Effective Teaching And Learning In Vocational Education: Fill & Download for Free

My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.Remember this? From Grover Norquist? A lot of people have this same mentality. They want to “starve the beast.” Part of that beast is the public school system. A lot of people want to cut public education to the bone to make damned sure that we aren’t throwing money away. “Reading! Writing! Arithmetic!” Those are the only important academic pursuits, right?Two factors are largely responsible for the death vocational education:In the US, we only value academics. We don’t care about trades. We see wanting to do a trade as a shameful thing. It is a waste of talent. We see it as okay for someone else’s kids, but not ours. We have developed an educational system in which we push everyone towards college. Getting a college degree is rapidly approaching the prestige getting a high school diploma once had.We have a growing parasite in education. It is called the “District Office.” It is full of administrators who have little or no positive effect on education but suck up a lot of the budget for their own raises and programs that are poorly thought-out or go nowhere. If you notice a rise in per-pupil spending, that’s largely where the money is going. I know it isn’t going into my teacher pay check. It sure as hell isn’t going into the way my campus looks. We fight tooth and nail for a 2% increase and went nearly a decade without even 1% while admins got 5–10% raises on a regular basis. Incidentally, my superintendent makes more than a five-star general would (If we had one at present).When you cut the budget, we lose things. First on the chopping block are “electives.” Those would be fine and performing arts, languages, and vocational education.Incidentally, a lot of those classes are the most expensive ones. I teach English. If you give me some old novels, a box of paper, and access to computers, I’m good for the year. I don’t need (and often don’t want) anything else. Now let’s look at another class. Symphonic Band requires musical instruments, repairs on those instruments, field trips, etc. That class is really expensive.A shop class? Jeez. You’re talking about tools and lots of consumables. Steel, wood, aluminum, nuts and bolts, blades for saws, etc. Think about how much a car lift is for an auto shop class. Consider the price of a lathe. Consider the insurance on such a program.So… we cut them. After all, as long as a kid can read, write, and do sums, he’s good to go, right?And then we hear that American education is failing. Too many kids aren’t interested in the “Three Rs” and have little interest in the electives we offer because we cut them to the point that the programs can’t really sustain worthwhile activities.On the other hand, I can tell you that my school has a thriving vocational program. We have a solid shop class where kids learn to weld, lathe, and all the rest. We have a culinary arts class. We have a class in which students learn how to screen print and do custom stitching on clothing. We have the branch of an actual credit union operating on campus, staffed completely by students.How?Because those programs fund themselves. They sell things. They do fundraisers. They have grants. They get donations. If not for that, our programs would wither and die. The teachers who run those programs? I have no idea how they do it. I certainly couldn’t do it. Most importantly? THEY SHOULDN’T HAVE TO DO IT. If a district is going to have a class, FUND IT. Don’t add more work onto a teacher’s shoulders, demanding that they become businessmen and businesswomen as well as educators. We’re teachers. We already have a job!

Being a teacher is a big responsibility and it is a noble profession which has so much respect around the world. Many teachers describe the profession as one of the most fulfilling jobs, while many others describe it as more than simply a job, it is a vocation that calls for the utmost dedication and patience .Transforming Education | Digimkey takes the burden away from daily administration tasks. Teachers have to take daily attendance of students, and teachers have to struggle with tasks like creating the timetable, making report cards, grading assignments etc.Teachers can also easily send and receive messages from the parents about the behavior of the students or any other matters of concern.The use of a school software has proven to be one of the most effective and efficient ways for teachers and parents to communicate with each other, with up-to-date data and progress at the click of a button.However, the use of an online school management system completely changes the concept of teaching and learning in the classroom. For instance, with the help of the school management system the teachers can look up online resources, games, videos, blogs that will make the subject more relatable for the students and inspire them to learn more in their spare time.Outside the confines of the classroom, the teachers can use the Transforming Education | Digimkey system to send across assignment and homework that is interesting to the students while staying relevant to the topic that the students learn in the classroom.

When I was around 7 years old I read a book of my father’s cover to cover in the school holidays.I was infatuated with space and the physical sciences and found the unanswered questions of quantum mechanics to be heady but stimulating topics. I was excited to be attending a school for gifted kids next semester.The cognitive dissonance I experienced after trying to learn science and mathematics after reading this book drastically altered the trajectory of my life. Before I hit double digits, I had a head full of questions about how electrons behave at quantum scale, the observer effect, and the greater implications about whether this is the only universe, or if we have free will at all. When I started to be exposed to science teachers and started asking these questions, my teachers would screw their faces up like I hadn’t been paying attention to the lesson on filtering sand out of water or how a spring works. Mathematics lessons consisted of copying answers out of the back of the textbook as using the calculator to solve the basic problems seemed a waste of time and energy. My teachers were teaching a different version of science and mathematics, and seemed to have no grasp of the concepts discussed in my dad’s book. I felt resigned to the fact that I was incompatible with science since I was having trouble applying myself to the simplified curriculum.I remember our school library had a big poster on the developments around string theory - but as far as science education and science teachers were concerned, there was no such thing as string theory. Even Einstein was not discussed.I learned after leaving school that there were in fact a few teachers at the school that had doctorates and taught these advanced subjects to their students. But these special teachers and classes were invisible to ordinary students. You had to perform for the teachers and show that you enjoy the repetitive busywork in the remedial classes to be deemed special enough to receive education deserving of a gifted school. Even still, they won’t teach quantum scale behaviours until 2nd year of University.Sex education - as a homosexual I had to sit through lessons that perpetuated the lie that homosexuality doesn’t exist. The closest thing a homosexual boy receives to sex education is during the regular church recruitment drives. We have this thing in Australia called ‘non denominational religious education’ where they cancel classes and invite ONE denomination (evangelist christian) to come and talk to the kids. The Hillsong church split us into groups and told us that homosexuality is wrong because (and I quote the church representative) “the body parts don’t fit together, except for gay men when they try and have anal sex but that’s still wrong”.Warped history. We would have a “welcome to country” announcement at school gatherings where we acknowledge the traditional owners of the land the school was built on. And then we go straight back to class and are taught by a history teacher that there were no humans in Australia before white man. The genocide of Australia’s indigenous peoples has been erased from history. The stolen generation is whitewashed as being necessary. The european holocaust never happened if all you depend on is your Australian high school education and never turn on the history channel.But by far the biggest lie perpetrated by this “advanced curriculum” STEM school was that you can’t change from a professional job to a vocational one and back again. The state offers vocational technical college courses through high school, but the school used timetabling to lock us out of these courses. You had to choose between qualifying for a UAI (university admissions index) and earning the vocational certificate (there was no possible way to earn both like in a mainstream school) thanks to their timetabling efforts. One girl wanted to take the nail technician vocational course as a fallback to pay her way through university. They flat out asked her to leave the school. Since leaving school I have met hundreds, maybe thousands of people that have chopped and changed between managerial jobs and going back on the tools, and are perfectly happy and have benefitted from not having their options limited, so this last one seems to be the cruellest of them all.