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Re: [Phys-L] teaching credentials +- qualifications +- administration




On 2013, Oct 20, , at 05:52, Marty Weiss <martweiss@comcast.net> wrote:

No.. you are 180 deg. from what I was trying to convey. It has nothing to do with statistics. Remember who the students "are" not how much money their parents make.

I thought most of the studies correlated socio-economic class w/ school success. Parents income is who the students are.



These are teenagers who take 6 or 7 classes, not just physics or chemistry. They enjoy their video games, sports, girls or boys (depending). They may or may not even like some of the subjects they have to take. Plus they have to pass some cockamamie state test to graduate. So here comes the BS in physics from Pronceton. WHAM! What a rude awakenibg. The degree means nothing in the high school environment. Classroom control, knowledge of the teenage mind and emotions, keeping the room clean and enticing, satisfying some principal who may or may not even know any science or understand what it is all about to teach science,... all of these things mean just as much as all the subject knowledge the university gave them. Just because a person has a degree from an Ivy doesn't mean they can teach high school students.

This is what I thought you meant, and since the Yardly HS is v. not inner city, I thought a Princeton grad. would be a good match, similar to the "upper" stream in 50's Santa Barbara, where the students wouldn't even dream of the behaviour common now.

See next post, later.

Teaching is an art that not everyone has the talent to do. The attitude that anyone with a top tier degree can enter a high school and become the savior of a physics program is why the teaching profession is filled with TFA people who do it for 3 years and leave; why the turnover rate for 5 year teachers is approaching 50%; why everyone who ever sat behind a desk thinks they can teach kids; why professors with their huge lecture halls and myriads of TA's and a captive audience think they can suddenly produce tons of successful teachers better than the rest of us who made careers of understanding the thousands of teenagers who passed through our doors.


bc, v. shocked when he subbed at N. Salinas HS.