A poll for the teachers on my lj

[shadowkat]

I'm not a teacher. I've known teachers. And I've had some excellent teachers and some horrid ones. At any rate, the poll below is some questions I've spontaneously come up with late tonight, when I should be asleep...

They were in an odd way prompted by an episode of Everybody Hates Chris that brought back some funky memories. I thought a poll might work better here than a meme.


[Poll #980684]

Comments

[arethusa2.livejournal.com]

I taught more basic skills so some standardization in tests was fine with me. One hundred and fifty spelling tests are a lot easier to grade when they're on computer score sheets. But reading comprehension was short answer, literary theory might be fill-in-the-blank, grammar was either, and essays were always assignments, not tests. Texas is very big on standardized testing, and most teaching seems to be for the tests--curriculum is designed around them. A teacher has no power whatsoever to affect this decision, at least here.

By the time students with learing disabilities got to me they had other problems that needed to be cleared up first, and usually it was almost impossible to solve those. Either the parents were in denial or the kid was or they had gotten so far behind that I could't help them during class very much. Some kids virtually stopped going to school if they had problems, or their behavior was so bad you couldn't attack the underlying problem. I started to learn to send them in for special testing, including counselor visits, but that takes a very long time.