The Glade 4.0

Amanar, the problem is that teaching, in my opinion, isn't a skill, per se. It's a personality and mindset.

The skills should be in the actual material. The personality should be what enables people to teach those skills.

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“The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.” - Thomas Paine

Teaching is absolutely a skill. Much like any job having the right personality and mindset help greatly in one's ability, but it's still very much a skill.

The fact that people think anyone can teach is a classic example of the Dunning-Kruger effect.

Not really. The ability to teach is not primarily a learned skill. Therefore, any given person is almost as likely to be able to teach as a person with an education degree.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Really?

The definitions of "skill" indicate proficiency, knowledge, or competence. These are all measurable things. Since "teaching," according to most teacher's unions, cannot be measured, that would exclude it as a skill.

Personality is not a skill. Mindset is not a skill. Those are the key determinants to teaching. This opinion is backed by the fact that most secondary or primary level educators do not get field-specific degrees, but get education specific degrees. Were the key determinants to teaching success to be hard skills, the majority of education jobs at those levels would require skill-based degrees. As Corolinth has already discussed.

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“The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.” - Thomas Paine

Did you miss the rest of my post? Where I point out what I believe is required for teaching? Where I imply the a lot more engineers can teach than teachers can engineer, but that it is not for everyone?

It's so much easier to argue against statements you want people to have made, rather than the statements they actually made.

either that or I was trying to avoid specific accusations against specific people, because that comes out as overly aggressive.

I put the statement in the most general terms to avoid using "you" or name individuals.

My point is NOBODY's said that.

We have direct observable evidence that an education degree is not at all a requirement to teach. Our technology as advancing, and it is doing so at an increasing rate. The people who pioneered the foundation for our technology are either dead or retired. Because our technology is still advancing, they have clearly taught successors, and have done so in large numbers. Those men and women did not have education degrees. They had degrees in science, mathematics, and medicine.

Yet they taught, and they taught well. Their students pushed forward the boundaries of what was possible, and are now teaching students of their own. Every time you pick up a phone or get into a car, you have solid physical proof that an education degree is not required to be an effective teacher. Universities across the world are crawling with excellent teachers who do not have degrees in education. Businesses across the world are also full of excellent teachers who do not have degrees in education.

Excellent teachers with education degrees are outnumbered by excellent teachers who don't have them. That is a cold, hard fact. You don't think about it, because most of those people don't call themselves teachers. Education majors don't want you to think about it, because then you'd recognize just how worthless their degree really is. A degree in education is not a degree in teaching, it's a degree in babysitting.

I know better than any of you that not everyone can teach. My ability to do so, which draws the respect and admiration of my peers, is based on knowledge and mastery of the subject material. It is all material I would have never learned in pursuit of a degree in education. If I had pursued a degree in education, I would be worse as a teacher, because I would not have the specialized knowledge that I use, every day, to back up my teaching.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

Since the rest has been addressed, in my mind, fairly well, I want to go back to the point RD made about STEM education not being as good at preparing students for communication as Arts education.

I'd say that's a widely spread and completely false notion. Between oral presentations and written reports, most STEM programs require far more communication, held to higher standards, than any Humanities/Arts program that I know. In fact, a huge portion of it is spent on teaching the ability to communicate complex ideas to people with little or no background in the area- bosses without engineering degrees, laypeople, etc.

I've made the argument before, but I'll make it here again- STEM education has become, for all intents and purposes, the true "liberal arts" degree, whereas most "liberal arts" degrees have left behind the trivium in favor of the quadrivium. In short, while STEM degrees still require a solid grounding in the arts and humanities, most arts and humanities degrees require little to no coursework in mathematics and the natural sciences.

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Darksiege: You are not a god damned vulcan homie.

I was thinking of bringing up all the teachers who are not Ed majors, but didn't for some reason. Thank you, Coro.

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

The Dunning-Kruger effect most accurately applies to the two people telling an actual, employed University level instructor at a Tier 1 STEM university they have no idea what they're talking about when it comes to teaching.

Corolinth and I have taught your vaunted education majors. The last person on the Glade to try and have this argument with me, lost when Corolinth demonstrated that the majority of Tier 1 universities were transitioning back to ONLY offering Education degrees as SECONDARY to an actual academic or professional discipline degree. And now that he's earned his stripes and demonstrated himself to be far more thoughtful, productive, and effective than his Education Degree holding counterparts: he gets to teach math classes for one of the best math departments in the United States.

