I could be interpreting your comment wrong, but it seems to put the onus heavily on the teacher, which seems a bit naive. My friend just started teaching in New York actually. And she specifically wanted to teach at a Title 1 school (i.e. poor) in order to reach students with less income and opportunity (she teaches an East Asian language in a predominantly non-Asian minority community). That was the idealized plan anyway. Yet, the school won't give her basic supplies. There is no lounge. No fridge. Ok, fine, that's tolerable (odd to me since I too was raised in an affluent community). But the teacher's need paper. There is a locked up supply room full of supplies, but the teachers are told they can't have access to it. Why? Nobody knows. Printing rights are curbed.
And on top of that all, NYC DoE requires a masters. That equals debt, if you went to a "good" school. But the DoE pays crap. Oh and for some reason at one point, the DoE lowered requirements to be a principal. 3 years of part time teaching, and you could be a principal. Her principal taught dancing for 3 years, and is now purportedly fit to analyze the effectiveness of foreign language teaching methods. But anyway, that's beside the point, that's just describing the environment.
Her program is new. But instead of asking students/parents and filtering for those who might be interested in an East Asian language, the administrators decided to randomly force students into the class, regardless of their prior language history or their year. You know what you get with that? Hostile students. The kind that scream fuck you in your face. OK, fine, just "standard" difficult students. But like any other job, if your "manager" has your back, you can usually deal. But this school doesn't believe in detention. Okay... The "dream" is that if a student is causing trouble, the deans will talk to said student. Uh oh, what wasn't accounted for was the saturation of the deans time due to trouble students. Now you got deans telling you that, sorry, they can't deal with disruptive students telling you to fuck off because they're overloaded. So now you have fire support and you're in the trenches alone. I'm not even going to get into the gay teacher's story. Once the students caught onto that...
This doesn't even include off-the-clock work that is required, which I won't get into. I'm sorry, but as someone in the tech field, or any privatized field, the shit that teachers have to put off with is insane.
I know teachers have been demonized, but the turnover rate in NYC for teachers is apparently extremely high (I have another friend working at the DoE itself). I'll have to get a source, but I seem to recall her saying it was around 70% after 2 years. And after hearing all the ridiculous war stories, I'm not surprised. Ha, another one of my teacher friends was moved to an empty classroom. Upon asking for desks, the administrators told her "we don't know where they are" and left it at that. So she had to essentially salvage desks marked for discard.
I'm not exactly sure how VAM works, but I'm skeptical that an algorithm can model something so complex.
> I'm not exactly sure how VAM works, but I'm skeptical that an algorithm can model something so complex.
And even if it could, should an algorithm like this be obscured from view? Should we rely on "black box" algorithms like this, or should we at least insist that, if not the code, the research behind the code be released openly so that it can be held to proper scrutiny?
And on top of that all, NYC DoE requires a masters. That equals debt, if you went to a "good" school. But the DoE pays crap. Oh and for some reason at one point, the DoE lowered requirements to be a principal. 3 years of part time teaching, and you could be a principal. Her principal taught dancing for 3 years, and is now purportedly fit to analyze the effectiveness of foreign language teaching methods. But anyway, that's beside the point, that's just describing the environment.
Her program is new. But instead of asking students/parents and filtering for those who might be interested in an East Asian language, the administrators decided to randomly force students into the class, regardless of their prior language history or their year. You know what you get with that? Hostile students. The kind that scream fuck you in your face. OK, fine, just "standard" difficult students. But like any other job, if your "manager" has your back, you can usually deal. But this school doesn't believe in detention. Okay... The "dream" is that if a student is causing trouble, the deans will talk to said student. Uh oh, what wasn't accounted for was the saturation of the deans time due to trouble students. Now you got deans telling you that, sorry, they can't deal with disruptive students telling you to fuck off because they're overloaded. So now you have fire support and you're in the trenches alone. I'm not even going to get into the gay teacher's story. Once the students caught onto that...
This doesn't even include off-the-clock work that is required, which I won't get into. I'm sorry, but as someone in the tech field, or any privatized field, the shit that teachers have to put off with is insane.
I know teachers have been demonized, but the turnover rate in NYC for teachers is apparently extremely high (I have another friend working at the DoE itself). I'll have to get a source, but I seem to recall her saying it was around 70% after 2 years. And after hearing all the ridiculous war stories, I'm not surprised. Ha, another one of my teacher friends was moved to an empty classroom. Upon asking for desks, the administrators told her "we don't know where they are" and left it at that. So she had to essentially salvage desks marked for discard.
I'm not exactly sure how VAM works, but I'm skeptical that an algorithm can model something so complex.