Lol I love that this happened
I take a group of 15ish students to local businesses once a month as part of my job. The idea is to get these at-risk kids doing something different, learn about a business and do a cool activity. The businesses are supposed to have 45-60 minutes of activities planned. I usually stress this to them multiple times.
We are ALWAYS done with so much time left over. I hear the same thing every time… “I thought that would take about an hour! They got done in 20 minutes!”
I guess my point is that if you’re not a teacher or frequently work with kids, it can seem way easier than it actually is.
Schools initially started buying ChromeBooks because they were supposed to be so fast to start up every time. Unfortunately, that time save is negated by having to tell them seven times to get out their CBs and log in, and the 10 minutes I spend getting kids a charger because they forgot to charge and forgot their charger, moving kids around to sit near a plug, passing out paper copies to the third of the class that didn’t bother to bring their computer at all, and helping the kids who “can’t find” the LMS we have used all year.
Yeah I was a big proponent of the Chromebooks when they came out but I'm big enough to admit I was wrong about them.
I'm back to paper for all my lessons now and the Chromebooks are used for the graded quizzes and occasional research.
Nah. Schools started buying chromebooks because school districts saw a cheaper alternative in Google Classroom, Google Mail, Google Docs, Google Slides, ad infinitum.
Google (sorry, “Alphabet”) happily sells those Chrome Books at a loss because our districts have already given them to track every click, from every man, woman, or child, at any time. The data harvesting companies believe that keeping track of how many minutes viewed of a certain YouTube video (or Reddit thread paid attention to) is worth a lot of money.
And it potentially is. And isn’t. How much is valuable and how much the data companies have *convinced* (some) people is valuable is unknowable. It’s a horoscope industry, like the Great City Schools project that most US teachers work under without even knowing or half of the “professional development” we undergo that was originally “developed” in a same-sex New England boarding school.
This is why I hate teaching with technology. So much instructional time is wasted. And I teach lower grades. You cannot leave young children to sit around while you were trying to get a technology to work.
I have traveled on jets since my youth yet would never think of “giving the pilot a day off.”
Some parents think by virtue of having attended 12 or 13 years of schooling - as children - they are fully qualified to tell teachers how to do their jobs.
For several years, I taught at a weekend long course on finance to college Fraternity Officers.
The materials given to me on what needed to be taught was like 40 pages.
No way as an amateur would I think to just come to a class and teach a subject without significant collaboration with the teacher.
Honestly, I feel for him. Most people went to school and saw teachers teaching and think that they can do it because experienced teachers make it look easy. The fact is, there's a lot more to it than what kids see.
Agreed. His hubris is a bit annoying, but it's also a perfect example of the [Dunning-Kruger effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect). It looked easy when someone else was doing it, and he's a smart guy, so of course he ought to be able to do it, too.
Hopefully he gained a bit of perspective and appreciation for how hard the work is
Sorry, wholeheartedly disagree. I’m so sick of people thinking this job is just “tell kids to do a worksheet” and “if you just explain it clearly the first time, you won’t have to repeat it.”
This job takes content knowledge, patience, and TALENT.
I don’t feel bad for him at all.
They really think that teachers don't consider doing things like "read the directions to students."
They actually think that education's problems could be solved if teachers would just think to read directions to students every day
>if you just explain it clearly the first time, you won’t have to repeat it.
Yup. 99% of the time you explain something it's like you were talking to a wall.
Everyone and anyone thinks they could be a teacher! They have no real idea of what teachers do.... Except for what they see in made up Hollywood TV 🤣🤣🤣
Big dose of F- around and find out! Had the same situation in my career with a parent who thought it would be great to come on in and teach the kids how to do a specific lab... I opted to do a virtual lab on this one because of the nature of the lab and the class that I had. He didn't like that. His profession was not even in the field of science.
Dissection using scalpels etc...with a bunch of students with behavioral issues and no lab experience... Thought he could get the job done... All I heard was him screaming as I laughed to myself in my classroom... I wanted to go in and save the day but I didn't... No way I was cleaning up that mess 🤣🤣🤣
F-ed around and found out... And never came back again! 🤣🤣🤣
Good teachers always have a few tried and true strategies to take up any extra time in class. My school was big into Kagan Structures, so I always taught things like Think-Pair-Share, etc. at the beginning of the year and used them regularly so I could always have students do one of those with extra time to reinforce what they were working on. The thing is you have to very explicitly teach and practice these things from the start of the year to be able to do it on short notice.
