Dissident Teacher
@edudissenter
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A student being flagrantly rude to a teacher should be an earthshaking event. It is in other countries. We live in a teacher-despising culture.
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Disruptive students steal education from others, but they never make amends because they cannot restore learning. So the just thing is to prevent the theft by removing them from the classroom, no?.
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School is about meeting students’ intellectual needs, not their emotional needs. We seem to have lost sight of this.
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Just because students like you doesn’t mean they’ll behave.
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Misbehavior is wrecking American education. When will leaders admit that PBIS is not working?
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It makes no sense for teachers all over the world to be writing curriculum. Shouldn’t there be at least one fantastic pre-fab curriculum for all subjects available by this point in human history?.
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Is it just me, or is the concern for actual learning evaporating at an accelerating rate? The traditional notion of academics is seen as obsolete, replaced with a full ration of SEL, counseling, social justice indoctrination, and vaguely “skill building” projects. Revolutionary.
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Shouldn’t America be reaping the rewards of Common Core by now? Legions of incisive critical thinkers and problem solvers? Amazing readers, writers and mathematicians?.
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If adult society can’t function without punishments, why do we think schools can?.
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Why are drills standard in sports but “joy killing malpractice” in the classroom?.
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Catnip for administrators who want to scapegoat teachers rather than tackle the real causes of school dysfunction:.
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I’ve been teaching for 25 years. I’m tired of building my own curriculum.
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What’s the unmet need that causes students to litter?.
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If rules are not enforced, schools devolve into scary, extremely unpleasant places.
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Why do sports still issue penalties when we know there’s a better way—restorative conversations, examining root causes, etc? Barbaric, really.
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Dear education gurus, when I need to regrout my sink, I seek out a YouTube video where an expert tells me how to do it. Is this bad? It’s direct instruction, not inquiry, after all.
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Most American public school teachers cannot begin to conceive that a classroom like this is possible. They need to see this.
Direct instruction is joyful & leads pupils to success. Here is a *clip* where I use high frequency & high participation questioning in 3 phases:.1. Check for listening.2. Rehearsal.3. Check for understanding.Established routines: all hands up, turn & talk, SLANT & ruler reading
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What would happen in sports if we stopped issuing penalties? That’s what’s happening in schools now.
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I’m actually quite good at handling a very challenging middle school class. For three periods. We need to talk about the energy levels and psychological resilience necessary to function in an unruly school.
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When you’re redoing the seating chart and you realize you’re using the good kids as blockers.
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We need a national conversation about student behavior, because it’s destroying our schools. This expose could be a start.
This article is an absolute banger:. 1) Parents have no clue what’s going on in classes because….2) Everything, EVERYTHING, is online. Kids in Chromebooks from bell to cell because….3) Education is more about behavioral control than actual learning.
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How can teachers, most of whom uncritically imbibe all the latest educational snake oil, credibly teach “how to detect misinformation”?.
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In education, when you oppose suspensions, you’re opposing the whole principle of punishment because schools don’t have any other meaningful punishment in their repertoire anymore. Corporal punishment is gone; fines were never allowed….
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Hot take: students should comply with teachers’ directions. Citizens should comply with police orders. Compliance with legitimate authority is the basis of civilization.
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There is more “social-emotional” learning in one Shakespeare sonnet than all the SEL programs in the world. Great literature, well-taught,is the grander, more beautiful, earlier version of SEL.
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With a few exceptions, my California middle school students do not know the cardinal directions and do not know that temperatures get hotter further south. They seem to have learned next to nothing k-5. “But they’ve learned skills!” Right.
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@sage_stage The owners need to develop better relationships with their teenage customers and make their stores more engaging. Also, have they tried talking to them?.
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Where is the anti-discipline version of Michaela that invites visitors from around the world to see its happy classrooms?.
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Why can umpires give kids summary punishments but teachers can’t? It’s ok to enforce rules on the playing field, but it’s oppression of you do it in a classroom.
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Kids benefit from strictly enforced rules. A slack regime is child neglect, not nurture.
From a former pupil. Kids need adults to be in control. They may not want it. They definitely need it.
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Here’s a truth no one wants to admit: many kids learn next to nothing between 4th and 12th grades.
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All the humans before now had it wrong: there is no laziness, malice, cruelty, spite or any other vice. There is only dysregulation and it is the teacher’s job to cure it.
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Players who incessantly breaks rules have to be ejected because they ruin the game. So why are we forced to keep rule breaking students in class? Do we care more about sports than education?.
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It’s now an unwritten rule that the only legitimate mechanism for rule enforcement is teachers’ ability to charm students into compliance.
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Coaches at my school demand and expect a great deal of effort from their players. Teachers cannot do the same with their students. Is this just my school?.
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The problem with low-discipline schools is that the hundreds of daily pleas to behave suck the life force out of the adults.
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This guy is doing an enormous public service: blow by blow reporting from the public school trenches. I hope education policy makers and administrators are reading him.
