THE PSYCHOLOGIST : Dunce teachers to be weeded out with tough test

Dunce teachers to be weeded out with tough test

It is certainly a good idea to filter out the dummies BEFORE they do teacher training rather than after. It avoids big waste of resources.

But no current proposals are going to help the kids in State schools much when all new teachers will be entering what is basically a destroyed educational sysyem. Smart kids will always do well in any system so it is the plodders and the dummies who need to be looked after. They are currently being largely failed by the chaos that is common in State school classrooms.

And that chaos both harms the pupil and deters good teachers. Teaching is not a job for dummies so young people who would make good tachers usually will have many options for their future. And they just have to look at a typical State school classroom to decide that there are jobs better than teaching

So there is something of a Catch 22 involved: To improve the education of the kids you need good teachers. But those who would make good teachers don't go into teaching. Which leaves mainly the desperates willing to go into teaching.

In short, teaching is a low-prestige job and that is the major dictate governing whom you will get to go into teaching. You can test yourself blue in the face but if the candidates for teacher training are mostly pretty dim, it it is only dim teachers that you will get. And the current crops of new teachers can be very dim indeed. You are getting the blind to lead the blind

But teaching has not always been a low status job and is not a low status job everywhere. Perticuarly in Asian countries teaching is high status and well-paid.

How come? Asian schoolrooms are famous for their high levels of discipline. Teachers are free to teach and do so. A good teacher likes to teach and in Asia they do

And that is the key difference between their government schools and ours. In our government systems teachers are too busy trying to get the pupils to sit down and shut up to have much time for teaching. And they are even told that it is not their job to get the kids to sit down and shut up. Teachers are not supposed to teach any more. They are merely learning facilitators.

That all asks too much of most potential teachers so State schools will always remain pits of poor education.

And parents know that. It is why 40% of Australian teenagers are sent to private schools. One way or another, such schools provide the sort of good learning environments that few State schools can equal. I taught High school in two quite different private schools and had no discipline problems at all. I was free to concentrate on my basic task of opening up young minds to the world of knowledge. So there are some dedicated and talented teachers in existence but they will almost all end up in one of our many private schools

So what can parents do who cannot afford private schools? Their only hope is to get their kid into a selective school or a school in a "good" area. But what is a good area? It is wherever well-off people live. Their kids get disciplined in various ways at home so give little trouble in classrooms. Teachers in such schools can teach. But again there is a Catch 22. "Good" areas are expensive so they are just not an option for the less well off. The less well-off are stuck with government schools

So why are government schools often so bad? It is purely the Leftist influence. Leftists have a horror of disciplining kids and they impose low discipline through regulations and other ways. Once again it is the Left who are NOT the friends of the poor

Shadow Education Minister Tanya Plibersek has told Sky News there must be a higher university cut off to enter teaching courses and potential teachers need to be tested before degrees rather than afterwards.

Dunce teachers will be weeded out before they start university with a tough new English and maths test.

The nation’s education ministers have approved a skills test for school leavers before they enrol in a university degree to study teaching.

One in 10 trainee teachers flunked a similar test after finishing a four-year education degree at university last year.

Federal Education Minister Dan Tehan said the upfront test would save students time and money.

“We don’t want to see students getting to the end of their degree and not being able to graduate or work as a teacher because they haven’t passed the … test,’’ he said.

“The sooner a student takes the test, the earlier they can get support or make alternative arrangements.

“Giving students the option to sit the test before their start their degree will save time and money.’’

Mr Tehan said students who fail the upfront test will still be able to enrol in a teaching degree at uni.

“But it does make them aware that they need to work on their literacy and numeracy skills,’’ he said.

Student teachers cannot graduate until they pass a test placing them in the top 30 per cent of the population for literacy and numeracy.

In 2019, almost one in every 10 graduates failed the online test – 8.3 per cent bombed the literacy test and 9.3 per cent flunked the maths exam.

Each test has 65 questions, administered by the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER).

The ministerial decree to let students sit the test before signing up to a teaching degree overrides the universities, which had refused to let students take the exam upfront.

However, the upfront exam will not start until 2023.

The federal government will make teaching degrees cheaper next year, to lure smart school leavers into the teaching profession and head off a national shortage of classroom teachers.

The Education Council of federal, state and territory ministers has also agreed to “improve’’ the writing assessment for students in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9 who undertake the National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN).

Mr Tehan said NAPLAN was due to go online in 2022.

“NAPLAN is the best tool we have to understand the impact of COVID-19, the long-term trends in student learning and what actions we need to take to improve,’’ he said.