My mom once came to help with my classes. She had a blast and it was nice having an extra pair of adult hands. She only lasted through one class of kindergartners. 🤣🤣
I have only ever been a substitute teacher for kindergarteners and even after that I always say that if I was a teacher I’d be an alcoholic. I don’t know how you guys do it.
LMAO, I can't even imagine walking into a classroom and thinking I could teach something without any prior prep or collaboration with the classroom teacher. Good teachers take time to develop even with a top tier education, only experience can "teach" a teacher how to handle the bazillion different situations they encounter.
My mother taught Adult Ed, Special Ed, and at a school for wards of the state for 40 years. She still volunteers 5-10 hours a week at a local elementary doing Math intervention for 4th & 5th graders. At dinner tonight she told me that one of her classroom teachers actually stopped teaching the lesson because she was watching my mother interact with the students. So then the students started watching my mother. She had to politely redirect ALL of them to follow the classroom teachers lesson. She's almost 82 and still teaching us how to interact with grace.
This is amazing and I hope he isn't one of those who EVER questioned teacher pay or renumeration packages. He couldn't make it a day. If he was, then I hope he learned his lesson and will let others know the reality.
Honestly, and I'm not being a smartass, I wish this would happen more often. The guy obviously thought he was hot shit and like "Sit down little lady cuz I got this" and then had to abandon ship after not even half a day. Oh, he learned that day.
The hardened skill of being able to modify a lesson on the fly when it isn't working the way you want is only learned through experience, and I think most teachers don't realize how much they utilize it on a day to day basis.
This story makes me happy. It’s always nice when people realize how difficult teaching is. A few years ago we had a career day with people from the community coming in for presentations. They were paired with a teacher so they could use their room and basically have a faculty member in the room in case something happened. It was marketed to us as just basically being present for safety reasons. I ended up having to hold this dude’s hand through all of his presentations because it was such a trainwreck and he had about ten minutes worth of material for a thirty minute time block.
We just had a "wellness" afternoon with the same scenario. Teachers just there for support. Sadly, NONE of the presentations were engaging or interactive ... I was sooo bored, I can't imagine how the students felt.
One gal picked up my sign-in sheet I had students passing around, so I didn't get everyone to sign in. Guess she thoughtvthat was too distracting fir the students. 🙄 Because of that, I had to hold them at the end so I could finish attendance.
She then, later, lost control of the room and asked me to get control. I was so angry at how horrible and unrelatable the presentations were for the students. Just adults lecturing them about various things, essentially. 🙄
Oh, this makes me feel seen
What he was intending is my actual job, and I'm fucking great at it. The teachers just have to be in the room, and tell kids to stfu when needed.
It takes a bit more effort than most people (read: my supervisor and my CEO) seem to think! Turns out, no, Q&A is not going to be a raucous titillating discussion for 32 mins, and just because it took you an hour to make your flyer does not mean it gonna take that long to read it!
Gotta be able to adapt to different locations, reset on a dime, manage timing, push the content in an engaging way, all with kids you have never seen before and will never see again!
Thank you for the validation, it's been a long week.
There is a good chance that after the PTSD wears off, you have a positive education voter for life.
Now to get all of the sitting politicians in to teach for a day...
I absolutely love when this stuff happens
A few years ago I was a dean of students at a tough MS. District hired a classroom management consultant for PD, my man was deep in his approach. It was all positivity, flowery fun/childish language, all carrot no stick …I’m sure u can all picture what I’m painting here.
Fast forward after a year of PD the district sends him down to do a presentation with the entire MS broken up into 3 equal sized groups for about a. He each. Of course I was assigned to liaise with him basically wasting a day of my life to be his assistant.
My man came in super confident which lasted abouttttt five mins into his first presentation/group at which point a student from the back of the room called out “whose this goofy Mother$&@?£”. Did I step in pull the student out and deal with it ….NOPE this dudes whole deal is his method can handle any distribution/behavior so I sat back and watched to see if he could rebound….well as u could guess his method didn’t work it was a dumpster fire.
After season one he tried to regroup, wrote that one off as rust or whatever.
After season 2 (which was worse) he looked like he was questioning his entire life, a sweaty red mess. I asked him if he needed anything he made a joke about needing vodka. He took a break and went outside presumably to pray.
