Hello. The Norwegian school system is probably something most of you know very little about, and that is exactly why I come to you with this. I am looking for outside opinions. Recently i’ve been arguing with people who, in my opinion, are idiots. I don’t think they have a leg to stand on, and it seems to me that they resort to all kinds of ridiculous arguments that really have no weight because they have emotional reasons to want a particular outcome. Yes, I am frustrated. But I shouldn’t get ahead of myself. Here’s a little information about our school system on high school level:
The teachers get hilariously bad salaries, with no signs of improvement. As a result of this, competent people do not become teachers in general. A lot of people will tell you that this is not true, and that X teacher is good(which may well be true, although their view of what a good teacher is may be skewed), but they are ignoring the problem, which is that the average teacher sucks.
In Norway, we operate with a 1-6 grading system, awarded in each subject, where 1 is fail, 2 is pass and 6 is best. Universities generally accept people based on their average grade. Now hear this: In order to become a mathematics or Norwegian teacher, you need -3- or better in that subject. THREE. Outrageous? Yes.
I was always a top student, having earned 6’s in just about everything(5.7 average). Despite a 6’s in mathematics and Norwegian, I don’t feel that it would be appropriate for me to become a teacher, since I feel that should require some exceptional talent in the subject. I don’t demand exceptional talent though, but knowing what I know about students and how the grading is done, I can tell that someone who recieves a 3 has not even grasped the basics. The people who got 3 in mathematics were the ones with blank, teary eyes, struggling to grasp even the most fundamental concepts.
Essentially my argument is that someone who did not recieve a 6, at the very least a 5, has no business teaching in that subject. None. Out of the question. Suggesting this though has directed a lot of anger my way, although the arguments against it have been severely lacking. They generally go along the lines of:
“They may have become better later…”
“I know X teacher who is really good who had bad grades…”
“There are lots of people with good grades who suck at teaching others…”
None of these have much value. The answer to all three though, are yes, that may indeed be true, but so what? Isn’t the whole point of grades to filter people by their competence, -now-? And even if a few really good teachers with terrible high school grades in their subject exists, how does that justify all the awful ones that are accepted at the same time? The last argument is the ‘best’, but there are plenty of teachers who are BAD at their subject AND suck at teaching simultaneously, so all higher requirements would do is reduce one ‘evil’.
The purpose of this thread is to ask you several questions:
What’s your take on the situation? Am I being unreasonable?
Are there other, better, arguments for a view opposing mine?
Do you think people’s own grades(low) and the fact that they are friends with teachers who got low grades(since, of course, we automatically assume our friends are good at what they do) emotionally impact their view on this matter?
I apologize, Oughtist for not including you where I should have. In fact, you’re probably one of the most important sorts of teachers that there is, in my opinion. You have patience for people that many others do not have patience (or sadly, time) for.
Good point about teaching the student to learn, by the way.
Actually, I helped write a personal statement for a Norwegian student applying to university over here (UK), so I know a bit about it.
I have a few thoughts on this.
Firstly, grades are a shit way to measure competence. I only got a decent, rather than excellent, grade in my final year of high school history classes, and in a number of my university modules got considerably lower grades than I was capable of getting. However, I am now a talented, knowledgeable investigative historian. Why? Because I learnt far more outside of education ‘systems’ than I did within them. I mean not in terms of information, because that’s largely a matter of time, but of useful skills. Had I not read philosophy books when I was supposed to be in lessons then I would have left school barely knowing what a logical fallacy is, let alone how to spot one. 18, and incapable of knowing when something is bullshit. I could do simultaneous equations, recite laws of thermodynamics, underline the metaphors in poems, but had never even had a day’s worth of being taught how to tell the difference between a good argument and a bad one, between well-sourced information and speculation.
Such skills are incredibly important for teaching, because a big part of teaching is persuading kids to give a damn. Tab is a great example of this - I disagree with 90% of what the guy says but he’s persuasive, funny, identifies what aspects of a topic others will find interesting and uses them to get people hooked, rarely says anything that’s redundant or superfluous. Now, Tab is a lot more than a teacher, but you can see in the way he writes that he is a teacher, and I can only assume a bloody good one at that. However, he won’t have learnt any of this from getting good grades at school, and I’ll wager he got similar grades to me - good, but less than he could have got if he’d applied himself more and spent less time chasing girls and smoking dope.
