Yeah, I guess it’ll teach me to try to come up with analogies first thing in the morning…
Another indictment of large class sizes. Think of all the spot on analogies we could deploy later in life if teachers had given us the individual time we deserved as children.
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Beyond class sizes, I’m sure it’s difficult to achieve the best learning outcomes possible when the government is instructing teachers to ensure they carve out time to find some of the good things Nazis accomplished.
But how does that ban work? If a student brings a phone into the class in their pocket, what's your next move?
In Junior High my kids had a ban on phones. If a teacher saw it, they took it away for the day. That was through the entire day also, including lunch, and it seemed to work just fine. The kids didn't love it, but everyone was subject to it, so it worked fine.
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As my kids are reaching junior high age, this would be my 2 cents.
Getting on the bus at 7:10am if just setting them up for failure.
I think having a good teacher makes a world of difference, someone who is interested in a kids challenges and performance milestones over individual assignments can keep the kids engaged, and nothing about grade 5/6/7 if hard enough that any engage person should struggle with it. From my experience, I think class size has nothing to do with the way a teacher engages with kids, but the real problem is when you have a teacher who can hold the kids attention and keep them engage, how do you scale that to the teacher who cannot? I have no answers, but lets start with sending preteens and teens to school at 8:30-9:00 am (I'm talking about when they have to leave their house), instead of 7:00-7:30am, set them up to be more aware and engaged people around the teacher, so that the teacher doesn't need to carry so much of that weight.
*I am very much for a 8:00 am elementary school start, I see no problem with that for the those kids.
If they’re judging these scores by PAT, then we all know what the issue is. The tests don’t matter to the students. My son took one in grade 9 and I’m almost positive he just went AC/DC down the whole thing and called it a day. His mark was abysmal (in case anyone was curious about how that strategy could work for you!). But it’s irrelevant to him. The grade didn’t matter in his overall class marks. Pretty difficult to motivate kids once they realize that.
And things were that way through Covid with the no jeopardy exams also. I can’t be the only parent who saw otherwise good students somehow have final exam marks that were laughably pathetic. Granted these exams were taken under duress in the sense that I thought it was a good idea to get some exam-writing experience under their belt.
I do wonder how much that might play in to these stats. There was a half-year there where nothing mattered.
There was also the transition to working/learning from home.
Some people had to scramble. I know I wound up buying a couple laptops and beefing up my wi-fi when that happened, but not everyone is that fortunate to be able to do that.
As was alluded to though, the report doesnt provide any sort of frame of reference which would allow conclusions to be drawn across jurisdictions.
"Well everyone dipped here, so we're pretty sure what that is..."
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Some people had to scramble. I know I wound up buying a couple laptops and beefing up my wi-fi when that happened, but not everyone is that fortunate to be able to do that.
It goes beyond hardware. Students who didn’t have parents at home supervising them just dropped out of lessons. My kids said that by the end of a remote class there were often only 4 our 5 students still in the video meeting. The rest had wandered off to watch Netflix or play videogames.
Remote learning only really works for self-motivated and engaged students. For everyone else, it’s effectively useless.
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I'm hearing about this on the radio almost every day on my way to work. Government won't address class size or complexity in the CBA. Teachers aren't moving without it. Going to be interesting to see where they land.
Class size should be max 25. 30+ is ridiculous. Everyone suffers with too many kids in a class. I was rarely challenged because the teacher had to deal with the problem students or struggling students. The struggling students don't get enough support, and the problem students (which are increasing) take time away from everyone.
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It goes beyond hardware. Students who didn’t have parents at home supervising them just dropped out of lessons. My kids said that by the end of a remote class there were often only 4 our 5 students still in the video meeting. The rest had wandered off to watch Netflix or play videogames.
Remote learning only really works for self-motivated and engaged students. For everyone else, it’s effectively useless.
Well, yes and no.
At the end of the day the School Boards were caught off-guard, which, the first time was more than understandable. The second time was ridiculous. They had ages to prepare.
But what they shouldn't have done is essentially 'forgiven' the end of the school year that first time.
Which I think is what Slava was getting at and you are correct. Most of them went to watch TV and play Video Games.
Which again, has me bitching about Teaching Administration as opposed to Teachers themselves, theres plenty of crap to go around, but when the Administration basically flings their arms up in March and says:
"Pandemic! School's Out! Don't worry about it!"
And then a few weeks later turns to the Teachers and tells them to keep Teaching? You sold them out. Thats an almost impossible task.