The controversial national test was cancelled this year due to COVID-19 lockdowns.

https://www.couriermail.com.au/education/schools-hub/dunce-teachers-to-be-weeded-out-with-tough-test/news-story/70981f845b774d62bd0f3da3bd3f187b

2 comments:

AnonymousDecember 18, 2020 at 2:39 PM
Yes, the lefty teachers love to wreck the schools they teach in. When I ran programs for year 10 boys (about 16 years old) in schools across Victoria most schools were a pleasure to work at. A couple though were awful and the programs I taught were of no benefit to the students so I soon left those schools. At one of them, the mad leftist principal thought I was a lefty too, and she boasted to me that it had taken her a few years but she had finally gotten rid of all the old school disciplinarian teachers and now had all progressive teachers and creative self-paced learning throughout the school. I could only describe the "teaching" there as negligent and psychologically abusive. Believe it or not, I stood at the door of a classroom and witnessed about 20 sad and confused looking boys seated on chairs in a circle, dressed in women's dresses and wigs, and several female teachers walking around the circle, one on the inside and a couple on the outside, calling the boys names such as slut, mole, tart, fatty, ugly, dog, whistling, etc, etc. Then telling the boys that is what it is like to be a woman. I retrospect I wish I had broke up the session but at the time I was so shocked by what I witnessed that I could hardly believe my eyes. Following their session of psychological abuse, I had the same group of boys for an anti-bullying program. Several weeks later while in the town's public library several of the same group of boys entered the library and made trouble, abusing the public and the female librarian. They repeatedly call the librarian a dog and whistled her like a dog. I ordered them to cease their behaviour or get out. One of them elbowed me in the head from behind, then danced when I looked at him. I told the librarian to call the police, she refused, saying that will make the boys come back later and cause more trouble. The town has a high crime rate, violence and drug use, and I think the stupid leftist "progressive" anti-discipline school principal is a significant contributor to that.
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NorseDecember 19, 2020 at 2:14 AM
I do not have experience as a teacher and made up my mind years ago that it was not an viable option for me. In my mind there was nothing good about kids/students increasingly doing as they please. Part of the purpose of discipline is to learn about self-discipline, is it not?

The teacher that has made the most impression on me was my English and gym/swimming teacher. He made sure we were disciplined if needed. He would regularly make every student speak English in front of the class, the dreaded mini-talk. Group discipline was not common but it was not out of the question either. On the other hand he could joke around and be reasonably friendly with students, but of course what was most important was order so that he could teach and so that we could learn.

“Self-discipline begins with the mastery of thought. If you do not control your thoughts, you cannot control your needs. Self-discipline calls for a balancing of the emotions of your heart with the reasoning faculty of your head.” – Napoleon Hill
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The "GOP" stands for "Grand Old Party" and refers to the Republican party. The GOP is at present center/Right, while the Democrats have been undergoing a steady drift Leftwards and now have policies similar to mainstream European Leftist parties.

The ideological identity of both parties has however been very fluid -- almost reversing itself over time. In the mid 19th century, the GOP was the party of big government and concern for minorities while the Democrats advertised themselves as "The party of the white man" -- an orientation that lasted into the mid 20th century in the South. The Democrats are still obsessed with race but have now flipped into support for discrimination AGAINST whites.

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Global warming

Calibrated in whole degrees. Larger graph here

Climate scientist Lennart Bengtsson said. “The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”

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Two examples of Leftist racism below (much more here and here):

Beatrice Webb, a founder of the London School of Economics and the Fabian Society, and married to a Labour MP, mused in 1922 on whether when English children were "dying from lack of milk", one should extend "the charitable impulse" to Russian and Chinese children who, if saved this year, might anyway die next. Besides, she continued, there was "the larger question of whether those races are desirable inhabitants" and "obviously" one wouldn't "spend one's available income" on "a Central African negro".

Hugh Dalton, offered the Colonial Office during Attlee's 1945-51 Labour government, turned it down because "I had a horrid vision of pullulating, poverty stricken, diseased nigger communities, for whom one can do nothing in the short run and who, the more one tries to help them, are querulous and ungrateful."

Defensible and indefensible usages of the term "racism"

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R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a war criminal. Both British and American codebreakers had cracked the Japanese naval code so FDR knew what was coming at Pearl Harbor. But for his own political reasons he warned no-one there. So responsibility for the civilian and military deaths at Pearl Harbor lies with FDR as well as with the Japanese. The huge firepower available at Pearl Harbor, both aboard ship and on land, could have largely neutered the attack. Can you imagine 8 battleships and various lesser craft firing all their AA batteries as the Japanese came in? The Japanese naval airforce would have been annihilated and the war would have been over before it began.

FDR prolonged the Depression. He certainly didn't cure it.

WWII did NOT end the Great Depression. It just concealed it. It in fact made living standards worse

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The KKK was intimately associated with the Democratic party. They ATTACKED Republicans!

People who mention differences in black vs. white IQ are these days almost universally howled down and subjected to the most extreme abuse. I am a psychometrician, however, so I feel obliged to defend the scientific truth of the matter:

The average African adult has about the same IQ as an average white 11-year-old and African Americans (who are partly white in ancestry) average out at a mental age of 14. The American Psychological Association is generally Left-leaning but it is the world's most prestigious body of academic psychologists. And even they have had to concede that sort of gap (one SD) in black vs. white average IQ. 11-year olds can do a lot of things but they also have their limits and there are times when such limits need to be allowed for.

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