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There's about 4 million primary and secondary school teachers in the US, compared to about 260 million adults. That leaves plenty of room for non-normieness among teachers.
It's the teaching colleges and the universities. I saw the same when it came to newly-minted social workers: they had been stuffed to the gills with (slightly outdated by that time) theories of value-neutral, non-judgemental, the rest of it. So completely unprepared to deal with the types who were cunning, gaming the system, and knew exactly what buzzwords to use when spinning a tale to wrap the social worker round their finger and get them to advocate for "more gibs!" (that handy phrase which the job could have used back then) when interacting with authorities on their behalf.
The Pedagogy of the Oppressed is decades old by this time, and it's still being referenced, for one.
I haven’t encountered all that much of that, in the course of getting an education degree, among other things. There’s a lot of “we have the kids we have, not the kids we wish we had,” which is literally true but often used as an excuse. Lately, the higher ups have been going on a lot about “data” — academic data, behavioral data, data to get kids in trouble, data to get higher staff ratios, and so on and so forth. I don’t like it, much of the data is just a more onerous way of documenting opinions, but it’s certainly getting pushed hard.
That's a meaningful improvement over the training some friends of mine went through. Are they still teaching Gardner's multiple intelligences? And a few years ago, the district where I had gone to school adopted a commitment to achieving the same outcomes for all students regardless of their gifts or circumstances.
An acknowledgment that not all children are the same, and that their different gifts cannot be made to produce the same outcomes in the classroom, is actually a big deal.
I haven't heard about the multiple intelligences lately. It's been a lot of Science of Reading, High Quality Instructional Materials (apparently this has a more specific meaning than I had initially assumed), uninterrupted Tier 1 (basic curriculum) minutes in ELA and Math, and interventionists for elementary schoolers, including adding Math Lab, STEM, and SEL (social emotional learning) to the elementary specials rotation.
I have a relative who's starting a licensure program this year, so perhaps I'll find out what the current educational zeitgeist is.
What's your take on this? I remember some pitchforks and torches raised a few years ago by socially conservative parents of grade-school kids that it amounted to a program of socializing students into the teacher's ethics while framing it as a skills thing. I haven't looked into it enough to understand it.
I do remember when a bunch of placards sprang up in my early '90s public elementary school listing all the traits they expected to develop in students. It read like a list of virtues as conceived by a committee of bureaucrats.
My reaction was more or less, "What qualifies you to teach me virtue?" I must have been a very humble child.
My local schools are not as conservative as Mississippi, but they're in that ballpark. Their two main SEL initiatives are associating emotions with colors ("I'm in the red zone" instead of "I'm really angry and freaking out", or "we need to get in the green zone to be ready to learn"), and Character Strong words of the month (kindness, gratitude, courage, etc). I'm not completely sure what they're trying to accomplish with the color zone stuff, I've never heard the kids actually use it that I can recall. The Character Strong words seem fine. Pretty generic. My daughter's SEL teacher gave us a list of books she'll be reading with all the grade levels, I haven't gone through it yet.
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All the "virtue-based" banners and signs in teachers' rooms when I was a schoolchild always struck me as very silly. Lots of transforming "R.E.S.P.E.C.T." into an acronym, lots of "At our school, home of the Bears, we are Based, Effective Altruist, Rationalist, Sapient" or "Everyone here C.A.R.E.S." standing of course for "Courteous, Achieving, Responsible, Excellence, at School on time"... I don't know that any of these did anything, but I'm sure there was some sort of state or federal grant money involved in "teaching ethical citizenship and public service" to children, for which these useless banners played a role.
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Yeah, I think a lot of this is top-down, not grassroots. Unfortunately, the people going through the universities and the training get this imposed on them. So even if they're not progressive themselves, they are being taught "this is how you do it" and not given alternative tools.
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