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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Constant Reader who wrote (22436)	8/16/2001 4:49:03 PM
From: average joe	Respond to of 82486

"satisfaction is not my concern." If his satisfaction is not your concern whose satisfaction is? Laws of logic are laws of logic. I suggest you become a supplicant and obey them.

To: Constant Reader who wrote (22436)	8/16/2001 5:29:50 PM
From: The Philosopher	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 82486

That's a fair comment. As to never having met X, that's true. I've never met her in the flesh. It's not impossible that we would, astonishingly, find that we actually liked each other. But I have read a lot written by her, and have a wider range of knowledge of her beliefs (or at least what she says her beliefs are) than I had for any of the hundreds of persons I interviewed and the dozens I hired for teaching positions in the seven years I was a school administrator at all levels, K through 12. And of course first in my years of teaching and then in my years of administration I knew and observed and worked with a lot of teachers. So I do feel I have a certain ability to judge teachers and teaching even though I haven't physicall met them as long as I have several years of experience with what they have said and written about themselves and about a wide variety of subjects. Would this suffice for deciding whether she should be teaching in a school I was working in, if I ever got back into school administration? No. But does it suffice for expressing an opinion here on SI? In my opinion, yes. What X said was that she had been a second grade teacher, and that she felt qualified to be a fourth grade teacher (no argument there, the two are close enough that the skills and knowledge are quite transferrable, though personally I always preferred teachers who stayed in a grade and got to know it really well). But then she said (or clearly implied if she didn't actually say it) that she was qualified to teach middle school as her child went into there, and then high school as he (I think he) went to high school, and that there were a number of high school topics she felt qualified to teach. This I called arrogance. Based on my experience, I know of no teacher who has been successful at all levels of school. The skills necessary to teach the different ages, the understanding of their physical and emotional development, the knowledge base required, are all so different. To the non-teacher this sometimes seems silly -- teaching is teaching. But let me ask you, if a doctor said "well, last year I was a heart surgeon, this year I'm doing eye surgery, next year I'll be doing brain surgery, and the next year I'll move on down and do abdominal surgery," I can assure you I wouldn't let him or her operate on me. And I doubt he or she would get board certified in so many disciplines. So, yes, I did consider anyone who would casually claim to be qualified to teach virtually any age and subject to be arrogant. Maybe she's the one in a million exception who could do it. But I don't think my opinion was unreasonable, and I stand by it.