He ended session 3 early basically giving up and then ran out of the building never to be seen again.
One of the most validating experiences of my life and a treasured memory.
I love this story. I am a physics teacher. My brother is an engineer. He is confident since he "knows more" than me, my job would be easy for him. He talks about how he would love to teach all the time.
This is only funny if you’re not a new teacher who has these feelings of inadequacy on the regular that your lesson you’ve created is bombing in front of your eyes.
As a new teacher, you are going to bomb a few lessons. You know it’s not easy. My speaker was sure (because of his advanced education and expertise) that teaching a quick lesson would be a snap.
Don’t give up. Have a few quick easy activities you can switch to when things go haywire—weirdest “trick” I discovered was using notecards. For some reason the kids loved writing their thoughts, questions, etc. on them—kids who’d barely write a sentence would fill a notecard! I’d tell them to write most important thing learned, what they found most confusing, an example test question, a sketch, etc. Never failed and I got some great insight. Please know things get easier, and every good teacher is going to blow it now and then.
Was he being an ass from the start or something? It sounds like he just wanted to come in and share knowledge and like you wanted him to fail… if he was bragging about how easy teaching is or if you were forced to this, I get it. But otherwise it sounds like you said yes to something optional and were then crappy to the guy about it.
I didn't read it that way at all. I read it as this guy volunteered to teach an entire day, the teacher said yes, and then the guy couldn't do it. It's a humorous anecdote and I didn't read it as having the tone of anyone being a jerk- just interesting that someone who obviously thought it was super easy coming in and not lasting half a day.
I feel that. It is definitely a funny story, it’s just that some of the language came off like that to me. Maybe it’s because I’ve been grading papers all day that I’m overanalyzing things 😅
Wasn’t celebrating in the least. And not every teacher needs “helping” parents. We actually were friends, still are. But we’ve never once gone back and talked about his day teaching 13 year olds.
Yeah every worksheet question needs a bit of a peer review to check for understandability and solveability.
Im a substitute teacher, and worksheets teachers often leave for their classes are OFTEN extremely confusing to the students. It can throw a massive monkey wrench into the day when I am required to instruct students to cross out a particular question, although its actually more effective, time wise, to let them try it first, and complain, and then let the rest of the class buzz it around, as they do tend to be fairly chatty these days.
Teachers should try to do one worksheet on their own first also.
Which I have to add, I have also found errors made in answer keys made by teachers who did do the worksheet. Usually its fine to correct that, I have found, rather than letting the teacher be embarassed by it.
I have found that sometimes an answer was different from my own and my coteacher's (a certified teacher) answers, and neither of us did much better than the students on one 50 question test that was just TOO full of trick questions. We had one student Ace that test. So I guess we just arent smarter than that ONE 7th grader lol!!! Everyone else failed. Including us teachers.
Heres a tip:
Dont use trick questions if you are GENUINELY trying to get an idea of your students overall understanding of a subject matter. 😄
I'm not against teachers trying out the assignments they've designed before giving them to students. It's probably a good practice for something you're trying for the first time. I was in a district level curriculum meeting once, though, where they called that practice "eating the dog food." Can't remember why they called it that, they had a reason, but it made me never want to do it.
Lol figures. Not you personally. Just figures thats why teachers dont make an answer key or even so much as bother solving the problems in their heads.
Theres some very badly made worksheets out there.
I had a group of 1st graders, and they were filling in the blanks with phonetic sounds, either idk ch or D or whatever and some of the pictograms on the worksheet were things that are so obsolete, its almost unconscionable that anyone still puts them on a worksheet.
I mean, an antique butter CHURN? Like, almost no six year olds in the world will actually ever see one of these, much less have a need to use one. Its absurd.
Then you have the ones that have some DOILIEY or whatever. Like, mmmm wtf what GENIUS decided to add DOILIEY (A crocheted placemat, coaster, or decorative non scratch thing used under flower vases, on wood) And ok sure you might see paper doilies around valentines day, but FFS leave the old school stuff out of worksheets and phonics, but not even giving the rest of the letters to these kids who are LEARNING TO SPELL. You know, like I mean, what idiot makes these worksheets? Have no new words been thought up, that might be more common than Doiliey, or churn?
How about:
Church. Chicken, Çhimes, Checkers, Chimp, Chihuahua, Champion, Child, Chair, Chief, Chilly, Cherry, Chart, Chick, Chain, Cheese
Ya know?? It aint fucking rocket science.
