One good teacher = how many educationists ?

Every year, like the dark monsoon clouds, new educational reforms arrive. Typically text-books change (new minister), languages come and go (Marathi is in as-off today), exams change (from no-exams to weekly exams), evaluation rules change (marks or percentiles or grades ?). Add to this the large annual churn of teachers and things can get very dizzy for children.

How does one draw any conclusions about education when nothing seems to be ever constant ? I guess words "new reforms" says it all - meaning we are dumping "old" reforms. We don't even know if those worked or not.

In last few decades many educational theories have done 180 degree turns. Here is one example. For years educationists promoted idea of different learning-styles (the literature is vast). Children have different learning -styles, so there have to be teaching-styles and evaluation-styles. This spawned an industry of text-books, tool-kits and experts. Now it seems, the evidence for 'learning-style' learning isn't quite there. A new study shows that teaching-styles have no effect on the actual amount of learning that happens amongst different children (Paschler et al). Give it another year and the new study will also spawn an industry with its own experts.

The problem is - we are theorizing faster than we are collecting evidence. And we are marketing faster than we are theorizing. There is too much focus on class-rooms. Class-rooms have become cutting-edge labs for all sorts of experiments. Educationists are quicker to take new results and create policy-advice out of it. Education, of all the fields, requires a very long baseline and control population (I would say half-a-generation at least). But no one has patience or time to verify anything here.

I think schools are suffering from too many Educationists and too few teachers. A good teacher is an intuitive educationists. A good teacher develops views and techniques over many years. He/she knows how to balance different approaches to teaching (if only we would leave him/her alone).

No means no, means no, means no, means ....

There is this growing thing in children today, both at home and in school. When I say "no", meaning "you will not do or have a thing", kids consider it as an Invitation for Negotiation.

They are really really really sorry.., oh please, please, please..., can't we do this just for 10 minutes..., why can't we..., but you allowed yesterday... This can go on for minutes, hours or even days. They want to know what they can do to get around this 'no'.

The grown-ups, rationals, teacher-types think kids will understand if we explain why. Intentions are good here, but this only furthers kids' impression that this is open for negotiation. For every explanation of yours, kids have varied explanations of why not 'no'.

May be it is possible to reach end of the argument, with one or two kids at home. I found number of parents are also suffering from this epidemic. However, there are 30 or 40 kids to tackle - in class-room. There is no scope of ending the arguments and also teach what you decided to.

Its worth studying this phenomena. It's telling us something about their strategy or their changed perception of who they and we are.