Get Paid To Promote, Get Paid To Popup, Get Paid Display Banner Banking POLITICAL WORLD: Thoughts on an Article I Haven't Read

Monday, October 3, 2011

Thoughts on an Article I Haven't Read

That would be this one, which tells me in the headline and subtitle that North Carolina "grooms its best students to be good teachers". I strongly suspect that this is not true empirically, and I certainly hope it is not. Teaching requires basic competence of the subject material plus the ability to lesson-plan effectively and communicate well. While this is not an easy job relative to many other tasks, it's not on the same level of difficulty of oh, say, developing new medical procedures, inventing new technologies, or devising and testing new theories of human interaction.* Given that, I'd rather our best students focus on the most difficult tasks and/or those with the highest social benefit, while our capable-but-definitely-not-the-best students focus on getting first graders to color inside the lines or getting eighth graders to dissect a frog without vomiting.**

*The inclusion of the latter is me puffing out my chest, in case you couldn't tell.

**Not sure if I have those activities assigned to the proper class because I skipped 8th grade and never dissected a frog, so I assume that's when that happened.

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