<p>“( they have a prom in middle school?)”</p>
<p>With limousines.</p>
<p>“I’m just telling you,and you can take this much to the bank, that NOBODY could stay a week at his job if he wrote normally like that. It was the food fight that undid him, obviously.”</p>
<p>Obviously, you aren’t familiar with the politics of appointments in the New York City public school system. That’s your answer right there. Ever hear of the “rubber rooms?” Also, deans are a dime a dozen and I suspect that the title means a lot less here than elsewhere. Based on Edad’s post, I’m thinking that’s true. Deans are not next in line to principals here. It’s just basically a teacher with certain added responsibilities and money. Not truly an administrator – this is the guy with the megaphone who screams in the hallways “move along now.”</p>
<p>"school district has at least one person just like this individual. This is the former high school jock who drifted through the State U, got a phys ed degree, and later on completed the requirements for teacher certification and began a career teaching phys ed. "</p>
<p>Ding, ding, ding!! We have a winner. EDad, that was remarkably accurate.</p>
<p>LOL, Edad, I gotta give you this one. Your scenario sounds equally plausible to the one I spun. Both are based not just on frothy “speculation” but from watching patterns over many years. </p>
<p>I did NOT know that “Dean” meant so little in that region of the country.
So it sounds like an “Assistant Principal” as I’d know it from my experiences.</p>
<p>Either way, the guy HAD to send home same-day notice to parents, or the school would be beseiged by calls the next day trying to find out what happened. At least the parents had a page in hand to know what did, and didn’t happen in that cafeteria. Even if it was a MISERABLE letter to read.</p>
<p>This situation also proves that you do not need to go to a good school, or learn much, or work hard to get a good job. Of course, the Dean will be embarrassed for a while. I doubt that will bother him much. Summer vacation is about to start. The school administration will take some corrective actions. Letters sent home will need to be reviewed and approved in advance. So the more literate teachers who send notes and letters home will need to go through the extra step of getting them approved.</p>
<p>In our school, we have small learning communities, each with its own dean of curriculum and dean of students. Communications from the dean of students tended to be short and I don’t recall grammatical errors in them; at any rate, the deans of students were not chosen for their academic skills. So I could accept edad’s scenario as plausible.</p>
<p>“Plausible.” You better believe it. Even at our “very competitive” high school, administrative positions are filled with these old jocks. Meantime all of the capable, energetic young teachers are struggling for tenure and making well less than half the salaries.</p>
<p>Edad is right on with his description of “dean” as I know it based on deans in our middle and high schhols. And I agree with the assessment that he oversees discipline and perhaps the physical plant and maintenance staff. He is not writing letters to anyone on a regular basis, other than standard preprinted letters having to do with detention, after school suspensions, etc. And the staff members that are directly under him most likely are not college graduates.</p>
<p>He’s a dean, NOT a teacher. If you think his spelling is badly, you should take a look at dockyumins from the Founding Fathers in the Smithsonian. It was good enough for government work - good enough, in fact, for the founding of a nation. </p>
<p>Spelling is MUCH overrated. His greatest sin was that he didn’t use Spellcheck, or better, leave it to his sekraterrier.</p>
<p>I get paid quite well, thank you, for handling written communications. If everyone spelt and grandmard well, I’d be out of a job.</p>
<p>(Noah Webster was a proto-Nazi. ;))</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>He’s an idiot.</p>
<p>
Marite - First of all, this was a middle school. Secondly, the person in question was a Dean. Regardless, it shouldn’t be that difficult to find someone competent enough to teach middle school math. I know that unfortunately, many of the teachers that have managed to complete HS, complete college, and get a teaching degree seem to not have a middle school competency level in math but there hopefully will be an adequate percentage that can. We’re not typically talking about Calculus here.</p>
<p>It’s really a sad state of affairs when our colleges are graduating such incompetent teachers that they can’t handle basic middle school level English language and math. The competency level needs to be bumped up.</p>
<p>UCSDdad:</p>
<p>I’m addressing the issue of math teachers only. IT IS difficult to find good math teachers. I was involved in hiring teachers in k-12 over a twleve year period and I got to know the pool of applicants for different grade levels and in different subjects. I speak from this wider experience, not just my S’s</p>
<p>Part of the problem is the lack of specialists before 7th grade and the emphasis on literacy over numeracy. So the teachers who get hired range from merely competent to terrific at teaching in the humanities and social studies and their math abilities is tolerated.<br>
When we found that our S’s first grade teacher was good at teaching math, we decided to tolerate her lack of good spelling skills.
By the way, Liping Ma would not agree that it should not be “difficult findfng someone competent enough to teach middle school math.” See her
Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics: Teachers’ Understanding of Fundamental Mathematics in China and the United States, 1999.</p>
<p>I suppose I inderstand it somewhat at the higher levels since the requirements for math education for a teacher must be quite low and those who are competent in math might move on to higher paying fields. I just find it a sad state of affairs the the level of competency is so low. </p>
<p>And, how hard could it be to teach first grade math? Did you really see a problem with teachers at this level? If so, IMO, they shouldn’t have ever obtained a teaching credential.</p>
<p>I guess my kids lucked out because they had (mostly) competent math teachers at their public MS and HS and they took the highest levels of math offered.</p>
<p>mini, you are too funny there!</p>
<p>The hard thing about teaching first grade math is not the subject content, but the pedagogy. 25 kids, all age 6, come from 25 different directions. Most First Grade math teachers are trained now, how to quickly set up and strike down 45-minute lessons at centers with concrete materials, so the kids have plenty of opportunities to manipulate them with guiding questions.</p>
<p>If you’re an ordinary math teacher, the kind Marite is too smart to hire (more power to you, Marite!), the kids are mucking away for 45 minutes with lots of little beans in cups, or blocks that pop together and apart, until the lesson ends.</p>
<pre><code>If you’re an excellent math teacher, you’ve diagnosed and know by heart which children in the room already understand (just one example here) a fundamental principle such as conservancy of numbers, and which chidlren do not yet undertand that. So when you visit those that do not you ask them different questions to develop that skill, while the kid next to him (also playing with cubes) is asked an entirely different question.
</code></pre>
<p>(Translation: conservancy of number means at the start of First Grade, if I put out 6 beans and tell the kid, “count 'em” he does so and announces, “Six.” But then if I put down 1 more and ask, “NOW, how many are there?” some kids in the room say “7” right away, but others go back and start to count the whole pile from 1 up to 7. Those that could hold that number “6” in their heads and just pronounce “7” have internalized a basic understanding called number conservancy. Without it, I’d be a fool not to reteach until he GETS number conservancy before moving him up to the next level of questions. But I’d also be a fool to bore the other guy, who’s ready for higher questions, such as “how many more will i need to make it 9 beans?” A greater teacher would also know that the previous question was a “bump” too strong for some, since it included a “missing addend” and that the in-between question for the middling student might have been this one: "Great! So if I have 7 beans and add two more, how many will there be? because you’ve provided the second addend.
You have to know each kid and where they need to go next, in other words.</p>
<p>A gifted teacher of gifted students would be helping them learn to form their own questions, too. And make that happen without decking the kid next to him.</p>
<p>So that’s kind of wonky, but I’m just trying to give you a flavor of what goes on in First Grade math, along with the worksheets that might be done after all this hands-on stuff. The worksheets go home to the parents, and often look a lot easier and don’t fully represent all that went on in class, sigh. Those are the curriculum books’ worksheets. They play a role, too, but hopefully children aren’t <em>only</em> doing worksheets all day for First Grade math. </p>
<p>That’s why I say it’s not the math subject matter, but the pedagogy that’s hard, not to mention classroom management so the room isn’t full of spilled beans all over the floor.</p>
<p>UCSDdad:</p>
<p>If you are not interested in buying Liping Ma’s book, go to Amazon.com and read the reviews. She discusses 3rd and 4th grade math and shows how American teachers are often woefully unprepared to explain such concepts as addition and subtraction with carrying over. They know how to do it; that’s not the issue. They do not know how to explain it. We’re not talking Multivariable Calculus here!
It’s not the subject matter, it’s not even classroom management, or students’ widely different levels of preparation. It’s pedagogy.</p>
<p>“American teachers are often woefully unprepared to explain such concepts as addition and subtraction with carrying over.”</p>
<p>…So supposedly 3rd & 4th grade teachers don’t know how to teach place value, and how that applies to addition & subtraction?</p>
<p>According to Liping Ma they know the procedure but they do not know how to explain why it works. </p>
<p>Here is a review from Amazon.com, from a teacher:</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Marite, I knew all that.</p>
<p>So for example, American teachers don’t explain regrouping, and how a vertical subtraction problem is merely a convenient way to allow us to calculate? that digits condense the value?)</p>
<p>(Good teaching illustrates by expanding the numbers when introducing the topic of borrowing or carrying over, for example.)</p>
<p>Sorry, but I’ve never had a problem teaching addition & subtraction so that children get it, and get it reliably. This is why you test for comprehension orally by asking the concept in different ways & from different angles, so that you are sure the concept is understood.</p>
<p>Either teacher credentialing is extremely poor now (long after I received my training), or there are very stupid teachers now that I guess I haven’t met. Sorry, but the kinds of things Liping Ma discusses, at least on the <em>elementary</em> level, are not new to me or to my pedagogy.</p>
<p>Liping Ma is not claiming that NO US teacher knows how to teach elementary math. She is not talking about YOU for heaven’s sake!</p>
<p>Her book has received kudos from advocates of both sides of the Math Wars and so many endorsements from teachers that she must have struck a real nerve. Don’t take my word for it. Google Liping Ma and read for yourself.</p>