From The Livingston Post:Hubris and the Children of Flint

Hubris. It’s a word not commonly used anymore. Maybe because it’s been around for 2,500 years and most words have a finite life-span. But it’s a good word. Aristotle said hubris defined actions meant to shame the victim.We see it in nearly every football game we watch; a player outruns his opponent then smugly shakes his finger in the opponent’s face. They call it taunting. It draws a penalty.

More recently the meaning has changed slightly and instead of describing actions, it has morphed into a description of the attitude that sparked the action, that allowed someone to scorn the victim. Merriam Webster succinctly defines it as “a great or foolish amount of pride or confidence.”

It seems to me the swirl of bad publicity bubbling up from Lansing has its roots in hubris, both in its original meaning and in its more modern sense.

For instance, consider the general elections in 2012 when the people of Michigan rejected Proposal 1 by a margin of 52% to 48%, a proposal that would have allowed Governor Snyder to continue to appoint an Emergency Manager (EM) whenever, wherever he deemed the fiscal environment was unsustainable.

You would think that would have settled the question but it didn’t.

READ MORE HERE:

Hubris and the Children of Flint – The Livingston Post

From the CURMUDGUCATION blog: NCTQ: Terrible Teacher Prep and Headline Research

Sunday, February 7, 2016

NCTQ: Terrible Teacher Prep and Headline Research

The National Council on Teacher Quality is one of the great mysteries of the education biz. They have no particular credentials and are truly the laziest “researchers” on the planet, but I think I may have cracked the code. Let me show you their latest piece of “research,” and then we can talk about how they really work.

Their new report– “Learning about Learning: What Every New Teacher Needs To Know” (which is a curious title– do other teachers NOT need to know these things?)– is yet another NCTQ indictment of current teacher education programs. The broad stroke of their finding is that teacher education programs are not teaching the proven strategies that work in education.

That’s the broad stroke. As always with NCTQ, the devil is in the details. After all, that sounds like a huge research undertaking. First, you would have to identify teaching strategies that are clearly and widely supported by all manner of research. Then you would have to carefully examine a whooooooole lot of teacher education programs– college visits, professor and student interviews, sit in classes, extensive study of syllabi– it would be a huge undertaking.

Or you could just flip through a bunch of educational methods textbooks.

What Every Teacher Needs To Know

First, NCTQ had to select those methods that “every new teacher needs to know.” Here’s the methodology for that piece of research-based heavy lifting:

Link to the source: CURMUDGUCATION: NCTQ: Terrible Teacher Prep and Headline Research