Secondly, given the failings of the teaching system that you’ve outlined, surely you recognise that the grades someone gets are not a direct illustration of their abilities, but also a measure of the teacher they had. Let’s say you got a Maths teacher who got a grade 4. The chances of you understanding the stuff that would earn a grade 6 are lower than the kid in the next classroom who has a teacher who got a grade 6. So you might, with a bit of hard work and because you’re a smart person, get a grade 5. By your own measure that would eliminate you from teaching that subject, through no fault or lacking on your own part. Indeed, you might well be better than that kid in the next room who got a 6 because he had a better teacher. He might have actually been less smart and hardworking.
You aren’t being unreasonable, just impractical.
Yes. The fact that the system is a failure means that all those people who you think didn’t get good enough grades to become teachers themselves were also let down by that system. So their grades are not an adequate measure of their capacity to teach.
Hence, if you instigated a policy whereby only the people with top grades became teachers all you would ensure is that the people with the top grades became teachers. They wouldn’t necessarily be better teachers than the ones now, and in the process you’d be getting rid of a lot of the good teachers (present and future) who for whatever reason got lower grades but still make good teachers.
Yes, as any system of rank and classification will be resented by those are defined as ‘lower’. When you’re at school your worth is measured in grades, as is your future worth. I don’t mean monetary worth, I’m talking about the way people feel about themselves. I was fortunate enough to be able to breeze through most classes without really trying, but the problem with this is that it taught me no self-discipline. However, for the kids who struggled to get even mediocre grades it must have been very disheartening, must have impacted on their self-esteem, their expectations and hopes for their own future.
So, to have someone with high grades come along and make out they are part of some competent elite while they are mere incompetent plebs is going to piss people off. You’re basically saying because you have the high grades you have the right to determine what they can and cannot do. That isn’t right. It isn’t justified. It isn’t logical. It isn’t practical. If you persist with that attitude then you will come across as an up yourself, egotistical twat. Whether that is the correct response is largely irrelevant, it is how people will react. This here’s the world we’ve got. In truth, the arguments people have raised against your militant fascist policy of excluding low-grade plebs from teaching, regardless of what they do and accomplish between getting those grades and becoming a teacher, are quite correct. Poorly articulated. Not expressed in a way I expect you to find convincing. But quite correct.
I see what you’re saying here, and you’re right of course; there is a lot to be learned outside the school system, and potential teachers may be victims of the system too. The problem though, is that executing a view like this in practice invalidates the entire grading system. You could say the same thing for every single profession and remove grade requirements for professions such as Medicine, Law and Economics as well. I think that would be a mistake, and that it would be better to start by improving teacher quality and education system so that the grades mean more. I don’t agree that I am being impractical. In fact, I think I am very practical: By increasing grade requirements, we filter out a lot of people who got a bad grade because they just don’t have much talent for it, and we lose a few people like you. To me, this is an acceptable sacrifice. Besides, your argument about learning things outside of school has a flaw. After all, if you’re interested enough in mathematics to want to be a teacher in that subject, one would assume that it’s interesting enough to spend some of that time outside school on MATHEMATICS, resulting in a better grade.
I don’t mean to exclude them regardless of what they do afterwards. In Norway for instance, it’s fairly easy to resit a subject after high school ends. This is then done privately with an independant examinator and an independant censor judging you(in oral exams - written ones have two independant teachers evaluating it). If you have the competence to teach in a subject, surely that would be no obstacle. You spend a semester learning the very things you are supposed to teach others, retake your exam and begin teacher education. I don’t see the problem. If someone after multiple tries still can’t succeed, it’s obvious that they just don’t understand the subject they are meant to teach others. Do we want teachers like that? I know I don’t.
If this is a “militant fascist policy” then so is every single subject grade requirement at universities. If you want to study medicine here, you need a 5.6 average or better. That’s how the system works. If their arguments are correct, then we should eliminate grades completely, since someone with a 2.3 average might, after all, turn out to be an excellent doctor one day. What I am suggesting is not a different system, it’s improving the already existing system to elevate the teacher role to the level and prestige it deserves. I don’t know about you, but I consider teaching to be just as important as medicine; probably more important. This increase in grade requirements should obviously come with higher salaries, as they have done in Finland(who happens to have one of the very best school systems in the world).
It seems to me that you want an entirely different educational system where no one are judged by grades. If so, I suggest you say that instead.
This indeed is where the field has been moving for over a decade, vis. “Assessment for Learning” (i.e. a skills-based, curriculum specific form of assessment, versus the monolithic grading system we as yet still enjoy). One of the bigger stumbling blocks to this approach is that it doesn’t give parents a clear image as to where their children sit in terms of the statistical averaging of their classmates. But that’s a sociological issue, not a pedagogical one per se.
Pretty much. Don’t forget, Nietzsche was basically a failure as a student.
Medicine, perhaps not, because you’re trifling with people’s lives. But Economics? Jesus, what do economists ever actually provide to the world? Crap metaphors and excuses for not radically overhauling how we do things. ‘Boom and Bust’ ‘the bursting bubble’ ‘stimulus package’ ‘inflation’ ‘deflation’ ‘the economic cycle’ ‘recession’ ‘negative growth’ negative growth? Who came up with that? Things do no grow negatively, they shrink. But in the midst of the epic rhetorical mind fuck that is professional economics you can say things like that and people think you know what you’re talking about.
To be honest, let the kids with learning difficulties run the economy, it literally couldn’t be any worse than it is now.
The problem with this is that you end up with teachers entirely focused on the test, on increasing the grades, on ‘proving’ that the system is improving. You ever seen season four of The Wire?
I’d be a brilliant teacher, every single person who knows me personally has said that when I’ve suggested it to them. Your suggestion is massively impractical.
Get over the need to judge via grades. They are not what make you who you are, however much the rotten school system might try to convince you otherwise.
Only if one does that prior to taking the exam, and in such a way as makes it more likely that you’ll get a higher grade.
The point is that exams are not reality. There’s a huge difference between sitting a three hour exam paper and spending a decade stood at the front of a classroom trying to get information across. Grades are not an accurate measure of someone’s worth, or their ability to teach a subject.
What if you’re from a poor background, had to go out and work for a living (something I’m assuming you’ve not had to do yet) full time and hence don’t have the time and money to do that? What if despite this you show at work a real talent for training other people, teaching them the job and managing them, helping them get along with their co-workers. This counts for a lot more than grade performance, yet by your measure these people wouldn’t stand a cat in hell’s chance of joining your academically elite clique of venerated state-sponsored educationatrons.
Once again, performance in exams is not the be all and end all of whether someone can teach.
Indeed. Though I was teasing a bit when I called it ‘militant’ and ‘fascist’. I’m just trying to get you to understand what you lose with such an approach.
Depends on what they are teaching.
If the existing system is fundamentally flawed then ‘improving’ it will only exacerbate the damage done by those flaws. You might want to live in a world where people are reduced to numbers stamped on their foreheads but no offence, I’m not trying to patronise you here, there’s a lot of intelligent people out there who (gasp!) don’t even have university degrees, not to mention all that people with PhDs who are in reality mildly retarded.
By whose measure?
I think assessment of people’s aptitude for things should be assessed before they are put in positions of responsibility.
I see exams and grades as a pretty terrible way of manifesting that principle.
I just can’t take this seriously. Doctors are trifling with peoples lives, but teachers aren’t? And economists are somehow to blame for how the economy is executed? You do realize that the task of economists is to inform the decision-makers of the potential effects of their actions right? They generally don’t make the decisions themselves…
You’re essentially dismissing the entire subject of economics because you don’t like how the economy is turning out. This is the kind of people I have to deal with…
Yes, because clearly not demanding any kind of formal competence so any moron could become a physics a teacher would be so much better!
“I would be a good teacher because everyone I know says so. Therefore, your suggestion is impractical.”
Do you see how massively flawed this argument is? First of all, your premise tells us nothing about the real world. You could be completely wrong or you could be a rare exception. Second, your conclusion is nonsense. It’s not even conveying what you really want to say. You don’t mean to say that my suggestion is impractical, because my suggestion is just a correction within the current system. What you want to say, is that the whole system is impractical, and nothing could be further from the truth. The system loses a lot of talent to be sure, but it’s fairly simple and it works. Any alternative method I know of fails in its lacking ability to really determine who is good at what and who is dedicated. Even if an alternative system might work within one school, it still faces the problem of comparing results to other schools, which inevitably requires some way to compare students at one school with those on another.
But they are an accurate measure of how well you understand something. If you understand mathematics, you get a good grade in it. This holds true in the vast, vast majority of cases. You can be the best at teaching others what you know in the entire world; if you don’t intimately understand the subject you are teaching, you will always suck. You are right that it’s not an accurate measure of someone’s worth, but it is a more accurate measure of someone’s ability to teach a subject than not requiring any formally approved competence at all. You’d never know what you get.
This is just a joke. Resitting an exam costs about 80$ here. If you can’t fish up 80$ to pursue the dream career, you don’t deserve it. As for time, that’s also a laughable argument. I know people who have taken up multiple subjects in a semester while working two full-time jobs. If resitting and preparing for what is presumably someone’s favorite subject takes up too much time, either because they won’t dedicate that time or because they need an unreasonable amount of time to grasp the subject, they have no business teaching it to others. Again, you may be talented at teaching, but it just doesn’t help if you can’t grasp the basic concepts of the subject you are teaching. And not only do you need to grasp these concepts, you need to prove that you do.
Of course you lose something. I should know, since I was a school dropout. I didn’t attend school from 13-19, apart from a year or so when I was 14-15, and I failed in almost every subject because I couldn’t care less. At 17, I was told to start working and ask for welfare money. When I was 19 years old and realized I needed formally recognizable competence, I completed high school in two years, with just 6 years of schooling behind me. Then I was accepted into one of the best universities in the world.
So you see, I didn’t really ‘cruise’ through school, and I know exactly what a rigid system potentially loses out on: me. I -still- think it’s better than having no way of knowing how competent someone is, which would be a consequence of dropping formal requirements.
No, it doesn’t depend on what they are teaching. It doesn’t matter one bit. If it’s decided that a subject should be taught in schools, it should be taught by someone competent, and to get someone competent you need to pay them well.
And no, improving a flawed system does not necesarrily increase the damage done. It could, but it doesn’t need to. Of course, in order for it to become an issue you need to demonstrate that the system is flawed, and so far you really haven’t. As i’ve told countless people before you, it doesn’t matter how many smart people there are without university degrees, and it means nothing that some with PhD’s are clueless. It doesn’t change the fact that a higher grade requirements attracts more competent students on average. You don’t have to like it, but that’s how it is.
National tests, employment records, university acceptance, actual understanding of subjects presumably, since it is my experience that students with low grades understand next to nothing about subjects.
Well we certainly agree that some assessment is required. Any assessment of someones aptitude though would necesarrily bring with it a hierarchy of aptitude. Employers will want to know who is best, and they will find out somehow. You can call it whatever you like; it’s still going to be grades of some kind, official or not.
Incompetent doctors kill people. Incompetent teachers just add to the slurry of mediocre intellects.
This is extraordinarily naive. Person A is technically making the decision, but because they don’t know what they’re doing (i.e. most politicians) they turn to expert person B. Person B advises and recommends a certain path. Person A, not knowing any better, will usually take the advice. Person B, in reality, has made the decision.
Particularly when that person also plays the role of handling media criticism or questionning of the decision, and ultimately defends the general state of the economy by only ever considering reforms of a very minor and inconsequential nature.
I’m dismissing economics requiring high grades because most of what economists talk and write about is a load of bollocks. You clearly don’t need high grades to do that job, you need a willingess to talk crap all the time. Quite different.
Don’t be an ass. Nowhere have I said we should just let anyone do anything. Your attempt to reduce my opposition to the grading system of most western education institutions to a rejection of all manners of assessment is a shoddy, shoddy argument.
No, but I’m sure you in your very finite wisdom is going to try to explain it to me.
I teach people by habit, I explain things to people all the time, I have done a fair amount of professional training. All of the people who’ve experienced this side of me say I’d be a wonderful teacher.
If that says nothing about the real world then nothing says anything about the real world.
My apologies, I mean, you must know what I intended to say far, far better than I could know that. This isn’t in any way part of the condescending arrogance that makes you think a high grade is equivalent to a competent professional.
Then what you are complaining about? Clearly if it works then it doesn’t need you slapdash reforms.
The current system doesn’t determine that.
Therefore we need a huge state social democratic bureaucracy to manage the entire thing and produce national league tables and run the whole thing through a bunch of management consultants and computer analysis which will supposedly explain how to improve results, right?
I can tell you’ve been educated in Scandinavia. Is there any problem which you people don’t think can be solved with more government, more administration, more centralisation?
Balderdash. You don’t need to know any subject intimately to teach it at high school level.
[qote]You are right that it’s not an accurate measure of someone’s worth, but it is a more accurate measure of someone’s ability to teach a subject than not requiring any formally approved competence at all. You’d never know what you get.
[/quote]
Again, nowhere have I suggested we just let any paedo who walks in off the street become a teacher.
You lack basic sympathy. Are you a certified sociopath?
Unless those people literally did not sleep, this is a lie.
There’s a lot of people you seem to think have no business teaching. If they didn’t get the grade the first time round they shouldn’t be a teacher. If they don’t know their subject intimately (with you being the arbiter of what is intimate) then they shouldn’t be a teacher. If they don’t have 80 bucks they shouldn’t be a teacher. If they don’t have the time to gain grades that make you happy they shouldn’t be a teacher.
Tell me, apart from some upper middle class nobody with a 5.8 grade point average who hasn’t lived a day in their life, who do you think SHOULD be allowed to be a teacher? Is there any other type of person you recognise as potentially useful in this profession?
No exam I ever sat at high school level tested basic concepts about anything. I can only imagine, unless your exams have been written by philosophers, that neither were yours.
You find out how competent they are by letting them do something, not by taking an exam.
Try again. You claimed teachers were even more important than doctors. I responded ‘depends on what they are teaching’. You responded ‘angry angry blah blah competent competent grades grades you’re wrong blah blah’.
I have, you just missed it because you were too busy getting to the point where you argued with me.
It really isn’t, for reasons I’ve already outlined. I can outline them again if you wish.
Given your aggression, arrogance, condescension and apparent dislike of other human beings I suggest that conclusion has more to do with you than it has to do with them.
No, incompetent teachers ruin people’s lives. They reduce the future welfare of a country by creating incompetent workers. They ensure that people stay blissfully ignorant about the world around them, so they can be ruled more easily by politicians. As far as I am concerned, this is worse than accidently killing someone in an operation.
And your solution, rather than trying to address the problem you percieve, is to allow people with lower grades than now to be economists. Surely that will improve the situation in a very meaningful way.
As above.
Well I am glad you have this wonderful alternative system in mind; I don’t really care. I am looking at the current system and asking myself what might be done to secure better teachers since the current ones are terrible on average. I believe my suggestion works to that end. Instead of addressing that argument, you suggest a revolution in the school system. You’re not being very helpful.
No, you have said how the system should be based on your values which are different from mine. You have not, in any way, explained how your system is better. You have just claimed that it is, based on your confused ideological convictions.
Well, they only kinda bore people really, and put them off subjects. My old 6th form biology teacher. He stank. And there is a limit to how bad you can be - if your classes routinely fail examinations, in this statistical world, sooner or later you’ll get the push.
And actually, since most jobs these days are mind-numbingly repetitive and massively borring, a good teacher isn’t doing most of his or her students a favour by giving them inquiring, lively minds. It’s like training people to run to olympic standards, but then shoving them into a world which is 99% corners.
A populace more easily ruled, assuming the governing body is not totally howlingly insane, would tend to generate a more stable, and probably economically robust country. China’s doing pretty good, and I’ll bet their overall literacy ratio is pretty dreadful.
And given a choice between living life full of bad punctuation, and an accidentally punctured lung, I think I’d choose the former. The gap between “Oh damn - where does this apostrophe go again” and “Oh damn, I can’t breathe” is wide, deep and not easily stitched up.
Contributing to someone’s incompetence is worse than accidentally killing them? Seriously?
Would you care to qualify that with, y’know, some reasoning or something similar?
Our economic system fails by every standard measure. High inflation, massive debt, low growth, high unemployment, lots of people overworked, the majority of people in poverty despite abundant material wealth, tons of pollution, tons of work being done that doesn’t need to be done, tons of resources consumed that don’t need to be, lots of time and effort devoted to a system which benefits very few people and causes almost no end of problems for everyone else.
For example, in the early days when the ‘global recession’ was still a ‘credit crunch’ (the former meaning ‘the death of lots of poor people’ the latter sounding like a breakfast cereal) a lot of the futures traders who were fleeing the financial markets went to the food markets. Increased speculation drove up the price of basic foodstuffs, and as a result millions of people starved who would not have done otherwise. The assholes sitting in offices in Canary Wharf or on Wall Street didn’t care. 99.9% of journalists didn’t pick up on the story. But there, in a nutshell, is the kind of calculating tactic employed by those managing this economic system.
Call me whatever you like, but I stand by my comment. You wouldn’t find a kid with Downs Syndrome doing that.
Aside from when you demanded I outline this system. Declaring that you don’t care, before going on to show you do in fact care a great deal, doesn’t make it easy to discuss this with you.
I did a lot more than that. I explained why the premises on which your reform is based are flawed (all the stuff about prospective teachers being let down by the system themselves) which your reform does nothing to address. If all students were on a (more or less) level playing field then increasing the grade requirements would produce more academically minded teachers. But given the current state of education all your reform would really achieve is excluding a bunch of people who would actually make good or very good teachers. I explained that there are many aspects to being a good teacher, and that pure academic ability is somewhat secondary. If someone wants to be a researcher, looking into a particular field and trying to make more sense of it, then they need ‘elite’ academic ability. People doing stem cell research, people trying to extract oil from tar sands, people reverse-engineering UFOs, that sort of thing. Also, it doesn’t particularly matter if those people are alienating weirdos who find it difficult to talk about anything but work and have no sense of humour. It matters hugely if a teacher is. You could be the smartest people in the world, but if you can’t make things seem relevant and interesting to your pupils then you’ll never be a good teacher.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but there is no real measure of such skills and characteristics in the entry requirements for becoming a teacher in Norway. I know there aren’t in the UK. At the very best you get an interview by people running the training course. Not a classroom audition, not a practical test to see if you have the skills and characteristics, an interview, with people who are middle aged, who will assess you on your answers to questions. As above, plenty of people can answer questions well in interviews who are not good at their job. Like exams, it’s just a crap way of testing.