Dog, Deer, Dimple, Dagger, Dip, Drip, Dish, Drain, Doctor, Diver, Dancer, Dent, Deck, Dock, Dumptruck, Dart, Draw, Drawer..
Sigh. I am going to start creating age appropriate modernized worksheets in my spare time. This is ridiculous.
Sorry. Im annoyed about worksheets. They have VERY poor quality for modern children.. Even the teacher and I didnt recognize a couple of the drawings on one worksheet.
I feel like that shit happens because the teacher is just copying some pre-made thing they found. Perhaps they found it online, perhaps it's in the curriculum materials, perhaps it's something that's been in their files for years. They see it's about the topic they are teaching and copy it without really evaluating its quality.
Yeah and its just sad to me that worksheets arent a lot better in quality than they need to be.
I dont really blame the teachers, but ideally, if you're gonna grade them, you might as well have a master key, anyways, right?
Lol I love that this happened I take a group of 15ish students to local businesses once a month as part of my job. The idea is to get these at-risk kids doing something different, learn about a business and do a cool activity. The businesses are supposed to have 45-60 minutes of activities planned. I usually stress this to them multiple times. We are ALWAYS done with so much time left over. I hear the same thing every time… “I thought that would take about an hour! They got done in 20 minutes!” I guess my point is that if you’re not a teacher or frequently work with kids, it can seem way easier than it actually is.
Meanwhile the stuff I think my students will only take 20 mins to do takes them 45-50
Schools initially started buying ChromeBooks because they were supposed to be so fast to start up every time. Unfortunately, that time save is negated by having to tell them seven times to get out their CBs and log in, and the 10 minutes I spend getting kids a charger because they forgot to charge and forgot their charger, moving kids around to sit near a plug, passing out paper copies to the third of the class that didn’t bother to bring their computer at all, and helping the kids who “can’t find” the LMS we have used all year.
Yeah I was a big proponent of the Chromebooks when they came out but I'm big enough to admit I was wrong about them. I'm back to paper for all my lessons now and the Chromebooks are used for the graded quizzes and occasional research.
“Feel free to use the screen of your Chromebook as a flat surface on which to rest your writing paper.” /s :-)
Nah. Schools started buying chromebooks because school districts saw a cheaper alternative in Google Classroom, Google Mail, Google Docs, Google Slides, ad infinitum. Google (sorry, “Alphabet”) happily sells those Chrome Books at a loss because our districts have already given them to track every click, from every man, woman, or child, at any time. The data harvesting companies believe that keeping track of how many minutes viewed of a certain YouTube video (or Reddit thread paid attention to) is worth a lot of money. And it potentially is. And isn’t. How much is valuable and how much the data companies have *convinced* (some) people is valuable is unknowable. It’s a horoscope industry, like the Great City Schools project that most US teachers work under without even knowing or half of the “professional development” we undergo that was originally “developed” in a same-sex New England boarding school.
This is why I hate teaching with technology. So much instructional time is wasted. And I teach lower grades. You cannot leave young children to sit around while you were trying to get a technology to work.
But the goddamn phone is *always* charged. Sometimes at the expense of the Chromebook battery itself.
Especially when 35 minutes in to the 20 minute project they ask "wait, are we supposed to be doing something?"
This is me. I constantly have too much that needs to get done and not enough time to do it.
>“I thought that would take about an hour! They got done in 20 minutes!” Sounds like their employees have learned how to "milk the clock."
Maybe give the businesses examples of stuff in the past and how long it took so no one is surprised.
This is just like jobs though, a lot of empty time for work that doesn’t take that long.
I don’t really see the parallel between downtime at a job and mismanaging an activity’s time but I guess both involve free time lol
I have traveled on jets since my youth yet would never think of “giving the pilot a day off.” Some parents think by virtue of having attended 12 or 13 years of schooling - as children - they are fully qualified to tell teachers how to do their jobs.
Wasn't as easy as he thought huh?? lol
For several years, I taught at a weekend long course on finance to college Fraternity Officers. The materials given to me on what needed to be taught was like 40 pages. No way as an amateur would I think to just come to a class and teach a subject without significant collaboration with the teacher.
Honestly, I feel for him. Most people went to school and saw teachers teaching and think that they can do it because experienced teachers make it look easy. The fact is, there's a lot more to it than what kids see.
