[ SECRET POST #2486 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2486 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 024 secrets from Secret Submission Post #355.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[chardmonster]

Would you be at all willing to teach normal kids?

[(Anonymous)]

(not OP)

I would be willing to teach motivated kids at any ability level.

[volta_arovet]

Honestly, most kids can be motivated or at least involved/invested if you do it right. It does take a lot more work and effort, though.

[(Anonymous)]

ayrt

Yeah, I insist on pre-motivated kids. This is why I'm not in teaching.

[volta_arovet]

haha, fair enough.

[chardmonster]

Is this code for "not city schools?"

I'm not trying to make you look like a bad guy or anything; I hear the education majors saying this stuff all the time. They only want to teach the kids who don't need much help. I guess I get it but it's kind of depressing.

Big massive trigger warning goes here

[feotakahari]

My mother's told me stories about the kids she taught in city schools. It makes me wonder who on Earth would have the guts to keep doing that for more than a few years. (She swears she got one once who'd been rescued from a kiddie porn film shoot. He'd tell all the girls that he wanted to rape them.)

Re: Big massive trigger warning goes here

[chardmonster]

Uhhhh

Yeah my sister works in a city school as a teacher. Me and my siblings attended them. THAT IS NOT EVERY CITY SCHOOL.

[(Anonymous)]

ayrt

Motivated kids is code for motivated kids, which is why I'm not in teaching. I would be a terrible teacher for children. Any kind of teaching involving kids also involves motivating and disciplining them -- or teaching them how to be functioning members of society, if you want to look at it that way -- and I didn't understand what went on in most kids' heads when I was a kid, much less now.

[forgottenjester]

I kinda feel the same as you and I'm in the field right now. It's sad but slightly understandable? For me though, it's not about gifted/not-gifted. It's about motivation.

I've worked with special ed, normal kids, and gifted. All are a joy to work with if they want to learn. If they don't want to learn it just usually ends with frustration on my part and little to nothing learned on theirs.

So yeah, understandable but sad because the kids who need you the most sometimes are those who have the least motivation.

[chardmonster]

Thanks--and This is true! I'm really happy my sister wanted to go this route (she's working as a special ed science teacher in the city high school we attended!), but part of that is because... well, that's where we went. So we know what it's like. Meanwhile when I went to catechism class in tenth grade the kids from the catholic high school acted like kids from the city schools were characters from Dangerous Minds--despite our usually being from the same neighborhood and background.

A lot of the best students I've had in freshman history were from disadvantaged backgrounds. And I ended up having to give them reduced grades on papers, because--despite their having much more interest in the material and incisive thinking than most of the advantaged kids--nobody ever taught them to write. It's a writing intensive course and I have to grade stuff like grammar and structure. People care a lot about giving these kids scholarships once they hit senior, but it appears nobody bothered to teach them a lot before that. It's depressing.

[(Anonymous)]

OP- I have less interest in this, especially if it was in the constraints of a normal school model. I'd be more willing if it was normal kids in alternative schooling systems. Still, my specific interest goes to gifted kids, though people with learning disabilities also have some of my interest. It's not that there's anything wrong with normal kids, it's just that some groups really need that special attention, and it's awesome to actually see them flourish.

[(Anonymous)]

your last line strikes me as kind of strange, because "it's just that some groups really need that special attention, and it's awesome to actually see them flourish" is something i would expect more from someone who works with/would work with disadvantaged students. honestly i've heard similar sentiment from my mom who currently works in a juvenile detention center, so maybe that's why.

as a kid who was considered gifted (for a time. then i guess i got stupid again LOL.) i suppose i just don't see what's so special about us :p

[chardmonster]

...normal kids don't need special attention?

I understand you having specific interests, I do. However that just isn't how teaching works. You might get to teach gifted kids! And you'll also get to teach other kids. You'll have to, in fact. You don't get to be That Guy From Dead Poets' Society.

As a gifted kid, who was among other gifted kids--sorry, dude, we actually needed less attention. We didn't have problems with math and could read just fine. We got through the material. I'm very happy I was able to take AP classes but it would have been awesome if someone had devoted some resources to the kids who were actually in danger of getting bored to death, who needed encouragement to move forward, instead of having us read Faulkner while the rest of the school went to shit.

[(Anonymous)]

I don't think it's fair or accurate to say that gifted kids need less attention. I was a gifted kid, and even in the upper-level classes my schools provided, I wasn't challenged. I never had to "study" -- I just paid attention in class and maybe looked over my notes once or twice before a test. I was able to get by (and do well) on sheer brainpower, and so I never learned how to tackle challenging material, or work at a problem until I "got" it. Needless to say, about halfway through college, when I was hitting more difficult material and I could no longer coast (not that I thought I'd been coasting until then, because I never learned any other way), I hit a wall academically. I would've been a lot better off if there had been a more intensive gifted program in my earlier years that had challenged me enough to give me the opportunity to learn to handle material that was "hard."

It sounds like that's what OP wants to do. I know US school systems generally aren't set up to accommodate that, but I know firsthand that it's something that needs doing, so good on them. School is about more than just "getting through the material" - it's about learning how to learn. Or it should be. "Normal" kids are able to do that with the standard curriculum, for the most part, but gifted kids DO need special attention in order to get the same result.

[lunabee34]

It depends, though, on how the school where OP teaches is set up. My daughter's school has dedicated gifted teachers who only teach gifted students.

