Teachers: Typical!

[NotNoNever]

I believe he said that he was reading an advance journal in biology and the teacher basically confiscated it.

 

Where is the abuse by the teacher? Where is the education system failing him? He dismissed the whole incident as if it was a joke!

So, who mentioned abuse?

 

I respect teachers and what they do. Let's face it, if the teacher stopped his/her lesson with all the other students to 'help facilitate' this genius, then the other 20-30 students parents would be in an uproar over their kid not getting the proper attention.

Did anybody ask for a break in the lesson to facilitate this genius? No, didn't think so. However, the good teacher does arrange things so that all levels are covered in a class instead of running all kids like little automatons and getting them all to the same point at the end of the curriculum - otherwise known as mediocrity. Curiously, small schools and their teachers manage this perfectly well, where there are more than one age group in a class. I think it's called combined year group teaching.

 

I would never want to be a teacher because there is one fact, every parent has their opinion (and only their opinion) on what the teacher should do.

Unfortunately, that's the sort of patronising paternalistic attitude that got teachers into a mess in the first place. We are the teachers. Teacher knows best. You cannot possibly hope to know anything because you are not a teacher like me. You are an uneducated, unthinking moron whose opinion on all things information-passing is worthless. Brings to mind a classic song by Pink Floyd

 

My hats off to the teachers that do teach because it is a thankless profession as proven in this thread by people jumping on the profession for one line out of a interview.

Actually, it's not a thankless profession. I have yet to find a human being alive who is not grateful to the teacher that treated them with respect, humanity, and care, and who inspired them to understand and love at least something about a subject. Furthermore, the teachers I really remember were the ones who facilitated my learning according to my learning style, but who, curiously, were also very good disciplinarians and held a class in the palm of their hands by sheer dint of personality. We were not frightened of them, but we were scared witless of stepping out of line in a bad way. We knew that stepping out of line in a good way would always be valued. For instance, I was in a primary class once, bored out of my mind, looking out the window, because the whole class was doing oral spelling, which I was immensely good at. I was staring out the window, and the teacher called on me to spell prison. I turned to him, reeled it off at high speed, turned back to the window. Instead of being pissed off at me looking out the window and giving me withering 'pay attention' commands, he called the whole class to watch as we repeated the whole thing, because he was amazed. He did not flip out and demand his rights as a teacher to be centre of my world. He valued the obvious ability and demonstrated it to the whole class as an indication of what could be done - I was no teacher's pet, by the way. Generally I was the teacher's pest! But he was a great teacher, as were a couple of others, and I'll be eternally grateful to him.

 

Some questions come up, how is his English marks, his social marks, his any other classes marks? Kind of left out of the equation. So I applaud the fact that he has researched and come up with a testing device for cancer which has amazed the scientific and general world, but how is his biology mark?

Who knows. Who cares. We're breeding kids here, not assessible widget makers. Although, based on his ability, one can assume that his English is excellent (have you ever read a learned journal written in reading range for a normal 12 year old?) He's doing great things for society, so his social marks are probably indisputable, because he clearly understands the issues. His other classes marks? Pft. What do you know about, say, economics, or engineering, or computing, or art, or physical exercise? If you know a lot about all these things, good on you. But I suspect there's one or two you're excellent at, and all the rest, meh. Picking a couple of things he might not be brilliant at does not make him hopeless, it just makes you patronising.

 

You make it sound like he should skip High School and jump right into University. Well, does he know anything besides identifying cancer cells?

If you'd care to explain to me how he managed to get to where he is, along the route he outlined in the video, by knowing nothing beyond cancer cells, I'd be very amused interested to hear it.

 

Personally without any more information, like did the teacher talk to him after class and set out expectations and offer to help him outside of class with his special interest? If he/she did, I bet it would make you all think a whole lot different then what you do without all the information.

 

This is true. However, what he illustrated was where the teacher stopped him; where 11 out of 12 researchers rejected him; where he won $75k; where he got the support he needed. It may indeed, as you imply, be possible that the teacher did take him aside after class and support him. But given his even approach, why would he not have mentioned this. But more amazingly, why is the school not bobbing up and down claiming credit and shouting 'look what we did, look what we did!'? Hmmmmm!

 

By the way - it's 'than' not 'then'. <wonders what Wildone's English grades were like>

 

You are right, of course. We should value teachers more. But believe me, in the UK, at least, they get paid enormous amounts of money eventually, for generally not so fantastic results. And they imply they are worth ten times as much because of their philanthropic ethos. Yeah, right, that computes. If it takes heaps of money to convince a philanthropically minded human to convince them of the value of passing on knowledge and thinking, then it's time all the teachers went back to school, because their social marks were obviously pathetic.