Treat teachers as professionals
Treat teachers as professionals
Thank you, Kimo Rosen, for managing to cheapen the profession of teaching by trying to draw some parallel to the cheap and tawdry world of “professional” sports in your letter “The NFL draft and the real world of jobs.” I’m sure teachers around the country will appreciate it.
Perhaps we should have teachers fight for the best teaching positions in MMA-style fighting matches, too? Boy, won’t that get your blood flowing — figuratively and literally!
Allow me to offer a much simpler and logical solution: treat teachers as professionals. Pay them as professionals. Don’t force them to financially martyr themselves and then treat them like babysitters by sending your children to them day after day unprepared to learn.
I have no problem with pay being merit-based, and no problem with removing teachers with poor performance, but creating some spectacle like a draft is simply ridiculous. They do this in sports to create fake drama to catch the fancy of those who need drama. Teaching is not a sphere where drama and spectacle needs to be created.
Michael Mann
Lihue
Kimo’s pointless—and, frankly, embarrassing—letter should never have made it into print. To make light of teachers, who struggle daily with overflowing classrooms, inadequate budgets and resources, along with ill-prepared and unruly students, and then asking them to do the impossible, is insensitive. America’s future lies with its children. We need to make certain they are properly educated.
The “drafting” proposal would treat teachers as a commodity. A teacher should be able to decide where he or she wishes to teach. Since teaching in certain schools may be more difficult, even more dangerous, than in others, we must find a way to offer higher compensation for teachers willing to serve in such schools, and attract better teachers in that way.
Naturally, parents are motivated to support their own local schools in many ways. This is great for schools in prosperous neighborhoods, but parents in poorer areas cannot provide their own local schools with similar support. Those schools cannot presently pay their teachers enough to compensate for the greater challenges they face, or even provide the children with adequate materials, a school environment conducive to learning, good after-school programs, etc. We must find a way to give those schools the support they need!
I think that Kimo’s letter was “tongue in cheek.” For that reason, this letter is probably an over-reaction.
Drafting teachers makes no sense because, unlike football players, teachers’ ability is not proven in college. In college, they are mostly just learning and practicing, not teaching in the Rose Bowl.
I had five kids go through school on Kauai. Some administrators and teachers on Kauai are great. Some are really bad. Unfortunately, the government sector is so much worse at correcting problems than the private sector. Bad administrators and teachers on Kauai just continue being bad. They can’t blame the budget or the students because other teachers and administrators are doing quite well, under the same circumstances
We should find a way to bring accountability to the public schools.
How quaint, Beeksma imagines that teachers take “seating charts 101” and pair up and, as he puts it, “practice teaching.” I guess we can judge the closeness that he monitored his 5 kid’s education by how he never came across, or processed, all those student teachers spending a year in the classroom as a degree requirement. Perhaps he judged teachers and administrators as “bad” because they didn’t give him a parade, like China gave trump, when he did finally show up. Then there’s the cliched twaddle about the public sector by yet another who has never worked in it and knows nothing about it other than the tired old party line repeated by others who made the judgement based on the scorn they received when they reached a public counter woefully unprepared. We have found May’s Dunning – Kruger poster boy!
“Drafting teachers makes no sense because, unlike football players, teachers’ ability is not proven in college. In college, they are mostly just learning and practicing, not teaching in the Rose Bowl.”
This makes no sense. A lawyer’s ability is not “proven” in college. Nor is a doctor’s. Nor is an engineer’s, nor any other profession. You are singling out teachers and attempting to hold them to some different standard simply out of a lack of respect for teachers.
I made it very clear in my response that I have no problem with accountability. But I’ve been a teacher on this island, and would likely still be doing it if it paid a living wage. Demanding accountability when you have no respect for the profession is not acceptable, and I see no such respect in either Kimo’s letter, your attempts to excuse his letter, nor your choir’s attempts to bolster your claim that I am “over-reacting.”
They say locals, just being locals. Can they hire a person from Oregon to teach English? Yes. What qualifications? I came up with 3 creterias.
1. School is in Oregon
2. Skills, more broad in scope
3. Did he graduate?
Looks ok. We have a new teacher in the DOE.
Mr. Beeksma…. Your are right the last letter if I recall drew upwards of 150 comments to a over reaction.
“Your [sic] are right the last letter if I recall drew upwards of 150 comments to a over reaction.”
Apparently, it’s only an over-reaction when it doesn’t happen to you. To us, it is an unwelcome fact of life. The root cause of the problem to which you refer lies not with me, as I stated in that “last letter.” And I will keep stating it, rest assured.
Mark Beeksma, EVERYTHING Kimo writes is “tongue in cheek!” Perhaps he should try to write something serious. My letter is not an over-reaction…it is an HONEST reaction to something that was completely pointless and rather offensive, given the importance of education and its ability to transform lives. We have a hard enough time attracting qualified teachers, much less keeping them. I’m really tired of this “1st-world society” being so completely clueless on this issue. It isn’t something to joke about, and Kimo’s letter had zero merit.