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I have been teaching in small liberal arts colleges for over 15 years now, and in the past five years, it’s as though someone flipped a switch. For most of my career, I assigned around 30 pages of reading per class meeting as a baseline expectation—sometimes scaling up for purely expository readings or pulling back for more difficult texts. (No human being can read 30 pages of Hegel in one sitting, for example.) Now students are intimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding. Even smart and motivated students struggle to do more with written texts than extract decontextualized take-aways. Considerable class time is taken up simply establishing what happened in a story or the basic steps of an argument—skills I used to be able to take for granted.
At the end of the day the School Boards were caught off-guard, which, the first time was more than understandable. The second time was ridiculous. They had ages to prepare.
But what they shouldn't have done is essentially 'forgiven' the end of the school year that first time.
Which I think is what Slava was getting at and you are correct. Most of them went to watch TV and play Video Games.
Which again, has me bitching about Teaching Administration as opposed to Teachers themselves, theres plenty of crap to go around, but when the Administration basically flings their arms up in March and says:
"Pandemic! School's Out! Don't worry about it!"
And then a few weeks later turns to the Teachers and tells them to keep Teaching? You sold them out. Thats an almost impossible task.
Was it Administration that said that, or politicians? I'm a bit fuzzy on the memory, but I thought all these "tests don't count anymore" proclamations came directly from the government. I mean, I'm sure they consulted with numerous experts before they said it...
How are the new curriculums doing from a teacher and parent perspective?
In my opinion, the new curriculum is pretty bad. It’s very information heavy and developmentally abstract. For example, students get introduced to the concept of mass and area in grade 1 and sound wave diffusion in grade 2. As an educator, the focus is always on all students, but the spirit of the new curriculum seems to be focused on your top end students who come from homes that will readily pay for tutors or have a parent who won’t be working late night shifts to make ends meet. Furthermore, I care much more about teaching students how to think critically and problem solve rather than rote memorize a ton of information. The pure volume of information in the new curriculum makes it so teachers have to just make kids memorize facts rather than learn conceptually and problem solve.
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In my opinion, the new curriculum is pretty bad. It’s very information heavy and developmentally abstract. For example, students get introduced to the concept of mass and area in grade 1 and sound wave diffusion in grade 2. As an educator, the focus is always on all students, but the spirit of the new curriculum seems to be focused on your top end students who come from homes that will readily pay for tutors or have a parent who won’t be working late night shifts to make ends meet. Furthermore, I care much more about teaching students how to think critically and problem solve rather than rote memorize a ton of information. The pure volume of information in the new curriculum makes it so teachers have to just make kids memorize facts rather than learn conceptually and problem solve.
I suppose it’s too early to see this impact test scores (as a trend), but do you expect it to?
Was it Administration that said that, or politicians? I'm a bit fuzzy on the memory, but I thought all these "tests don't count anymore" proclamations came directly from the government. I mean, I'm sure they consulted with numerous experts before they said it...
I mean...we all know that.
Either way though, I think we can confidently declare that it wasnt the rank-and-file Teachers who made that call.
And it was a bad call.
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I do think phones and technology are part of the problem. But it goes beyond distracting students in class. Screen time is now so high that it has crowded out almost all other activities, including reading. Or really anything requiring sustained attention. I’d guess the ability to concentrate on reading long-form text or doing math problems for 30 solid minutes has been badly eroded over the last decade.
It’s not banned in high schools. It can be a very big problem as I’ve had some students who just sit and play on their phones all day. At some point, I’m just so exhausted with enforcing cell phone rules that I’ve given up. There’s no consistent schoolwide policy on cellphone usage in high schools so it’s hard to enforce any rules. At their age, they know it’s their choice to tune out to me in class and their grades reflect that. I tell them now at the beginning of their year I won’t be a cell phone police, but if your grade isn’t what you want and you or your parent comes asking me about it, the only thing I’ll say is to get off your cellphone.
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The Oilers won't finish 14th in the West forever.
Eventually a couple of expansion teams will be added which will nestle the Oilers into 16th.
I suppose it’s too early to see this impact test scores (as a trend), but do you expect it to?
I don’t know. But I do think when educational design choices are centered around your strongest students, it becomes a “rich get richer” situation. I would venture to guess you’ll see stronger results from students who are already doing well because they have access to resources to support them, whereas your students on the fringe, have exceptional learning needs, or have unstable home situations will do worse. Those students are also the ones that tend to lack resiliency and lose confidence quickly, so when the encounter concepts that don’t understand they tend to shut down quicker. A difficult curriculum might do that.
Not saying strong students don’t deserve enrichment, just think that those can be done in the classroom outside of blanket curriculum policies, we already have many programs for those students such as GATE, AP, and IB.
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The Oilers won't finish 14th in the West forever.
Eventually a couple of expansion teams will be added which will nestle the Oilers into 16th.