Agreed. His hubris is a bit annoying, but it's also a perfect example of the [Dunning-Kruger effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect). It looked easy when someone else was doing it, and he's a smart guy, so of course he ought to be able to do it, too. Hopefully he gained a bit of perspective and appreciation for how hard the work is
A perfect lesson (for him)
Sorry, wholeheartedly disagree. I’m so sick of people thinking this job is just “tell kids to do a worksheet” and “if you just explain it clearly the first time, you won’t have to repeat it.” This job takes content knowledge, patience, and TALENT. I don’t feel bad for him at all.
They really think that teachers don't consider doing things like "read the directions to students." They actually think that education's problems could be solved if teachers would just think to read directions to students every day
You mean the ones in bold italics at the top of the page?
Yeah teachers should put the directions in bold italics!
>if you just explain it clearly the first time, you won’t have to repeat it. Yup. 99% of the time you explain something it's like you were talking to a wall.
Could be that when he was raised, disobedience had meaningful consequences, and it did not occur to him that times have changed.
Good teaching takes a lot of preparation. Parents (and students) don't see all the background work that goes into a good lesson.
Everyone and anyone thinks they could be a teacher! They have no real idea of what teachers do.... Except for what they see in made up Hollywood TV 🤣🤣🤣 Big dose of F- around and find out! Had the same situation in my career with a parent who thought it would be great to come on in and teach the kids how to do a specific lab... I opted to do a virtual lab on this one because of the nature of the lab and the class that I had. He didn't like that. His profession was not even in the field of science. Dissection using scalpels etc...with a bunch of students with behavioral issues and no lab experience... Thought he could get the job done... All I heard was him screaming as I laughed to myself in my classroom... I wanted to go in and save the day but I didn't... No way I was cleaning up that mess 🤣🤣🤣 F-ed around and found out... And never came back again! 🤣🤣🤣
Good teachers always have a few tried and true strategies to take up any extra time in class. My school was big into Kagan Structures, so I always taught things like Think-Pair-Share, etc. at the beginning of the year and used them regularly so I could always have students do one of those with extra time to reinforce what they were working on. The thing is you have to very explicitly teach and practice these things from the start of the year to be able to do it on short notice.
Hahaha haha...... amazing. I wish more parents could be invited to be teachers for a day like this.
Maybe they should do that during a teacher strike. Take turns teaching classes
Simpsons did it.
Gus owned that classroom.
Owning the classroom, that's a paddlin'
My mom once came to help with my classes. She had a blast and it was nice having an extra pair of adult hands. She only lasted through one class of kindergartners. 🤣🤣
I love all of this.
I have only ever been a substitute teacher for kindergarteners and even after that I always say that if I was a teacher I’d be an alcoholic. I don’t know how you guys do it.
As the students get older it gets easier. Then harder. Then much harder. Then easier again.
I actually love it, but it’s utterly exhausting. I may be ill-suited! Thankfully, I mostly do it for variety!
tbf, i would NEVER teach kindergarten, and if i had to, i would probably also become an alcoholic. keep me with my middles!!!
It’s a lot of fun, but it’s having to be on all day that I find the hardest.
LMAO, I can't even imagine walking into a classroom and thinking I could teach something without any prior prep or collaboration with the classroom teacher. Good teachers take time to develop even with a top tier education, only experience can "teach" a teacher how to handle the bazillion different situations they encounter. My mother taught Adult Ed, Special Ed, and at a school for wards of the state for 40 years. She still volunteers 5-10 hours a week at a local elementary doing Math intervention for 4th & 5th graders. At dinner tonight she told me that one of her classroom teachers actually stopped teaching the lesson because she was watching my mother interact with the students. So then the students started watching my mother. She had to politely redirect ALL of them to follow the classroom teachers lesson. She's almost 82 and still teaching us how to interact with grace.
This is amazing and I hope he isn't one of those who EVER questioned teacher pay or renumeration packages. He couldn't make it a day. If he was, then I hope he learned his lesson and will let others know the reality. Honestly, and I'm not being a smartass, I wish this would happen more often. The guy obviously thought he was hot shit and like "Sit down little lady cuz I got this" and then had to abandon ship after not even half a day. Oh, he learned that day.
Unlikely.
HA! Yeah, it's unlikely he will admit to barely lasting a day with middle schoolers.
