21 posts tagged “education”

Three links about teaching in America:

MAEP, the basic funding formula for K-12 education in Mississippi, was fully funded today.  Key quote: This is the first time lawmakers have fully funded MAEP, a complex formula that provides money to schools to meet midlevel performance goals, outside of a statewide election year. The program was put into state law in the 1990s.

Hypothetical:  One of your best students, a conscientious and hard-working senior with good grades, a great attitude, and a full academic scholarship to Mississippi State, stops by your classroom during homeroom and asks to speak to you in the hallway.  Once in the hallway, he says that he came to school directly from his early-morning job at the grocery store where he unloads and opens boxes.  He takes a box cutter out of his jeans and says, "I forgot to leave this at work.  Can you hold it for me?  If I'm caught with it I will get in trouble."

Hypothetical: You are a first-year MTC teacher.  While proctoring a state test another teacher comes in the room and tells the students, "Question 12 is tricky.  Be careful.  Answer 'c' is incorrect."  The teacher leaves and the students go back to the test, presumably not answering 'c' on question 12.  What do you do?

You are a young, female teacher from "up north."  You teach high school Biology in a small Delta community with one church for every 30 residents.  Several of your female students have discreetly asked you for advice on various birth-control measures.  School district policy is to promote abstinence-only.  Furthermore, the community, spurred on by the churches, and in spite of the high teen pregnancy rate, is strongly in favor of abstinence-only measures.  You trust the teens to keep your confidence, but at the same time they are teenagers and teenagers talk.  You are worried that if you are discovered to have contradicted the official school policy, and the unofficial community norms, you will be ostracized and perhaps even lose your job.  What advice do you give?

I like these "hypothetical" situations, so much so that I may try to incorporate them into the summer training.  At the very least, I've found next month's blog topic.  In any event, here is another one:

Follow-up to the previous post.  Same situation, but instead of being a nice kid, he's a jerk: makes fun of the other students; disrespectful to the teacher; disrupts the learning environment.  Do you pass him now?

Here is a hypothetical (that came up at lunch today in discussion of this question) based on a real experience (and I think the incoming first-years would do well to reflect on these kinds of questions):

Molly linked to this interesting blog post.  Here is the question at the end of the post:

You've heard directors and teachers by the gross tell you 'Come to grips with yourself,' 'Regain your self-esteem,' Use the space,' and myriad other pretty phrases which they, and you, were surprised to find difficult to accomplish.  They are not difficult.  They are impossible.  They don't mean anything.  They are nonsense syllables, strung together by ourselves and others, and they mean 'Damned if I know, and damned if I can admit it.'