Over the summer I went through an alternative teacher certification program. The program focused a lot on the techniques in Doug Lemov's book, Teach Like a Champion. I have implemented a few of Lemov's techniques and they have been very helpful in managing classroom behavior.
I worked at a Jimmy Johns for a few months. They make the sandwiches in a very specific way to optimize for speed. The average time between order and handoff to a customer was about a minute during busy times.
How did you become a computer science teacher? Did you get a degree in teaching? I have my degree in cs and am interested in becoming a teacher and trying to find as many options as possible.
I joined a charter school network in NYC last summer. I am working on a teaching degree simultaneously (there is classwork during the year, but the bulk of the work was/will be during the summers on either side of this school year).
I am teaching some 5th grade math and english in addition to computer science, though if the network is able to continue to grow, there are likely to be teachers teaching only 5th grade computer science in the very near future. Not many NYC middle schools (charter or otherwise), offer computer science to middle school students.
For what it's worth, my undergrad was in economics. I know enough to teach Scratch to 5th graders, though I wouldn't sign up to teach AP Computer Science. Like alistairSH, I also wonder where the computer science teachers are going to come from. Genuinely wanting to work with kids every day is more important than any of this though, in my opinion. Definitely feel free to email me if you want to talk more about any of this.
In my county (suburban DC), it was roughly (I briefly considered moving into teaching in the early 2000s):
- degree in related subject, typically math (CS is/was part of the math department in the county)
- master's degree in education, or some other combination of post-graduate work that qualifies for a teaching certificate.
My degree in Economics, with a minor in CS, didn't come close to qualifying me to teach CS in high school. Not that it should have by default.
But, it does make me wonder where Chicago will find CS teachers. If they have to come from the ranks of those already qualified to teach math, that's not a very large pool.
"you have to compete for everything you want and need to live." I think I'm a special creature. This really depresses me. Do you think this is the ideal situation? I don't understand why this is currently the case. In my opinion there is more than enough to go around, and the majority of our daily problems are caused by other humans.
Woah. That's the problem to a T. You hit it right on the head. You are not a special creature. There are approximately 6 billion other creatures nearly as capable as you trying to make a go of it right now, and a substantially greater number who tried to make a go of it and are now dead.
The majority of our daily problems are caused by ourselves, not other people. We think too much about ME and not enough about others. Try taking 30 minutes a day to intentionally improve someone else's day.
And as long as I'm writing here, I'll note that parenthood becoming something we hold out as long as possible to start down is probably one the single greatest issues facing Western culture, and I'm not even convinced it's altogether a bad thing (teenage pregnancy not great, yada yada yada). But the full weight of responsibility of keeping someone else alive is enough to wake anyone out of their delusions of self.
I agree that "we think too much about ME and not enough about others". I don't understand how "having to compete for everything you want and need to live" will encourage people to care less about themselves and more about others. I think the opposite is true as evidenced by the current state of affairs.
I don't agree that "the majority of our daily problems are caused by ourselves". I think most people's daily problems are the result of more intelligent and selfish people taking advantage of them.
I agree that "taking 30 minutes a day to intentionally improve someone else's day" is great advice and a fantastic investment of your time.
I don't think anything in life is ideal. That's just not how it works. You have to escape the fairy tale and accept the world as it is. I agree with the other guy who said most problems are caused by ourselves. It's really important to understand that you share this planet with 6 billion other people. Step back and reassess yourself, ensure what you think you need is actually a NEED, and be kind to other folks.
I never suggested that life was ideal.
I don't understand how "most problems are caused by ourselves" and "understand that you share this planet with 6 billion other people" can co-exist while there is very high inequality throughout the world.
I will not "accept the world as it is".
The public university I attended was not much better. Tuition + Room and Board was 24k a year and rising. At the same time, an incredible amount of new university buildings are being built.
I'm wondering what the parent meant when they said that their parents were unwilling to help. Does that mean that they would not cosign for a private loan?
If you're referring to me, yes, they totally rejected cosigning a private loan. My school had its own independent program for this, and their credit was not exactly a problem (that year their main band issued them an unsecured note for more than 4 years of the total costs; ironically to set up a computer system, the brand of which I researched and specified as about the last thing I did before going to the university).
A bit more: they were quite determined to make sure none of us graduated from college, with one exception that proved the rule and another than paid her way through a community college level 4 year school, the sort that rents textbooks and was literally on the other side of a creek sharing a border with us. The other 2 of us were more ambitious and ruthlessly crushed.
The system assumes good will on the part of parents, and pretty much has to, to avoid free riders.
> The system assumes good will on the part of parents, and pretty much has to, to avoid free riders.
That's the second time I have read this lie in this thread.
