The Toxic Culture of Education
Joshua Katz is a high school math teacher in Orange County Florida. He gave a TEDx talk recently using the metaphor of the super villain archetype to describe the forces that have given us the toxic culture that currently exists in education. The super villain releases a doom onto the world that only a super power can stop, conveniently his super power.
Today’s super villains are private education companies who created a crisis in education that they are prepared to ride in and rescue us from. They did this once they realized they could use the public education system to create a nearly endless stream of taxpayer dollars headed directly to their bottom line.
It is a wonderful video, well worth the 16 minutes to watch. Katz talks about the two worst words in education today - rigor and accountability.
Katz states they have successfully sold us rigor when what we really need is relevance. He gives the example of his request to his district to bring back Home Economics as a math credit. I know a woman who taught in a very poor school in the south. She was supposed to teach math to a group of students who were clearly behind their peers and disinterested in the learning process. So she decided to have them make cookies instead. She gave them a recipe that made two dozen chocolate chip cookies. Many of these kids had little food at home so chocolate chip cookies were exactly the kind of incentive they needed. The students had to figure out how many cookies they each wanted to have, how many they would have to make for each student in class to have that many cookies and then figure out how to adjust the recipe to provide that final count of chocolaty goodness. This involved multiplication, division and fractions. The students ate it up, literally. Relevance, not The Toxic Culture of Education | Missouri Education Watchdog: