4. Credibility: Don’t be one of those self-appointed, overpaid “social media gurus.” They rarely create enough value to offset their inflated salary, and many of these tech-hipsters don’t know the difference between “trendy” and “useful.” They hop onto the neutrality wagon because it signals that they are cool, tech-savvy, and perhaps even “leet.”

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Just ‘cuz he helped found the Internet Media Blogger’s Alliance doesn’t mean he’s not an overpaid technovangelist. *rolls eyes*

He and I are doppelgängers.

I’ve got FIRE on speed dial just for him. Check him out, @twittername darthcheeta

This website should answer your vocabulary questions:

http://dictionary.reference.com/

If people make errors like that in blog posts or comments I don’t read beyond them. Employing incorrect vocabulary, syntax, or grammar is indicative of sloppy thinking.

I don’t think you know the first thing about teaching. I think you have a vague notion about it based on some pretty poor representative data.

A teacher can take a kid from zero to sixty in a blink of an eye. I can make a comment to someone that I barely know that will either give the motivation to want to be a better person or to hate teachers for a lifetime and post f’d up comments on my sister’s blog. Obviously, teachers are human and don’t know whether their comments tore someone down or pulled them from the edge of something… but regardless, I think the issue needs to be made that teachers don’t deal with anything concrete or absolute, this making the “free market” pitch complete bull shit (sorry, Libby, I love talking about it, but nothing has convinced me it’s a good thing… you guys have it all wrong, because none of you have ever spent a second as a classroom teacher to know what it’s like… empirical data, ftw!).

So, at what point does facts, stats, and figures become the only commerce in education. I donate my time as a role model to kids who don’t have one. I spend hours helping kids with their papers, assignments, projects, and speeches because no one else has the time to do it with them. I guess the next time I should say “Nope, sorry, some guy named Alex won the Interweb today and said teachers should not get involved morally or ethically because it’s not right.”

What’s ironic is it was a teacher who motivated people to pursue whatever career they have… yet, teachers get pissed on because they get summers off and are unionized…

Now, Alex, as an economist, please explain to me how teaching is anything like any other job out there? Should a dentist get paid better for his patients lack of cavities? In most jobs that “produce” things, a worker’s time is often rewarded if they are more “productive” than the other guy. How should teachers be rewarded? Perhaps you think test scores are indicative of a superior teacher… but how is it any more my responsibility when I have a class of 9th graders who do well on a state mandated writing test, I should I get credit for it because I saw them for 45 minutes per day for 20 weeks? Maybe I should be punished because as a science teacher, one of my students learned about some chemical reactions in my class and was interested and decided to make a few bombs…

Vouchers… I know Libby has done research on the topic and if I had time to devote to finding point by point analysis of why they are dumb, I would…

But let’s say we open things up for parents to decide to let so-called “bad schools” sink. Where are these kids going to go? If you give a parent $5-10K to spend on a private school, will there be enough room for the new supply? As mentioned earlier, most economists know nothing about being a teacher… they see it as a system of putting time in to earn tenure and handout worksheets. While that can be a portion of our job description, it’s only a fraction.

You clearly have an idea of how people ought to raise their children. I know that our beliefs on how to raise kids probably overlap by a good solid 98% (as we were both raised by the same set of parents ). But it’s a fascist position to think that the public sector – i.e. the state – ought to have any say in raising people’s children for them (other than instances when kids are being neglected, abused, or harmed in an extreme way). “People are too stupid to raise kids.” Can you hear how that statement conveys arrogance? Exactly what level of intelligence is necessary to be a “proper” parent? How much doubt in God should a sufficiently intelligent parent possess? How much cultural awareness, or acceptance of gay marriage, or understanding of political economy should a parent have?

I know that you have special training as an educator, but the fact remains that education is a largely uncompetitive industry. Parents, save for the more affluent, don’t have much of an option when it comes to selecting teachers whose disciplinary styles and methods for educating children line up with their own child–rearing preferences. Would this situation be different if one of the girls’ moms had provided the phallic candy? Or if she were the photographer? I knew parents like this in high school – they were kinda creepy, but they loved their kids just the same.

There’s a gray area between class room education and socialization/moral instruction, I get that. But I think it’s better for everybody if teachers are cautious to not overstep their bounds. Parents have the ultimate say in how their kids are instructed. My intuition is that educators would do better serving as an extended support system for students, not as moral authoritarians.

I think schools should be privatized and teachers exposed to the rigorous competition that disciplines other competitors in a free markets. Whether that is through vouchers or an outright privatization, I don’t care. But what I do know, and what my training as an economist tells me, is that insulation from competition never produces good results. Ever.

My experience as a student in a National Blue Ribbon public school is that teachers are people like anyone else. The notion that teachers have some superior type of skills, intellect, incentives, or knowledge to mold kids in every way is ludicrous and frightening. There are bad parents, but I do not believe that a teacher should be empowered to step in and humiliate children when the teacher thinks the parent is doing a bad job.

Teachers should teach the few subjects they are competent to teach (math, history, science, etc.) and leave morals and ethics lessons for the home. Ultimately morals and ethics exist because it is in the best interest of the individual who wants to exist in society to behave in a certain way. If those individuals do not learn, it is there fault.

“One should hope that mankind will never have to learn so important a lesson through so corrupt a channel.”
-William Godwin, responding to the argument that we need government run schooling to teach people morality.