In the final Tips for Teachers series of the Spring 2010 semester, we watched excerpts from the film, Stand and Deliver. It was based on a true teaching story of Jaime Escalante, who had sadly died recently on April 1^st, 2010. The link to his obituary from the New York Times is at: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/01/us/01escalante.html?emc=eta1

Having watched an excerpt from the start of the film of the sort of rowdy high school class Mr. Escalante first had to teach in Garfield High School, East Los Angeles, in the 1980s, to later excerpts of the progress he made teaching math to these students, to their preparation for and ultimate amazing prowess they demonstrated in the very hard Calculus AP exams, to the fact that ETS accused them of having cheated, we had much material to talk about.

In the fourth of the Tips for Teachers series of Spring 2010, we read and discussed "Building a Better Teacher" by Elizabeth Green, in The New York Times Magazine, March 2, 2010. The link to this piece is at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/magazine/07Teachers-t.html?pagewanted=1

We started our discussion by considering Lemov’s Taxonomy, mentioning how it seemed to take off from Bloom’s Taxonomy, and wondering how applicable his forty nine techniques to help teachers maximize student performance are to us as college level teachers. Definitely we agreed with the article’s statement that the quality of the teacher will impact students’ learning. However, when the article bemoaned the fact that an inferior teacher will not get through as much of the syllabus as a strong teacher, we felt that it was not only the quantity of material covered, but perhaps more importantly, how well the information about a particular academic subject is communicated and understood by the students, that is of primary concern.

One teacher present suggested that one way in which this article is relevant to us is that we receive students straight from high school, where the teachers had definitely impacted their learning and their expectations. One difference, however, between high school teachers and college teachers is that high school teachers must receive teacher training, whereas at the college level this is not a requirement. However, we thought that the Rutgers Writing Program offers an advantage over many other college programs, in that we offer orientation, mentoring, folder review, tips for teachers meetings, and many other opportunities to discuss ways to enhance teaching. One teacher present said how he learned a lot while teaching, especially about classroom management. He said, for example, that he learned it was better not to be too lenient at the start of the semester, but to start quite strictly and then ease up later. As far as freshmen in Expository Writing are concerned, many of us thought that the way the course is structured does help students to make the transition from high school to college writing, especially since the first two papers do not impact their final grade.

In the third of the Tips for Teachers series of Spring 2010, we read and discussed "How Knowledge Helps", by Daniel T. Willingham. It is published in American Educator, Spring 2006, and is also online at http://archive.aft.org/pubs-reports/american_educator/issues/spring06/willingham.htm We started our discussion with one member stating that he heard from many high school teachers that a number of their students lack simple basic knowledge, such as being unable to complete the rhyme, "Mary had a little _" Whether this lack of knowledge is because of not having been born in an English speaking country, or because of not being exposed to literacy, or because both parents work and spend less time raising their children, or the children spend all the time playing video games, the essential point is that students are unable to make some references to basic knowledge, which are part of the building blocks of knowledge acquisition. 

We spoke about how, as mentioned in the article, having knowledge means that gaining new knowledge becomes easier, so that the "rich get richer". What this means is that there is a widening gap between those with and those without knowledge. We thought that what might be an incentive to learning might be a discovery of a particular fascination, and then wanting to find out more about it. Chess might be one such example. Then as knowledge grows, and new abilities manifest themselves, then there is more success in playing the game, which in itself is an incentive to gain even more knowledge.