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Captcha, what, precisely, do you mean by “you’ll get people like Ms. DeRegnaucourt”? What leads you to believe that she is unqualified for her position? This isn’t a rhetorical question. I’m genuinely curious.
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I do believe that she meets formal requirements. Formally, she was likely qualified to ‘teach’ at her son’s school when the son was 6 and she was a 29 years old high school graduate who missed a lot of school and did not know that negative numbers exist outside of her checking account balance.
Ms. DeRegnaucourt went back to school when she was 29. She is 47 and she has been teaching high level math for 13 years. So, she started teaching high level math 5 years after she was introduced to negative numbers. Unless your talent matches Ramanujan’s you cannot move from finger-counting to teaching math to teenagers with 10 years of math education behind them.
Weren’t you the one who was troubled by the lack of expertise in the decision making process at the highest levels of our government? I find this to be similar – you have people with good intentions and insufficient skills who were told that good intentions and strong will compensate for the lack of expertise.
I don’t question Ms. DeRegnaucourt’s good intentions (I’m not convinced about that either) and her ‘charge the mountain’ attitude (ignorance?), but I don’t think her departure is a huge loss to the system. I think she is the product of that system and generally matches the qualities (poor?) of the system that produced her.
My TSA comment was the result of my disdain for TSA rules and procedures. I don’t think that throwing more money at the problem will fix anything. There was an interesting article in WSJ that was picked up by Slashdot earlier today and some of the comments there are possibly more interesting than the article itself.[/quote]
As I mentioned in my previous post, I have my own opinions about Ms. DeRegnaucourt’s level of expertise. However, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, they are just that: opinions. Unfortunately, the article is devoid of actual information. Even though I may strongly suspect that Ms. DeRegnaucourt may utilize every nonteaching minute of her day immersing herself in “Jersey Shore” and “Real Life: Las Vegas”, it is also possible that she is sitting in her grandmother’s rocker before the fire, marveling over Richard Feynman’s CalTech lectures (Notice I said “possible”, not “probable”; won’t gamble on that one in this economy).
Your second paragraph assumes (or appears to assume) that everyone learns the same amount of material at the same rate and to the same degree of understanding. I, myself, have no problem believing that an academically-deficient individual could return to school at age 29, and, in five years time, acquire more than enough knowledge to teach students with 10 years of math behind them. This is not common, but it is not, in the least, an impossibility. As I mentioned before, learning cannot take place in the absence of curiosity. And people learn to the degree to which curiosity is piqued.
Again, I’m not saying that this is true in Ms. D’s case, but people experience different levels of motivation to learn throughout their lives, and changing capacities to learn.
The other thing to consider is the actual mathematics skill level of 11th grade students in an A/P class. I have four children, (14 years separating youngest and oldest) and between their education, and that of the children of friends and relatives over the years, I’ve had the opportunity to make certain observations. One is that all A/P classes are not on the same level. They can differ. A lot. And the sad truth is that I have yet to see any A/P course that was more difficult than any of my standard high school courses back in the 1970s. I’m sure there are some out there, but I think, in many cases, it is a misused term today.
As for 11th grade students in general, I am truly shocked by their overall level of literacy in math, spelling, the sciences, English composition and grammar, and reading. School system administrators are concerned with pass rates on standardized tests, and many districts teach “to the test”. My 16 year-old stepdaughter is extremely intelligent (both parents have doctorates in the sciences), yet is functionally illiterate. For some reason, her school assigns one teacher in the first half of the school year, and another in the second half. Her first biology teacher was very concerned about her less-than-stellar performance, and would make sure that we knew about missed assignments. My daughter was given opportunities to make up the assignments, but if they were not submitted, she received a failing grade. However, in the second half of the year, she had another bio teacher who would change grades so that all of her children would have no lower than a C on any given assignment or test. I checked the record (which is available to parents on the Web) on a Thursday, and on the following Tuesday, my daughter had a C- instead of the prior F, which I could trace directly to the changing of several grades.
So, while I most definitely believe that we should have competent, accomplished teachers in our schools, and that we should constantly challenge our students academically, the sad fact is that we have a population of high school (and even college) graduates who are, for all intents and purposes, illiterate. Anything that will improve that average is okay by me, and that includes the use of teachers that may not have Ivy League degrees, but who can get students to realize the importance of learning, and can inspire them to do so.
As I mentioned, the article has no detail that allows me to make a judgement on this woman’s grasp of the material she is teaching, or whether she is up to the job. It doesn’t tell me where she went to school, or when, what she studied or her G.P.A., or any information on how her students have performed on the SATs or how many have been accepted into science/math-oriented degree programs at 4-year universities. All it gives me is a first-hand account of her teaching philosophy which, if it can be believed, is an effective one.
But I agree with you, 100 percent, that good intentions are not enough to fulfill the obligation we have to the children in our schools. We not only need qualified, appropriately educated teachers in our schools, we need administrators that will support them in their efforts, and parents that will not sabotage them. A teacher has a very small amount of time with a class each day, and he/she often has to share that time and attention with over 25 students. To treat them like a babysitter, instead of the highly educated professional that they are, is counterproductive and insulting.