So, just to make my statements clear ...

Corolinth is an actually an established and recognized authority on teaching, and quite 'skilled' at it according to freely available public records and open information requirements.

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I find a lot of STEM programs have by-and-large stripped too much humanities and arts from their curricula. This has to do with funding, politics, and meta-level idiocy with Universities. I'm sure you know what I'm talking about, Nephyr.

There are still many Tier 1 schools that require a good core curriculum, but those are dwindling. The last 20ish years have been spent producing degree mills and educations so specific you graduate limited-skillset-monkeys instead of students. That said, I agree entirely that too many humanities classes stop at College Algebra, 1 2-class Hard Science Sequence + lab, and one more hard science class as an elective under the 3000/300/"3rd year" level.

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Oh, I completely agree that the requirements overall are being stripped- just that they're being stripped faster from one area than another.

I just think it necessary to point out when I continuously here people talk about how much "broader" someone with a humanities degree is than someone in STEM.

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Darksiege: You are not a god damned vulcan homie.

Yeah, I have a very broad education in terms of "subject matter," provided I use the over atomized, post-Derridean focus on label-stratification in academics. Which reminds me, at some point I should really explain why the dialectical materialists have destroyed the world and any change of educative competitiveness in the U.S.

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The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cute bit of trivia someone heard from their psych major girlfriend, that seemed like a good idea to use to attempt to impress ignorant peons. It is especially comforting to someone who dropped out of a college program to believe that anyone speaking with any confidence on a subject be likewise impaired, even moreso if they dropped out due to lack of competence. After all, because everyone can be an expert on the internet, no one is.

So Riov, quit working bullshit tech support jobs, or whatever the **** it is you're doing these days, and get your *** back to that physics program you've been blaming your ex-wife for forcing you to drop out of ten to fifteen years ago. Then we can talk about miscalbiration of one's abilities.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

You're so cute when you fall back on ad hominim attacks when you cannot rebut the actual statement.

and correcting everything wrong with your post with actual facts (instead of your inventions about my personal life) would involve posting more details that you'd try to somehow turn against me in some other fashion. So, not going to engage other than to say you really don't know crap about my life. Stop trying to bring it into discussions.

Since DFK! and I already rebutted it, there's no reason Coro should need to also. Teaching ability is not primarily a learned skill; therefore there is no reason an untrained person is incompetent, or is overestimating their ability. Furthermore, many people teach various things in settings other than schools and therefore can realistically assess their own abilities.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Bad teachers are absolutely over paid. The only justification to pay teachers more, is that if it paid better, it might attract better talent.

You can't make a blanket statement that all teachers are over paid or underpaid. There are a few (very few) that are worth every penny they make and a lot more. Most are just going through the motions...

This is quite true. Unfortunately, bad teachers are more common than good teachers, average teachers are more common still, and mediocre teachers are most common of all.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Eh, I think teaching is probably a learned skill. I think most education degree programs probably just don't do a very good job of teaching it, so I agree with the idea that we shouldn't restrict teaching to those with education degrees.

We could take 20 random people, give half of them a 24 hour crash course on teaching (taught by the best teachers we can find), and give the other half nothing. Then we could have each person try to teach a specific concept to 20 random 10 year olds. We'd test the kids before and after to measure their level of improvement, and then compare the two groups of teachers to see who was more effective.

Anyway, I bet if we carried out that experiment, we'd find that those who take the crash course on teaching are more effective. But that's just my best guess.

I'd compare the whole thing to art. You don't need an art degree to be a good artist, and having an art degree does not necessary mean you are good at art. Some people have more of an innate talent for it, but art is still a skill that is primarily learned.

Not to derail, but one complaint about art that I've heard repeatedly, is that art instruction, while teaching you HOW to create what you imagine, actually contaminates the imagination.

"There's something pure about kids' art, something he says older artists spend their lives trying to regain." - Tim Burton

Ok so this is actually an interesting hypothesis.

What would really make it interesting, and relate more to the learned skill v. inherent capability issue is if you cross referenced this proposed study group with a group controlled for certain "teacher" personality traits, and with another group controlled for subject matter aptitude. Run all three tests and a regression analysis and I bet that the "crash course" has less impact than ability or subject matter expertise.

But these are all just speculative.

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“The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.” - Thomas Paine