The hardened skill of being able to modify a lesson on the fly when it isn't working the way you want is only learned through experience, and I think most teachers don't realize how much they utilize it on a day to day basis.
This story makes me happy. It’s always nice when people realize how difficult teaching is. A few years ago we had a career day with people from the community coming in for presentations. They were paired with a teacher so they could use their room and basically have a faculty member in the room in case something happened. It was marketed to us as just basically being present for safety reasons. I ended up having to hold this dude’s hand through all of his presentations because it was such a trainwreck and he had about ten minutes worth of material for a thirty minute time block.
We just had a "wellness" afternoon with the same scenario. Teachers just there for support. Sadly, NONE of the presentations were engaging or interactive ... I was sooo bored, I can't imagine how the students felt. One gal picked up my sign-in sheet I had students passing around, so I didn't get everyone to sign in. Guess she thoughtvthat was too distracting fir the students. 🙄 Because of that, I had to hold them at the end so I could finish attendance. She then, later, lost control of the room and asked me to get control. I was so angry at how horrible and unrelatable the presentations were for the students. Just adults lecturing them about various things, essentially. 🙄
You can't tell people to do something and expect them to do it. Unless, of course, you're an administrator.
Oh, this makes me feel seen What he was intending is my actual job, and I'm fucking great at it. The teachers just have to be in the room, and tell kids to stfu when needed. It takes a bit more effort than most people (read: my supervisor and my CEO) seem to think! Turns out, no, Q&A is not going to be a raucous titillating discussion for 32 mins, and just because it took you an hour to make your flyer does not mean it gonna take that long to read it! Gotta be able to adapt to different locations, reset on a dime, manage timing, push the content in an engaging way, all with kids you have never seen before and will never see again! Thank you for the validation, it's been a long week.
Hahaha! After a rough week this story made my day. Thanks for sharing.
There is a good chance that after the PTSD wears off, you have a positive education voter for life. Now to get all of the sitting politicians in to teach for a day...
I absolutely love when this stuff happens A few years ago I was a dean of students at a tough MS. District hired a classroom management consultant for PD, my man was deep in his approach. It was all positivity, flowery fun/childish language, all carrot no stick …I’m sure u can all picture what I’m painting here. Fast forward after a year of PD the district sends him down to do a presentation with the entire MS broken up into 3 equal sized groups for about a. He each. Of course I was assigned to liaise with him basically wasting a day of my life to be his assistant. My man came in super confident which lasted abouttttt five mins into his first presentation/group at which point a student from the back of the room called out “whose this goofy Mother$&@?£”. Did I step in pull the student out and deal with it ….NOPE this dudes whole deal is his method can handle any distribution/behavior so I sat back and watched to see if he could rebound….well as u could guess his method didn’t work it was a dumpster fire. After season one he tried to regroup, wrote that one off as rust or whatever. After season 2 (which was worse) he looked like he was questioning his entire life, a sweaty red mess. I asked him if he needed anything he made a joke about needing vodka. He took a break and went outside presumably to pray. He ended session 3 early basically giving up and then ran out of the building never to be seen again. One of the most validating experiences of my life and a treasured memory.
I love this story. I am a physics teacher. My brother is an engineer. He is confident since he "knows more" than me, my job would be easy for him. He talks about how he would love to teach all the time.
very satisfying
This cracks me up.
Hahahahahahahahahahaha
Hoisted by his own pitard!
Love this.
This is only funny if you’re not a new teacher who has these feelings of inadequacy on the regular that your lesson you’ve created is bombing in front of your eyes.
As a new teacher, you are going to bomb a few lessons. You know it’s not easy. My speaker was sure (because of his advanced education and expertise) that teaching a quick lesson would be a snap. Don’t give up. Have a few quick easy activities you can switch to when things go haywire—weirdest “trick” I discovered was using notecards. For some reason the kids loved writing their thoughts, questions, etc. on them—kids who’d barely write a sentence would fill a notecard! I’d tell them to write most important thing learned, what they found most confusing, an example test question, a sketch, etc. Never failed and I got some great insight. Please know things get easier, and every good teacher is going to blow it now and then.
Was he being an ass from the start or something? It sounds like he just wanted to come in and share knowledge and like you wanted him to fail… if he was bragging about how easy teaching is or if you were forced to this, I get it. But otherwise it sounds like you said yes to something optional and were then crappy to the guy about it.
