A Teacher's Competency Should Be Evaluated Often
Posted: Saturday, August 20, 2011
by Gerry Charbonneau
http://nibblednews.typepad.com
Anatole France: "An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don't. "
For many of the luckier students a new school year is about to begin. They were fortunate and were able to loll away the summer months with rest, relaxation and time away from the pressures of academe. Their days were spent tanning, surfing, enjoying leisure time with their friends or perhaps working at a summer job.
Their concerned parents, realizing the importance of a good educational background, hoped that the voluntary summer school attendance would somehow enable their youngsters to enter the new academic year willing and able to produce exemplary work. The extracurricular effort would in their minds magically cleanse the slate of a previous year’s less than perfect performance.
Many of the students who endured summer school were not lazy or lacked the right stuff. In a number of school districts the educators themselves were guilty of promoting students they knew could not make the grade. They did this for purely personal reasons based purely on greed, self-promotion or tenure. The student’s educational welfare was the farthest thing from their minds.
The teachers involved in the past year's scandal and many school districts were playing a type of educational shell game. They wanted the competency and the overall performance of their districts to shine and be worthy of public recognition and ultimately increased governmental funding. Academically challenged students were promoted with the rest of their classmates even though they had not successfully completed the work load requirements.
Many teachers often have a few students in their classes that they know will require additional coaching and attention if they are to succeed with the year's course material. Dedicated teaching professionals accept the challenge and devise course material geared to meet these needy students requirements.
The academically needy students should not be viewed as a blight on the overall educational landscape. They should nor be used as catalysts who will ultimately enable conniving and unscrupulous educators to publicly justify fudging academic records so that their teachers and districts can compete and perhaps outshine rival teaching associations.
Parents should become actively involved with the quality of the education their youngsters receive and the caliber of teachers the system offers to educate them. As a new school year starts concerned parents should make every effort to get to know the members of the teaching staffs who will be responsible for their children’s academic training.
The start of the academic school year is the ideal time for parents, teachers and students to form an educational information alliance wherein the learning process and a student's progress in the total classroom learning experience is encouraged, monitored and encouraged by family members and teaching staff.
Following such an interactive and informative course of action will avoid the confusion and the heartbreak that many parents and students discover at year end whenever a youngster fails to complete his course curriculum successfully.
This Article has been viewed 288 times. (Not updated in real-time.)
No comments yet.We want your comments! If you can read this, you don't have javascript enabled, so you can't use this comment system. Please enable javascript.