The importance of the first year at school

[DMB]

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/education/article6169479.ece

HAVING a bad teacher in the first year at primary school can blight a child’s entire education, researchers have found.

They discovered that the effect of having an exceptionally poor – or an unusually good – teacher in the reception year was still detectable six years later.

I wonder how they evaluated the teachers.

[premjan]

Consensus perhaps.

[Alex]

Do teachers ever get evaluated? They can get fired for misconduct, but I've never heard of a teacher being dismissed for "pedagogic incompetence".

[Alex]

I endured several completely useless teachers in my time at school. One of them seemed to suffer a nervous breakdown whenever you caught his eye, and I've never made up the ground I lost in his class.

Lots of us, I suspect, have acquired much of the learning we possess despite the best efforts of teachers.

[Ray Moscow]

I endured several completely useless teachers in my time at school. One of them seemed to suffer a nervous breakdown whenever you caught his eye, and I've never made up the ground I lost in his class.

Lots of us, I suspect, have acquired much of the learning we possess despite the best efforts of teachers.

Ditto. Some of my teachers were terrible, but I survived somehow.

[DMB]

In the 20 or so schools I attended, I had a handful of brilliant and inspiring teachers in among the dross. I still am still grateful for them.

ETA but my first teachers were terrible, and I think that is one reason why I became an autodidact.

[sohy]

I had a wonderful first grade teacher. She is one of the few I remember positively. She even taught me that after you do your work, you can play. Maybe that's where I learned to work really fast, a habit I have to this day. :D I know that not every student in the class benefited from her style, but she was just what I needed. Being a quick and accurate worker has often given me an advantage.

If only I could get motivated to do my housework before I play.

[Matty]

aaaahhhhhhhh. Parent-noia. oh nooooe, you sent your kid to so and so school and that fucked them up for life. We just signed the we guy up at school for September and it all gets pretty "aaaah are we doing the right thing. But i basically think that the biggest difference between all teachers of all ages is the difference between teaching how to remember and how to think. Many teachers are the former. The occasional well remembered gem is the latter.


And some times, what you learn from said teacher isnt necessarily the straight up subject matter. I cant remember my earliest teachers really but when we were 10 through 14 we had this near retirement 65yr old ish geography teacher who Surprised me somewhere. She couldnt teach geography worth shit but boy did she know some tricks in the sack.


:)

[Notta]

aaaahhhhhhhh. Parent-noia. oh nooooe, you sent your kid to so and so school and that fucked them up for life. We just signed the we guy up at school for September and it all gets pretty "aaaah are we doing the right thing. But i basically think that the biggest difference between all teachers of all ages is the difference between teaching how to remember and how to think. Many teachers are the former. The occasional well remembered gem is the latter.


And some times, what you learn from said teacher isnt necessarily the straight up subject matter. I cant remember my earliest teachers really but when we were 10 through 14 we had this near retirement 65yr old ish geography teacher who Surprised me somewhere. She couldnt teach geography worth shit but boy did she know some tricks in the sack.


:)You do realize that "knowing some tricks in the sack" is a euphemism for having sex in US lingo, don't you? So I'm imagining a bunch of 10 - 14 year olds who know jack shit about geography but lots about having sex with someone old enough to be their grandmother!

[Matty]

that was my exact point.
twas a j/k. nevermind. :)

[Cath B]

I only had one teacher I would rate highly throughout Primary School (up to age eleven). She taught me when I was eight years old.

She was a superb storyteller, putting historical and biblical stories in her own words. She left me with an enthusiasm for history, and her account of the destruction of Jericho, heavily toned down as it was, was sufficiently vivid to leave me puzzled about the morality of God and within a year I reached the conclusion that he/she did not exist. I'm sure that wasn't the teacher's intention and I'm not aware of any other pupils responding in this way.

I didn't actually enjoy Maths in her class, but she gave us a thorough grounding in fractions, decimals, long division and pre-decimal weights and measures.

She encouraged me in story writing and when I showed her a brief original play I'd written she did not edit but helped with production, casting and costumes and we put on a performance for the rest of the school. I really should've thanked her for that, but never did.:mad:

Her status was merely a class teacher: senior positions were held by younger, more ambitious teachers. She did things her own way rather than following fads and this would have not made her well placed to score highly in whatever current fashion deemed indicative of a good teacher.

But she was.

[Alex]

Good teachers are rare. Lots of them have an adequate understanding of their subject, but they can't communicate it effectively to children. A reason for this failure is that many teachers lack natural presence, or intellectual authority or, to use a buzz word, "charisma".

My recollection is that both the best and the worst teachers that taught me were women.

[Matty]

school was pretty hit and miss for me, it was all going okay, i'd been at St Johns Comp for a couple years and ten there was all this fuss when i was found fingering Cindy Jones, one of the slutty 4th year girls, behind the bike sheds one lunch time.

The headmaster said there was zero tolerance, that they simply could not tolerate such behaviour and i would have to leave the school, although he did say it was a shame as i was one of the better English teachers there"

:) Tasteful as always.