Comment for Teachers Part 1

For my first comment for teachers assignment, I followed three weeks worth of posts by Alan Strange. Strange is a teacher in Canada. Strange is a teacher in Southern Saskatchewan, Canada. His blog can be found here. The topics of posts I commented on ranged from merit pay for teachers, students' responses to teacher's methods, and a school where students and teachers collaborate to make rules.

The first comment I posted was titled "It's not What we Teach." In this post, Strange points out that the actual material taught by instructors is not as important as how the students respond to it. My comment read :

"Greetings,

I am a Secondary Education major at the University of South Alabama. I am currently in a class called Educational Media (EDM 310).I have been assigned to read your blog and comment for the next three weeks’ posts. I will be summarizing my comments and posting them on my blog at http://www.arthurfarisedm310.blogspot.com. This post was definitely very interesting for me. It seems true that sometimes there is a disconnect between students and their teachers. I think that the ability to keep students engaged in and understanding the material the way we, as educators, want them to can be really tough. Pedagogical self-evaluation seems to be one of the most vital tools for all educators. The good ones can keep a definitive pulse on the attitude of their students."

My second comment was to a post about The Summehill School. In Summerhill, teachers and students are free to co-create rules and regulations for their school.

"Really insightful post. I really like the Summerhill model as being a potential framework for new classrooms. I get really excited when I read about educators who are investigating the possibility of revolutionizing the way we instruct and educate the generations of today. I want to be on the forefront of a newly evolved and more efficient secondary education world. The only draw-back I see to this model is that it would take some amount of time, in my estimation, for a freedom based model like Summerhill to be fully operational. In one school I have worked in, I know for a fact that the students have been so conditioned to the authoritarian model that they would run wild with the new freedom. They would make outlandish proposals that would never be realistic. In my eyes, it would take a shift at the lowest grade levels first before a k-12 implementation could be used. It’s all still exciting stuff though."

My third comment was about a post on the flaws of merit pay for teachers.

"I think that right now merit pay is just simply too good to be true. It would be wonderful if there was a fair way to evaluate teachers’ and students’ success and reward the teachers who were performing at the highest level. Sadly, we live in an incredibly flawed world where things like merit pay are just too utopian for the education system of today. Right now, it seems that each of us can really only do the best we can. I would rather be paid less and KNOW my students were getting quality, useful instruction than be paid more and have students who really had not learned anything valuable while they were in my classroom."

I really liked the critical stance that Alan Strange took on these posts. I think it is vital for teachers to be both critical and self-evaluative.