UK Teachers Say Censor The Internet 463
Marlow the Irelander writes "The BBC is reporting that in response to a YouTube video of a schoolboy breaking his teacher's window (yes, this is a video), NASUWT, one of the teaching unions in the UK, is calling for legislation to control the internet. Could Britain, rather than the US, be the main front of the battle against censorship in 2007?" From the article:
"Unfortunately, any yob or vandal can now have their 15 minutes of fame, aided and abetted by readily accessible technology and irresponsible internet sites which enable such behaviour to be glorified.
[The general secretary of the union] said the union supported a zero tolerance approach in schools to pupils who used technology to abuse and undermine teachers, and called for more rigorous legislative control of internet sites which gave them license."
Call me stupid... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Just so I get this right... (Score:4, Interesting)
I tried checking out a bomb making book from the library as kid, they wouldn't let me. They had no problem with me checking out the books on witchcraft and demonology. Go figure.
Re:It was good they were jerks. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Teachers have a tough job (Score:4, Interesting)
I wish I had those kind of teachers in the states. Took Cobol my senior year. Straight A's on every assignment and test. The sweet old lady in charge of it had a stroke 2 weeks before final and the new substitute wanted to fail me because I'd missed half the lessons.
Had to lob him a real tearjerker line, but I aced the final too. Who woulda thunk it?
Sadly, the sweet old lady was the exeption in my college career.
Instead (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Teachers have a tough job (Score:5, Interesting)
It's no wonder they're turning out idiot students -- the poor kids are being taught by idiots of the first order.
Re:Dumb criminals, not bad youtube (Score:0, Interesting)
one girlfriend i didn't keep for long, turned out her mother did a degree at a crappy polytechnic-turned-university when I was there doing day release on a BTECH. She remembered me from doing the pointless crap elementry coding elements in no time then going round and helping my fellow pupils. ( I was like 18 at the time, been programming since 11, written my own little forth compiler on the speccy, os extensions to the ST etc, {back in the days when I though only poofs used C!})
so we were chatting (the mum and me) I said what do you do now? she was working as a lecturer in computer science at the same bloody polytechnic-turned-university. "what?" I said.. "with no experience in the industry?". well it kind of fell apart there. I had had 2 years of being taught by people with a degree from some craphole university and no bloody idea whatsoever. it was 1990, what was I being taught? cobol, modula-2 and C (only basic stuff, no pointers or strings). And the woman who taught cobol/jackson structured design always went on about doing design before coding and I ridiculed her in the class because she made handouts where it was obvious she wrote the code and made a design diagram that didnt match. or the woman who taught databases who was SO BORING I fell asleep in every lesson, and I was sitting at the front. and I snore. and nobody even woke me. not even the teacher.
the only person who knew what they were doing was a bloke who was only there to try and shag anything that moved. going for those shy geeky girls...
in two years i learnt... karnaugh maps. from the bloke who knew what he was doing and was trying to shag anything.
I have no sympathy for lecturers either, I have a friend who is a university lecturer. Lovely woman. Intelligent but can't seem to grasp the notion that their pay is lower than the private sector because instead of working at teaching for 40 hours a week they get a significant amount of time to develop their own academic skills and therefore their careers. And its mostly complete bollocks, check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_research [wikipedia.org] . A type of career enhancement by notionally improving your teaching technique. Except if you are crap and try to make it better that is aparrantly not action research. And you don't actually have to do a controlled experiment (like teaching 2 different classes in 2 different methods and comparing scores). And people can write crap like "action research is like quantum theory" without being picked up on. OK that might be true, but in what way?
fuedalism (Score:2, Interesting)
Do me a favor... (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm a teacher (math and computer). I'm also a tech coordinator. I wear both hats at my school. I've been studying, taking apart, assembling, and troubleshooting PCs for 12 years. And I take offense to anyone who says "Those who can, do, those who can't, teach." If you were to take the time and evaluate MANY teachers, you would see how much time and effort we put into helping students, as well as research how to better educate students in our discipline(often through professional teacher organizations...I myself belong to the MCTM...www.mctm.org).
Sadly, even at my school, I have seen and am upset with some teachers who do not give a rat's ass about the students they teach, and I wish that administrators and teachers got a lot more serious about evaluating teachers' behavior and teaching inside and outside the classroom. It upsets me a great deal to see how much time and effort I put into helping a student learn, both about a particular subject and about the world & life in general, in hopes that I can build trust with students and show them I care about their lives, only to have that trust destroyed by a teacher who makes rather damning comments to students demonstrating apathy to their profession. Yet while I have met and even work with a few teachers who behave this way in one way or another, I will not sit by and watch some stupid punk think that we teachers are a waste of space.
There are so many students that depend on us teachers for social and academic support. We don't just sit and twiddle our thumbs when kids ask us questions. We understand our discipline. (I, as well as the vast majority of teachers, majored in their discipline in college; if you want to discredit our education, you may as discredit your own, assuming you graduated from college, at least.) Most of us have a great passion for it, as well as for helping other students learn to love it as well. And if you wanted us to actually demonstrate that in a job, I certainly could do so. But I would find great boredom in, say, being an actuary, doing nothing but number-crunching for 8 hours straight. And I've tried tech support before, but to be quite honest, I don't like living an OfficeSpace-kinda life. I actually enjoy being around other people and talking with them, teaching them, interacting with them, and even watching them grow and being a part of it!
And it's teachers like me who help make the students who become a part of your work force. They're not just born smart, stupid.
Dog trainers towards conformity... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:It was good they were jerks. (Score:2, Interesting)
You would notice that youth crimes and imprisonments have gone down, way down in the last decade or so. What does that mean? It means you old farts were considerably worse than kids today, it's just that news coverage has changed to hype up "problem with kids today".
It would be nice (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Dumb criminals, not bad youtube (Score:5, Interesting)
Uhhh, why? This incident makes the perpetrator look like a fool. Why does having a vandal break a window make the victim look foolish?
It makes the student into kind of a "hero" who stood up to a bully. And so, like most bullies, this teacher is lashing out in an unintelligent manner.