Got an email that two of my most difficult kids from my most difficult class were planning on having a fight so me and my co teacher should keep an eye on them today. Co teacher immediately calls off for the day.
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This is so damning. Our schools are such a fraud. Some of us teachers are too blockheaded to even suspect that something is gravely wrong. How in the world can the US stand up to China with such a corrupted education system?.
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Giving kids activities and claiming it’s teaching “skills” is far easier than imparting knowledge well. Yet another reason we’ve abandoned the knowledge-building project.
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@sage_stage Kids aren’t learning anything, in part, because of the way we teach. Packets and projects don’t impart real learning. I call it the Doing Without Learning curriculum. Old fashioned direct instruction and distributed practice is what cognitive science supports.
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It’s interesting that the least intellectual teachers are the ones who carry on about higher order thinking and the most intellectual teachers who want to teach facts.
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The root cause of much teacher misery is trying to teach things that are unteachable.
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7th grade girl can’t add 170+40 in her head, and doesn’t know how to use the standard algorithm. Spends over a minute on it and gets the wrong answer. But she has “deeper understanding”!.
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Public education has a huge quality problem. Off the shelf curricula are crap. Teacher made curricula are generally crap too. No one seems to grasp how much labor it takes to create even one excellent lesson. Kids get an unending stream of the half-baked, untested and unrefined.
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If certain kids misbehave because of our “failure to build relationships and create engaging lessons” why do the other 95% of students behave?.
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Ironic how teachers are eager to teach how to detect misinformation, yet abjectly fail to detect misinformation about education.
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I know nothing about visas, but, as a public school insider, I don’t see how the US can keep competing when so many of our schools are non-schools.
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The same leftists who issue draconian punishments for adult microaggressions have created schools where student macroaggressions cannot be punished in the least.
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Reducing suspensions has become the new raison d’etre of American schools. Order and learning are secondary considerations.
@MrDanielBuck Our Superintendent opened up the year with a slideshow bragging that suspensions have dropped by 25% in the district. Did student behavior improve? No, we just took away all the consequences. Such a joke.
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We’re starting to realize —finally—that progressive education is snake oil and needs to be roundly rejected.
Progressive education is a project of devising ever more complex reasons for why teachers shouldn’t just explain new concepts to students.
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Administrators: let’s design our schools so that students can excel without making any effort!.
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Do teachers at your school ever ask skeptical questions at professional development sessions? If not, why not?.
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Amazing—imagine a school that hold students, not teachers, accountable for the students’ behavior.
We never blame teachers for high numbers of removals in Astrea secondaries. We have their back.
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Restorative justice is causing a crime spike in schools too. When will we return to traditional rule enforcement?.
On criminal justice:. “The Trudeau government enthusiastically mimicked U.S. ideas about restorative justice. Canada’s incarceration rate dropped from about 86 per 100,000 adults in 2013–14 to about 72 in 2022–23. Over that period of nearly a decade, Canada’s rate of violent.
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I love how “compliant” is used as a slur. Polite hard-working students are recast as contemptible collaborators with an unjust regime; bullies and vandals are borderline heroic for smiting the oppressive establishment.
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How can one have a Masters degree in Curriculum and Instruction and not know E.D. Hirsch?.
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Imagine if we completely stopped enforcing laws and instead gave trinkets to rule followers. It would be Somalia, right? That’s what our school are doing.
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American schools need to teach American history and culture in their fullness, not just a peevish and sneering attitude towards these things.
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“Trauma informed” policies are trauma-creating policies insofar as they unleash aggressive kids on the rest of the school population.
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Wasn’t Common Core supposed to improve literacy and math?.
"Between 2007 and 2020 the average graduation rate at public high schools in America leapt from 74% to 87%. Yet SAT scores fell. Results from the latest PISA test show that maths and reading literacy are flat or down."
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@MathsNinja24 Agree. And it seems wrong that they’re not held accountable for the real damage they do—not just to learning, but to the teacher’s psyche. Forget microaggressions, it’s often psychological assault. But this is unsayable, isn’t it?.
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Faced with collapsing behavioral and academic standards teachers just…adapt. There is no resistance.
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I’ve been saying this for years. The problem is kids don’t have background knowledge, not that they don’t activate it.
The prompt, "Use your prior knowledge to. " works great, unless students have insufficient prior knowledge. And if they already have the knowledge, the prompt is sort of redundant, although nice to remind students that they don't have to make stuff up in their answers.
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The biggest obstacle to fixing public schools is educators’ pathological commitment to keeping up appearances.
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But it seems so irrational for each teacher in America to have to do this. Why aren’t there more truly excellent kits of teaching materials out there? Kits that are rigorously classroom tested.
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Education schools have to cultivate prejudice against veteran teachers because they’re the ones who have the wisdom to call BS on the profs’ harebrained ideas.