[(Anonymous)]

Gifted kids ABSOLUTELY need to be challenged. The other anon who replied to your comment is spot-on.

If gifted kids are not stimulated enough, they'll hit a wall and never reach their full potential. As a gifted student, I was NEVER challenged in school. I just coasted along getting As with barely any real effort. I was never truly intellectually stimulated, and I was never taught to work hard. I never needed to. As a result, I've developed a lazy personality and have serious motivation issues, which are preventing me from achieving things and reaching my full potential.

When a child shows extraordinary ability, it must be nurtured and encouraged, not just left alone and ignored because the kid is already getting As. That is a surefire way to waste a child's potential.

[(Anonymous)]

If you needed less attention, then you weren't gifted, sry2say, just clever. And I speak as a "clever but not gifted" person myself.

BIG difference. The gifted child is so many deviations away from the mean that they are like a child with an LD at the other end. So outside the norm that they need a different kind of treatment

What fantasy world do you intend to move to

[insanenoodlyguy]

... because that's what you'd fucking need.

You think you are going to just get a teaching job teaching the best of the best, which is probably some elite private school in some neighboorhood where most teachers entire paychecks for the month won't clear the house payment alone?

Yeah. Cause your that special one that will graduate the top of your class with a book on a new revolutionary teaching method already published and go right to the elite schools.

No jackass. Let me tell you what your life is. Your life is adjunct and sub positions for a bare minimum of 2 years, and at least a stint in a behavioral or special ed classroom. Then, when you are lucky enough to get a job, you will take it and be glad for it. Then, and only fucking then should you start thinking about teaching gifted anything.

Re: What fantasy world do you intend to move to

[chardmonster]

On top of this--the kids in the nicer school? Not necessarily gifted. They're just less likely to have problems* and have parents pushing them. They might be writing perfectly adequate five paragraph essays with approximately no content.

I know because I get a lot of these kids in freshman college courses I TA. Perfectly adequate. Only that. Not gifted at all.

The one or two gifted kids in the class full of kids who can barely read, in the poorly funded school with problems? They need you. And so do the other kids.


*THE PRIVATE SCHOOL CAN EXPEL KIDS WITH PROBLEMS. The public school in the suburb is more likely to have parents who can afford outside tutoring/therapy.

Re: What fantasy world do you intend to move to

[volta_arovet]

Or you could get a math or hard science teaching degree and get a job pretty damn quick. :D

[(Anonymous)]

Not OP, but I can completely understand not wanting to teach normal kids because of the problems with the educational system today - there is such an emphasis on standardized test scores that teacher are often forced into teaching to the test, which can severely curb creative teaching methods. It seems like education for gifted kids or kids with learning disabilities might be a place where trying alternative methods would be encouraged.

[(Anonymous)]

+1

I was worknig full-time as a substitute teacher for awhile, and I think I taught at least a couple days at every school in my county. An then I burnt out and quit.

I want to teach only if I can teach "motivated" kids not because of classism or not wanting to do the hard work or whatever - it's because I like *teaching*. I don't like spending 80% of my time attempting to keep kids from killing each other/bullying each other into tears/stealing shit from each other/running out of the building/destroying school property/going out to smoke up in the bathroom/etc.

And yes, you can turn kids like that into 'motivated' kids, I fully believe anyone can be taught to love learning. You *can't* turn kids like that into motivated learners with one teacher, who isn't being paid enough to live within fifty miles of her workplace, in a classroom with no supplies, with 40 kids in a room that has 25 chairs and crappy climate control and unsafe conditions, when giving personal attention to any one student results in all the other students immediately attempting to cause physical harm to each other, while you have to follow a county-wide 'curriculum' that lays out what you have to teach the kids *day-by-day*, using a workbook designed by bureaucratic committee where half the pages contain mistakes that make them unusable, under constant threat of being fired if at any point you fall under whatever this year's mandated benchmarks are, and your supervisors have failed upward and give you no support, and the county bans you from touching the kids at all even for hugs, and..... (and for the record, the above describes suburban schools in a fairly well-funded district.)

Or, well, maybe *you* can? But the teacher who can do that is one in 1000. and an educational system based on the one in 1000 being willing to spend their lives working 60-70 hours a week for less that the living wage in crap conditions while paying off student loans for a professional degree is an educational system that's unsustainable.

Special Ed and Gifted classroom are less likely to meet the above description only because they tend to have fewer kids, have more adults per classroom, have more freedom for how the teachers choose to teach, and have only kids whose parents are directly involved in their lives (because 90% of kids don't end up in those programs, even if they need them, unless parents are involved. Because that teacher with seven classes a day of 40 kids doesn't have the time to do that for every kid.) If the kids in those classes are more motivated, it's because of the above reasons.

Anyway, I feel you, OP. There are careers where you can do teaching without being in a school setting - working in museums, libraries, and parks, for example - but the pay tends to be even more crappy in recompense, and there are a lot fewer jobs to be had. If you feel a real passion for this, you might want to look around your area and see if there are any community programs that use volunteer tutors? That can be really rewarding teaching work outside the warehouse school system. You could also maybe look at getting involved with groups like boy scouts/girl scouts/campfire (you don't have to be a parent!), teaching in a religious setting, or teaching classes through a hobby group like a hackerspace or yarn store or art center? There are plenty of places to find a way to teach a little, if you already have a nice steady boring 9-5 job to live on.