Who is this average teacher? Do they have a name? Or are they merely the product of reducing people to statistics?
Did you not say the average teacher is terrible? That implies that the system is not working. Not only are schools not producing large numbers of educated, competent people to add to the workforce, they aren’t even producing enough people to become the next generation’s teachers (according to you).
If that’s a system that ‘works’ then I’d hate to see what you say about one that doesn’t.
Yes, because it fundamentally contradicts what you’ve been saying.
‘Some idea’ and ‘in general’ are both pretty vague, but nonetheless quite different, qualifiers. Any system of testing gives you ‘some idea’ of who is good at the test and who isn’t. That doesn’t make every system of testing a useful and valid one.
Then you’re overlooking an awful lot of the reasons why people score highly and others score lowly.
Your view, which treats people as cogs in a machine and evaluates them through statistical performance, is a very common view in social democracies, particularly in Scandinavian countries. Like it or not, you are working from the same attitude as a lot of the people most immediately around you.
It isn’t our fault. The grade requirements for dentistry are too low.
Who determines the grade requirements? Is it the state?
‘Completely independent’ my ass.
Indeed, yours is an impractical ideal which would take the very best minds away from more vital roles and make them teachers (regardless of their aptitude for teaching), mine is saying we should try to do the best with what we’ve got, which means acknowledging that there’s a lot more to teaching than simply knowing the subject matter.
If all teachers were excellent then they’d all also be average. It’s because you have bad teachers that you recognise the good ones.
I had two outstanding teachers, one a whimsical old Tory who I never really got on with but learnt a hell of a lot from, the other a young female teacher who was one of the few to actually treat me like a human being and not a mark in a list of exam results. She was far too young to have an ‘intimate’ knowledge of the subject, but she was very smart and capable and at least had a go at breaking down the institutionally enforced roles of ‘teacher’ and ‘pupil’ which most of the time actually get in the way of learning stuff.
In your dismissal of anyone without the money to resit an exam, regardless of their ability, you made it a question of sympathy.
No, I care about the means being sympathetic AND producing a higher quality of teachers. It isn’t an either/or decision, but in your haste to fight with me you’ve tried to turn it into one.
B-, can do better.
Just because I don’t believe in state socialism doesn’t mean I’m unsympathetic towards poor people. This is a pathetic attempt to turn something back around on the person saying it without first bothering to think about what it means.
C, try harder next time.
What do you consider ‘full time’?
Meta-argument and more condescension.
D, a poor performance.
If you work in a sweatshop and therefore don’t have the time to study for a BA, go fuck yourself.
D-, not so hot.
My apologies, I thought you were being sensible and realising that teachers need to know beyond the limits of their own subject to be effective. Sorry.
Yes. Wealthier people do better in exams, on average. Like I say, you’re overlooking a lot of what goes into someone’s grade performance, and yet demanding that their grade performance is the be all and end all of what they should be allowed to do with their lives.
F. Epic fail.
Yes.
Once again, merely knowing a lot about a subject is not all you need to be a good teacher.
And you say I’m angry and confused.
Think through the implications of what you’re saying. If only the kids with the highest grades get to do anything with their lives then the majority of kids are wasting their time being taught stuff they’ll never be allowed to use in their careers. Hence, the teacher is also wasting their time teaching it to kids who’ll never be allowed to use it.
And yet you think this process is more important than helping people who’ve been knocked off their bike by a bus?
I have explained it. There is a lot more to being a good teacher than academic ability. Those with the best academic ability are needed elsewhere (to go and get PhDs and do work that requires that degree of intellect). Merely increasing grade requirements gets you people with higher academic ability, regardless of whether they have the other attributes needed to be a good teacher, and excludes lots of people with the same academic ability but who did worse on the test due to other factors, who might actually make better teachers than your top of the class elite. As such, there’s no guarantee that the policy would produce better teachers overall, just that it would be very likely to produce teachers with higher academic ability.
As I’ve suggested, I think the grading system is a load of tosh because it doesn’t just measure academic ability but a load of other stuff that you’re overlooking (such as wealth, health, cultural background). However, personal skills and characteristics are mostly ignored, when in fact they’re the things that you absolutely must have in order to do any job (different skills and characteristics for different jobs, obviously). Some people are very smart, but not cut out for teaching. Your reform makes it more likely that time and money will be wasted training them, paying them to not do the job well, and then seeing them leave the job within a few years to do something else. I’m not sure exactly what the ‘tests’ would look like in the system I’m proposing, but there would be a hell of a lot more focus on what kind of person the applicant is, and though there should still be an academic requirement, it is secondary in my eyes.
Now, no more bitching, no more complaining. That’s what I’ve been saying all along, and I’ve even taken the time to restate it here for your benefit. If you accuse me one more time of not explaining what I have already explained then I’ll cut your balls off.
Yes, contributing to someone’s incompetence is worse than killing them, from society’s perspective. The reason for this is that incompetence leads to even more deaths. If engineers are incompetent enough at mathematics, that bridge you are driving on will fall under pressure. If the future doctor doesn’t understand the first thing about biology, you don’t want him operating on you. This goes for a LOT of professions. Your imagination sets the limit of what awful consequences incompetence could cause.
And no, our economic system doesn’t fail by every standard measure. This is because your economic system isn’t my economic system, and Norway is doing excellent. Low inflation, no debt, one of the lowest unemployment rates in the world, low pollution compared to other countries, a massive welfare state ensuring that the system benefits a lot of people and not just a few. Overall, there is a lot to like here. I am not going to say British economists are terrible like you do, because I think there’s very different problems at work here, but even if you were right and a bad economy means bad economists, that means Norway’s good economy means good economists. That kind of takes apart your argument right there.
You are right, the requirement to be a teacher in Norway is low, just like in Britain. This is precisely the problem I am addressing, which you seem to have forgotten. When I say the system works and you respond by bringing up the one profession I am suggesting that the system ISN’T working for, I don’t really know what to say. We have great doctors, great engineers, researchers and so on. Seriously, is this your best argument? And yes, the average teacher is a statistic. It is determined by taking the combined quality of all the teachers and dividing that number by the amount of teachers. This then gives us the average quality of our teachers. Are you suggesting that all kinds of statistics are as useless as economists, and should be thrown out the window along with the school system? Maybe we should throw out society altogether and start from scratch?
And no, saying that something is true ‘in general’ is not vague. It suggests that something is true most of the time. That’s precisely what it means, and that’s adequate. You can never have a system that works for everyone 100% of the time. I am sure you prefer your alternative system of ranking people, and I wish you luck lobbying for it, but it honestly isn’t interesting until you succeed. I’d like the school system to improve right now, and nothing you have said suggests that my idea of how this might be done(be sure to read all of the above in this post before resorting to an old, debunked argument - remember that we DO achieve quality in the professions requiring high grades) is flawed.
As for your claims about Scandinavia being a machine, I don’t know what to tell you. What developed country doesn’t work like this? It’s not that I can’t imagine ideal societies and would like some things to be different, but this is a practical matter of improving schools, today. You know, -without- revolution. For me personally, it has been a fairly free system: I went to school, got the best grades, and I could go study anything I wanted.
Or you just have bad breakfast habits.
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Your point about taking away competence from other fields to place them in high schools, where most students don’t care much anyway, is the first good argument you’ve come up with. Congratulations. Again, I do agree that there’s more to teaching than knowing the subject, but you can have both. I had both. I had the same teacher in Economics, Modern & Ancient History, Social Studies, and Geography. The man has an extremely interesting life behind him, a long academic career in economics, political posts, worked as a journalist, spent years in the military and was an athlete in his youth to mention a little bit. He knew all kinds of subjects intimately and was incredible at teaching as well, not to mention hilarious and so outrageous that he’d probably be fired from a lot of schools. He was the most busy teacher in school, yet he always had time to help you between classes, somehow. I want more teachers like him, because I know it would make a world of difference to so many people. Teachers without impressive subject knowledge will never be like him, even if impressive subject knowledge is far from enough to qualify.
Money to resit an exam is not an issue in Norway. I can’t imagine anyone ever struggling with that.
Saying that “just because I don’t believe in state socialism doesn’t mean i’m usympathetic towards poor people” is no more valid than me saying “just because I don’t think people who can’t fish up 80 bucks in a country where 80 bucks is available to anyone doesn’t deserve their dream job, doesn’t mean i’m unsympathetic towards poor people”. I was making an outrageous claim to underline a point, but it seems lost on you.
