Letters: Time for Teachers

Credit: Edutopia

Time For Teachers

In "Give Me a Break: A Teacher's Plea for Pause [1]"(November 2005), Dan Ouellette makes an argument against lengthening the school year, saying teachers need summer vacation as downtime to recuperate from the past year of teaching and renew for the upcoming year. Everyone needs a break, but not just in the form of a vacation. How about a paid break that lets our teachers explore new ideas, meet with colleagues to brainstorm new approaches, evaluate what worked over the past year, and plan new approaches for the upcoming year?

Melinda Kolk

Substitute Parents

What bothers me about the last Editor's Note [2] (November 2005) is that its point didn't become clear to me until its conclusion: "The burden of being a parent substitute adds yet more weight to an already burdensome workload . . . ."

Sure, spending my first teaching years in an urban school when I was already well past forty almost burned me out. And, sure, this was due to the numbers: 180 preadolescent individuals every day, most of whom needed more than the one parent and the lousy living conditions they had. But I also developed the most memorable relationships and made the biggest difference with these kids. We can't do it all (whatever that might be), but every teacher who is a coach, facilitator, mentor, adviser, role model, or listener in time of need is doing some of this.

For my money, the idea that we teach only content -- prevalent among secondary school educators -- is a nasty myth at any level, including college. When we neglect the whole person, we get the results of negligence: shamefully deprived students at one extreme and "grinds" at the other. Owen Edwards implies that this is a burden we must bear because, otherwise, bad things may happen. I believe the best teachers find joy and opportunity when they do however much or little they can to help a child become more whole.

David Wolinsky

Credit: Edutopia

The Right Is Wrong

Bravo! A standing ovation for Norman Lear's "Declaration of Independence: Students Caught in the Middle [3]" (November 2005). The onslaught of the fanatical Religious Right is a dangerous virus that threatens our nation's schools and the education of every child now and in the future.

Unless we resist their false ideologies, we may be no better off than the Afghan people under the repressive and cruel Taliban. Extremism on any side of the spectrum invariably breeds falsehoods and lies necessary to indoctrinate people according to dogma. Keep our public schools pure to scientific principles and ideas, not the misinformation and falsehoods of the Religious Right.

Howard Fisher

It Doesn't Compute

I am so glad that Todd Oppenheimer ("Tech Made Easy: Keeping It Simple in the Classroom [4]," October 2005) called attention to the fact that too few high schools teach computer science. When we talk about the importance of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) education for students, computer science is often completely ignored despite the fact that computing is now necessary for almost every single transaction and interaction in our society.

As a result, though considerable time and money have been spent on increasing and supporting integration of computing tools across the curriculum, computer science has been left to wither and die in many schools, school districts, and states. The result of this shortsightedness is that we continue to fall farther and farther behind on the indicators of high-level computing ability.

For example, U.S. universities no longer dominate in the prestigious ACM International Programming contest. The long-term effect of this problem is that, though we may excel at training students to use the tools that power our world, we are forgetting to train those who will build them, and everyone knows that it is the tool builders, not the tool users, who guarantee our economic future. For some reason, there is an enormous misconception that there are no jobs in computing.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Every labor prognostication we have shows that the gap between the highly skilled workers we produce from our schools and the jobs that need filling in our society is growing, not shrinking. It is also probably safe to say that the great scientific breakthroughs of this century (especially in the combinatorial sciences such as bioinformatics) will depend on computing knowledge. We continue to ignore this fact at our peril.

Chris Stephanson

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