a fact.


*If anyone wants to argue about why some of Paul Graham's theories about software development are drivel, feel free to PM me, but I didn't think it would make any sense to go into that inside a parkour forum.

hey im not sure if you are joking here or what but i think almost everyone on this thread agrees wit MoF... just bc maybe u dont like school gives u no excuse to call muse a beotch

This reminded me of something that one of my teachers did last school year. He spent a class giving us notes about the civil rights movement and other race related topics. At the end he told us to crumple up the notes and toss them in recycling bin saying that all the notes we got were BS. Any way the class got angry and had a laugh about it but my teacher had made his point: just because an authority figure says something doesn't mean that it is right and that if something seems off we should ask about it.