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What’s so demoralizing about the activities curriculum is that it leaves kids empty minded—very little sticks. Direct instruction plus drill and practice actually *gives* kids something.
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@KSommerlot Kathryn—could it be you were ripped off by your own education if you never gained an appreciation of any classics?.
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Education professors: it’s fine if you disagree with E.D. Hirsch, but it is cowardly and unprofessional to shield your students from his ideas. He is a central player in the education debates across the globe.
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@ERobbPrincipal Discussions like these are such a waste of time. Raise the bar. Stop lowering it.
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Who else deletes emails about well-being as fast as humanly possible?.
I would like to clarify that the ‘toolkit’ that Ofsted will be trialling in schools in the new year, has nothing to do with the work we do at Teach Well Toolkit. We support the mental wellbeing of school staff, without judgement, and spend longer than two days to support them.
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Inquiry is all the rage in CA social studies circles. But whenever a presenter tries out one of these lessons on me, I’m left with nothing but fuzzy notions in my head. Am I alone?.
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One of the great services Emily Hanford performed is demonstrating that just because “everyone is doing” x doesn’t mean x is a valid educational practice.
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Sometimes I feel like a fool for actually caring about whether my students learn history. It seems no one else does.
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Without putting up much of a fight, we adults are allowing students to opt out of effort, aren’t we?.
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Asian schools teach math slowly and solidly with lots of rote memorization in elementary school so that kids can go faster and think creatively in the upper grades. We botch it.
My interview with Lucy Crehan here. She wrote the book Cleverlands.
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Here’s what I see: the teachers who try to teach the fancy standards (NGSS, CC) are miserable, as are their students. The teachers who teach straightforward knowledge are happy—as are their students.
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Building a year’s worth of good lessons is a Herculean task. It’s irrational to ask each teacher to do this himself.
Many glamorize teachers making materials, lessons, and assessments. Not glamorous. Knowing you're the frontline servant asked to build w/o tools is an ungodly pressure. I did it, but it cost me. Not glamorous. especially if you serve in a high- needs school. #CurriculumMatters.
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American teachers, in general, are ignorant of and incurious about education in other countries. I’ve never understood why.
@S_Oberle This is the single most important difference between schools in the US & schools in England right now. A head teacher said to me: it's hard to find a newly qualified teacher these days who doesn't know about working memory, retrieval practice etc. what a sea change. and one that.
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I’m always astonished by my liberal friends’ utter certainty that the failure of inner city schools can be accounted for by inequitable funding.
You know all those media narratives about unequally funded schools (rich districts are supposedly swimming in money while urban schools get nothing) and decades of ruthless budget cuts?. Yeah. Lies. All of it.
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This is the most brilliant guy on edu-Twitter.
RTI misconception: no, your Tier 1 instruction won’t close big gaps from previous years, and that means more than 20% of your class may need intervention. #education #rti #teachesoftiktok #intervention
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We have a norms problem in American schools. Disrespect to adults and slovenly work school not be normal.
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@tetheredtoed1 And some teachers are not there to teach but to obtain emotional gratification from their students.
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@teachbk I’ve been convinced by the research and my own experience that inquiry is inferior to direct instruction for most learners. If you want to learn how to fix a broken faucet, do you want group work and readings, or watching an expert show you in a five minute YouTube video?.
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@sage_stage A good principal would shut this nonsense down. This kind of thing is what makes modern schools soul crushing for teachers.
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Decades of passionately insisting there’s “a better way” and yet not a single proof-of-concept school that opens its doors to the world. If this isn’t a red flag, I don’t know what is.
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There should just be one incredibly well crafted curriculum for the entire United States.
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One reason that educational fraud abounds is that kids can’t tell they’re getting ripped off.
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@TalkingTier1 PBIS is pernicious because it conveys the false sense that discipline can be safely dismantled. We are entering a very dark phase of American education.
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Administrators think teachers cause misbehavior (bad vibes; boring lessons). Do they also think cops cause crime?.
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I struggle to read Greek, not because I lack reading skills, but because I don’t know what the words mean. Kids struggle to read, not because they lack reading skills, but because they don’t know what the words mean. A textbook is Greek to them until we teach them the words.
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Group work is malpractice that education schools have pushed for decades.
When classes switched from grouped table seating to desks in rows, on task behavior doubled. Grouped classrooms had three times the behavioral disruptions
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If your principal likes the cliche “Maslow before Bloom’s”, it means they don’t really care very much about academics.
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My goal in teaching world history is to firmly implant in students’ minds a rough idea of what has happened. Is this the wrong goal?.
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@sage_stage We had only one applicant for an open science position recently. No one wants to be a teacher anymore.
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K-12 schools are a dumpster fire and the Democrats are a major culprit.
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@teacher_woke @deb_fillman @MrDanielBuck @rpondiscio @pauldrossi @educatedandfree @Rieffian Ice breakers are boring and unproductive. We need to stop treating the teaching of subject matter as something icky and emotionally harmful.
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