US teachers union head lawyer on its "power"

[GT98]

I do not know from where You have gotten the picture of "once its in, its for ever".

I never said that, I was friends with a History teacher...well history doesn't change that much vs say Science..and I'm also not saying that it never changes, but at least in the US we are lucky to get new text books every 5-10 years...so if your going to teach whats in the book, how is your lesson plan going to change radically every year?

[DukeP]

I never said that, I was friends with a History teacher...well history doesn't change that much vs say Science..and I'm also not saying that it never changes, but at least in the US we are lucky to get new text books every 5-10 years...so if your going to teach whats in the book, how is your lesson plan going to change radically every year?

I do use books, from time to time. But:
1) Books can never be used as more than a base. If you use a science book, then it can describe a particular subject - say part of the light cycle photosynthesis. But You as a teacher has to include it in context (as I have written earlier - we are currently working with building artic climate greenhouses).
2) No matter what you teach, you always have to draw comparisons to current issues. If You teach the illiad, you have to also teach how the Illiad is reflected in modern litterature. Its a requirement, again pr. legislation.
3) All this is obviously subject to differences between classes. A math class might have certain sections of the curricula, that simply needs to be taught in a certain way. But the Math teacher still has to fit the relevance of his classes into an everyday context. Ie.: Teaching powerseries this fall, it was obvious to include the expected and the realized growth of the A H1N1 flu epidemic.

You might reuse one particular session, but you will always need to change it, so it fits todays agenda. But obviously -with experience You do build a kind of toolbox of solutions, that you can depend upon to ease the more base part of your preparations. But this should obviously just lead to a better context based education - since You now hare MORE time available to prepare in.

~~DukeP~~

[Evildead666]

My mother, just retired, was a teacher all her life.
She only taught ~6 year olds, but I can say that it is a LOT of work.

As for the holidays, there is one BIG downside, you only have holidays at peak periods fare-wise. Expensive.

And you have all the bloody kids from school, from every school, on holiday also.
So make that two.