And I would like to pose them here, since there seems to be quite a few fellow Kossacks who make their living in education.
I was born in 1956. I received what I consider to be a fine education at the hands of the teachers I had going up through both Elementary and High School. But I never raised a child of my own, so I really have no first hand experience to speak of regarding public education in the decades since my graduation. I've seen bits and pieces of it from afar...through nieces or neighbors and friends. Anecdotal stories in the MSP. I've seen issues and tax levies argued on the pages of the op-ed page over the past 30 plus years.
I know the situation on the ground has changed since I was last in school, but I don't have first hand experience as to just how.
I know there are a lot of members here who are teachers. Some of you teach Elementary School. Some High School. Some are in Higher Ed, either at a Community College or University level. It is a broad pool of experience to ask some questions of.
I read most of the education related diaries posted here, because I think it is a topic of vital interest. But most of them deal with specific grievances...be it teacher evaluation measures, or student testing methods. They are diaries written by educators addressing issues that they, largely, take issue with.
As a lay person, who never raised a child and thus has no direct experience with today's public school system, I have many questions regarding which I would be very interested in hearing your accumulated wisdom and experience.
If I pose my questions, would you please pick the ones you feel most strongly about or most able to address and discuss them below? Consider this a somewhat open thread, but within the framework of several broad ranging questions I have...the answers to which I do not.
1.) Why did I have the benefit of school nurses during the entirety of my public education, and nurses who actually performed quite a service looking back upon it, yet they seem to be not so common nowadays? Or is that just a myth? Are there still school nurses? Do they still do eye and ear tests? Basic inoculations? If not, why not? What happened to the school nurse?
2.) What do you have to read before you graduate High School these days? Mark Twain? Stephen Crane? Poe? Victor Hugo? Faustus? All Quiet On the Western Front? Any Shakespeare? Faulkner? O'Henry? Cathner? F. Scott Fitzgerald? Hawthorne?
What does an English teacher assign her students these days?
3.) Whatever happened to dodgeball, if anything? Some of my fondest memories of PE are playing dodgeball.
4.) As a history teacher...what can you teach, and what can you not teach? I was amazed upon entering college, and electing several history electives, only to learn that that history I was taught in High School was not really the history of the US. Are High School teachers forbidden from teaching labor history?
5.) How has the internet, and smart phones, impacted your classroom experience? Is it a distraction? An aid? Has it made students lazy with respect to either reading or researching? Does anyone even know how to do research anymore? As in going to a library and looking up primary sources?
6.) Are students more disrespectful than, say, 30 years ago? My 22 year old niece told me that, in High School, everyone addressed thier teacher on a first name basis.
Is that a good thing or a bad thing? And how did it start? I never addressed a teacher that way...so somebody must have made an opening that took hold.
7.) Are we getting anything back for the money we spend upon educating severely disabled students? Or is it just a good teaching niche that is paid for at the expense of other students who could achieve more but get less funding?
8.) How has the role of "school" changed, in your experience, since you have been an educator?
9.) How much of your daily time is spent on activities that are not teaching your students anything? If any.
10.) How much contact do you have, on average, with your students' parents? And how would you characterize that contact?
11.) Have you ever flunked a student? If not, why not.
12.) How does having a diverse class that has students of differing English language skills impact a classroom? How do teachers cope with this? Are classrooms broken up into smaller groups? Or does one big class progress at the rate of the slowest third?
13.) Would it make more sense to put ESL students into a separate track, that focusses on language fluence solely, and then mainstream them?
14.) Should promising students, in a primarily poor and troubled school district, be bussed to a better school so that they can realize their potentials without the disruptive influence of nonachievers and hooligans in their midst?
Should troublemakers be segregated and taken away from those who actually want to learn?
15.) For those in higher ed...what is the most glaring deficiency that you notice in incoming students? And to what do you attribute it?
Those are my questions...and I hope you all have some answers. I pray that somebody does.
Thanks.