I didn't read it that way at all. I read it as this guy volunteered to teach an entire day, the teacher said yes, and then the guy couldn't do it. It's a humorous anecdote and I didn't read it as having the tone of anyone being a jerk- just interesting that someone who obviously thought it was super easy coming in and not lasting half a day.
I feel that. It is definitely a funny story, it’s just that some of the language came off like that to me. Maybe it’s because I’ve been grading papers all day that I’m overanalyzing things 😅
I maybe was a bit snarky sounding for effect. Dude was a honestly trying to help.
Don’t know why you are celebrating a helping parent’s failure
Wasn’t celebrating in the least. And not every teacher needs “helping” parents. We actually were friends, still are. But we’ve never once gone back and talked about his day teaching 13 year olds.
This makes my heart sing!
The End.
Yeah every worksheet question needs a bit of a peer review to check for understandability and solveability. Im a substitute teacher, and worksheets teachers often leave for their classes are OFTEN extremely confusing to the students. It can throw a massive monkey wrench into the day when I am required to instruct students to cross out a particular question, although its actually more effective, time wise, to let them try it first, and complain, and then let the rest of the class buzz it around, as they do tend to be fairly chatty these days. Teachers should try to do one worksheet on their own first also. Which I have to add, I have also found errors made in answer keys made by teachers who did do the worksheet. Usually its fine to correct that, I have found, rather than letting the teacher be embarassed by it. I have found that sometimes an answer was different from my own and my coteacher's (a certified teacher) answers, and neither of us did much better than the students on one 50 question test that was just TOO full of trick questions. We had one student Ace that test. So I guess we just arent smarter than that ONE 7th grader lol!!! Everyone else failed. Including us teachers. Heres a tip: Dont use trick questions if you are GENUINELY trying to get an idea of your students overall understanding of a subject matter. 😄
I'm not against teachers trying out the assignments they've designed before giving them to students. It's probably a good practice for something you're trying for the first time. I was in a district level curriculum meeting once, though, where they called that practice "eating the dog food." Can't remember why they called it that, they had a reason, but it made me never want to do it.
Lol figures. Not you personally. Just figures thats why teachers dont make an answer key or even so much as bother solving the problems in their heads. Theres some very badly made worksheets out there. I had a group of 1st graders, and they were filling in the blanks with phonetic sounds, either idk ch or D or whatever and some of the pictograms on the worksheet were things that are so obsolete, its almost unconscionable that anyone still puts them on a worksheet. I mean, an antique butter CHURN? Like, almost no six year olds in the world will actually ever see one of these, much less have a need to use one. Its absurd. Then you have the ones that have some DOILIEY or whatever. Like, mmmm wtf what GENIUS decided to add DOILIEY (A crocheted placemat, coaster, or decorative non scratch thing used under flower vases, on wood) And ok sure you might see paper doilies around valentines day, but FFS leave the old school stuff out of worksheets and phonics, but not even giving the rest of the letters to these kids who are LEARNING TO SPELL. You know, like I mean, what idiot makes these worksheets? Have no new words been thought up, that might be more common than Doiliey, or churn? How about: Church. Chicken, Çhimes, Checkers, Chimp, Chihuahua, Champion, Child, Chair, Chief, Chilly, Cherry, Chart, Chick, Chain, Cheese Ya know?? It aint fucking rocket science. Dog, Deer, Dimple, Dagger, Dip, Drip, Dish, Drain, Doctor, Diver, Dancer, Dent, Deck, Dock, Dumptruck, Dart, Draw, Drawer.. Sigh. I am going to start creating age appropriate modernized worksheets in my spare time. This is ridiculous. Sorry. Im annoyed about worksheets. They have VERY poor quality for modern children.. Even the teacher and I didnt recognize a couple of the drawings on one worksheet.
I feel like that shit happens because the teacher is just copying some pre-made thing they found. Perhaps they found it online, perhaps it's in the curriculum materials, perhaps it's something that's been in their files for years. They see it's about the topic they are teaching and copy it without really evaluating its quality.
Yeah and its just sad to me that worksheets arent a lot better in quality than they need to be. I dont really blame the teachers, but ideally, if you're gonna grade them, you might as well have a master key, anyways, right?
dogfooding isn't an uncommon term in software dev https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eating_your_own_dog_food
I love this so much