Firstly, state governments are bound by the equal protection clause to ignore the assets of relatives (and all similar irrelevancies). They do just fine not soaking people for their ancestors wealth.
Secondly, university costs are in a financial bubble, for the exact same reason as house prices in 2007. The bizarre funding schemes and underwriting are a temporary state of financial cprruption, not the natural order of things.
Thirdly, the free rider problem only applies to zero sum games. If FedGov stopped blackmailing parents, it would not be education that collapses, just the bureaucracy grown fat on the back of ill gotten money.
Fourthly, to the extent that higher education is a zero sum game, that problem is trivially solvable by funding it with taxes. If higher education is a profitless necessary evil, like street construction and dog catchers, it should be funded the same way.
The equal protection clause is of no use to nineteen year-olds whose assets measure in the hundreds of dollars. What's your suggestion to the student who is wronged by the Fin Aid office? Hire a lawyer and sue? Ridiculous.
>Secondly, ... Thirdly, ... Fourthly, ...
What are you even responding to? None of your retorts are responsive to hga's or any of the other parent comments.
Well, the 2nd is responsive even if the author doesn't know it. MIT is a genuinely expensive place: the last time I knew the numbers, it spent about half your tuition on you in your freshman year and quite a bit more on average for the 3 remaining years. STEM subjects are expensive, all have lab work, and one of the reasons MIT is MIT is that with the rare exception that proves the rule, all courses are taught by tenure track or tenured professors.
You can't get tenure without being an adequate teacher and the vast, vast majority I knew really cared about teaching undergraduates. The school also constantly makes sure the professors are doing an adequate job (I once both read all the student evaluations for a disaster (only one was not negative and she was a special case), and then overheard the department head tell the professor, who's name you probably know, that he'd never be allowed to teach that particular course again), and e.g. has no hesitation about taking a course away from a professor who violates the rules like what can be asked for at the end of the term.
MIT is also in a very expensive location, the cost of living is very high. That's also true for many of the Ivies, Harvard up chuck river from it, Columbia in NYC, Princeton in NJ, etc.
3rd doesn't apply so much to MIT, although, yeah, it has too large a bureaucracy like pretty much every other institution of higher education. Just not one grossly out of wack with the rest of the school.
4th, no, MIT's independence is unquestionably one reason it's so good and continues to be. Go to 100% government spending and it would regress to the mean as government bureaucrats enforces their own irrelevant fantasies on it (even more than they do now: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grove_City_College_v._Bell).
My comment was directed to the repeated claims that free riders mean the only viable way to pay for universities is to bill parents. I am apparently not able to make that clear after staying up to four in the morning.
Is MIT actually that expensive, inflation adjusted, compared to 1960?
Bureaucracy is not just about labelled bureaucrats, but about the well-meaning organizational structure that tends to spring up over time. Take an axe to the budget and the excess structure often disappears with no ill effect. (I'm looking at you, committee meetings and approval processes.)
For academic year 2012-3, the MIT nominal cost is $57,010. Plugging that into the BLS inflation CPI inflation calculator at 2012, that's $7350 1960 dollars.
But that's somewhere around what the tuition was 2 decades later from memory and someone graduating in 1980, the same as my first academic year. Can't remember the rest, maybe $3,000, could be less if you went for less expensive housing (not sure if that was much of an option) and especially food.
Looks like MIT's inflation rate 1979-2012 was very roughly double the CPI; I'm comfortable saying it was around that, and it's congruent with the general reports I've seen on US higher education inflation.
I'm in a similar situation. My math background consists of the required courses for a BA in CS. I tried to start with Mac Lane's "Categories for the Working Mathematician", but it was too dense for me. I switched to Awodey's "Category Theory" and that has been easier to follow. Wikipedia, Youtube, and other online sources have been very helpful. It's been a very rewarding experience so far.
My friends and I have wanted a personal version of something like this for a while. We have several Facebook groups where we share links/ideas and comment on them but would like to move away from Facebook.
I just tried out Potluck and it feels like the whole goal of it is to suck in your graph. It has zero content or usability until you do that. I suspect that even after you add your graph, if none of your friends are using it, it will continue to have zero content. Seems kind of the opposite of what Monocle is trying to do.
Have you ever intentionally dressed like a slob? I think it's a great way to build confidence because most of the interactions you'll have with people will start with them assuming negative things about you. When you see them realize that those negative assumptions were unfounded it I think it can help you un-link confidence and clothing.
"Have you ever intentionally dressed like a slob? "
Or as I call it "dressing like a Physics professor". You'll notice that people who need to work with their minds very rarely dress well, and people who use other attributes dress very well...often inversely correlated with how well they can use their minds as a tool.