It’s not an issue in Norway. To give you accurate numbers, it costs 700kr. 7eleven salaries are 120kr/hour. Even if you couldn’t afford it, there are available student loans for everyone. To make an example of Norway’s commitment to student financing, the state is willing to pay 100-160,000kr/year to study at foreign universities, in addition to about 90,000/year in living expenses. Divide by 10 to get it in pounds.
As for teachers needing to know things beyond their subject to be effective, that’s obviously true, but how exactly does this remove the need to know your subject? You’re unbelievable.
Of course the middle class does better, but that has nothing to do with grades and everything to do with the middle class needing the school system to succeed, while the worker class is below it and the rich are above it. Thus the actual learning is based around what the middle class needs to learn. This would be the case even if you removed grades, since the worker class kid will still go work at the factory and the rich kid will still inherit his fathers company.
Tell me: Are you incapable of keeping two thoughts in your head simultaneously? I have never said that’s all you need, i have said it’s one of the things you need. It’s a requirement before anything else should even be brought up. You can be as good at teaching as you want, if you can’t solve 2x + 3 = 7, you have no business teaching mathematics.
Those aren’t the implications. There are plenty of professions that doesn’t involve teaching in high school. You seem to think that teaching quality in all subjects somehow means the utmost quality in every profession, which is wrong.
I’ve thought through the argument, and i’ve come to the conclusion that’s flawed. This is because competent teachers create a positive circle where most competent students are being produced. These students can then go on and either become teachers or do the other work you refer to. Ever improving teacher quality will eventually mean that newly produced competence outweighs what is lost from getting competent teachers.
Firstly, I don’t understand the system fully. You say that a teacher only needs a high school level three grade in a subject to become a teacher - but surely this can’t be the case? If it is, then clearly the Norwegian education system is behind almost every country in the world, but I suspect that Norwegian teachers actually need degrees in thier subject to become teachers? If the latter is the case, then what’s the problem? Attaining a reasonable degree generally requires far more knowledge and skill than passing a subject at high school in the same subject. Most students simply need enough information and training to pass the exams - something that a graduate should easily have.
A level of practicality also has to be considered. I’m sure the government would love all of thier teachers to have level 6s in everything. But to attain this would probably take far more than is affordable. Schools simply can’t compete with the salaries that private businesses are capable of offering - this is true in every education system in the world as far as I know.
I have read some articles suggesting the recruitment of ‘super-teachers’ - teachers on a higher salary who are excellent at thier subject to work for local authorities, perhaps serving two-three medium size schools, tutoring those who are gifted/higher level students. Although this seems a more viable option, it does have potential criticsms (favouritism, over investment in the upper levels, etc.).
I think I would go with saying that having gifted teachers in every subject would be wonderful but just isn’t going to be possible.
Here are the steps to become a high school subject teacher in Norway:
1.) Pass all subjects in high school, recieve a 3 or better in Norwegian or maths if one of those is your subject
2.) Take a masters, bachelor OR 1-year study in your chosen subject at a university. You only need to pass.
3.) 1 year of teachers’ education(some offer this as a semester course)
Congratulations; you are now qualified to teach at a Norwegian high-school! The pay sucks and the prestige is terrible, but it’s probably better than McDonalds.
I am not asking that every teacher should be as good as those I had, who were probably among the best in the country, but I would like something more than this. I have somewhat changed my mind about requiring more than a 3 at high school level, because it seems irrelevant if other standards are met. In Finland, who have the best overall international results in the world, they require each teacher to have a master degree in their subject. I think this should be a requirement here as well. If this is achieved, you must obviously know everything that someone with a 6 in the subject from high school does. I do however feel that rather than todays straight average grade requirement to get into universities, extra ‘points’ should be awarded for high grades within the actual subject, but that’s a different matter.
Essentially I want teachers to get higher salaries, and thus more prestige, to ensure that more bright people want to become teachers. As a direct result of this, grade requirements will go up.
By the way, you are right when you suggest that Norway has a terrible education system: we do. The requirements to get good grades are laughably low, and I was way, way above what was required to get a 6 in most subjects. If you recieve a 3 here, you don’t understand the subject at all. Hell, I know people with 5s and 6s who didn’t understand the subject at all. I wonder if this is unique to Norway(who is known to have a somewhat lacking education system compared to many countries) or if the same issues would be found in most countries.
Of course, some teachers do actually take a bachelor or master degree, but the low prestige and the low salary ensures that most of those who are willing to study for that long picks something else, and you are left with the 1-year teachers. I feel that despite backing out on the high school grade requirement, my main argument still stands: teacher requirements should be much higher than they are.
Ok, well, maybe, …no… actually, hmm. Do I teach? I ask myself that alot.
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