Hmmm, would I be a better teacher? Not with the microphone alone. But, put a Diamond-Vision scoreboard in that classroom and several Knicks City Dancers to cheer on students' correct answers, and I think I'd be the Red Holzman of teaching.
Pogue is awesome. Anyways, with a microphone, I'd probably hit them with the boom, the bap, the boom boom, the bap, but we'd be rapping now and not learning any math. In other words, technology like this is not very useful.
My son's new to the school this year "tech ed" (home ec) teacher brought her own little microphone and speaker system. But tried to hide it from the kids (ha, they're in 8th grade) and from the other teachers.
Turns out that...bad teachers? They need amplification. Good teachers (like the one who retired from this job last year)? Don't need it.
Unless of course, all the kids are losing their hearing from wearing their ipods constantly? Maybe soon kids with normal hearing will have to wear protective ear coverings while in class.
Well with high-school principals, like the smiling one in the New York Post praising larger class sizes and lunch at 9am, it's no wonder that our mayor would be interested in having lecture halls rather than classrooms to save on the budget. In fact it was just reported that even with the cuts, City Hall's payroll is still growing. The mayor, like Spitzer, is above his own edicts.
@Jen--
We had a similar situation with one of our teachers a few years ago. It was great--now he could just talk over the kids who previously had been talking over him. In the battle of volume, he was the clear winner ... but no one learned a $%^& thing.
I don't believe amplification is a band-aid solution. It's just small part of the great lie that is known in this country as educational reform.
Chaos, which is what you get in some overstuffed classrooms, started with that whimsical thing in the middle schools called the Workshop Model, where you intentionally sit young teens facing each other for the whole period. That's when the kids actually learned how to shut out the teacher — and all new information as well.
The next step in this particular continuum came from industry, which allowed students to chuck those cumbersome CD players and put all their music on iPods. Much more convenient, much less chance of getting caught. And, sadly for the rest of us, some teachers even condone these gadgets at times, as if dividing one's attention between an incoming piece of knowledge and a strong beat adds to comprehension.
Educorps now come up with bigger plans for louder noise, and of course: more contracts.
There's too much of this non-productive stuff being adopted by school administrators for me to trust that these educrats are just plain ignorant or guilty of poor judgment on what's needed in classrooms to help kids learn. These people are too smart for that.
If they're not lining their pockets or those of their friends, these decision makers lack the political will to spend money in the right kind of way, which is to lower class sizes.
I can't even imagine teaching with a microphone. It would make teaching seem cold and impersonal.
NYCE,
If I may nitpick, the quote from Cool Hand Luke is "What we got here is failure to communicate." There is no "a" in the line, though it is often quoted as such.
Also:
In West Orange, one school has seen a very significant boost in passing test scores since adopting it--from 59% to over 89%.
Ummm....cause and effect, folks?
I think the object the man is holding would appear to be a better use of technology in the classroom to improve grades and discipline.
Damm, if only there were no corporal punishment regulations.
Why not make life simple and just use a bullhorn?
What we have here is a failure to think through things clearly!
Well, slap a mic around my neck and call me a crappy teacher. I use Audio Enhancement in my classroom, especially when I lecture, and I love it. (The device goes around my neck, and the sounds comes from four speakers in the ceiling.) It saves my voice at the end of the day, it makes my voice evenly heard throughout the classroom, and it's been a life saver when I've needed to try to project some sort of audio. (A boombox works well for music outside your classroom, but not so great with Robert Frost reading a poem.)
I'm not sure the rationale behind equipping our school with Audio Enhancement, but it may very well been with the idea that all students could hear better, learn better, and later on, perform better on tests. Is it the reason why our test scores have gone up? I doubt it. Does it make us better teachers? I doubt it. And just to confirm, it IS absolutely ineffective in trying to talk above the students--if they are determined to block you out, nothing will change that.
It irritates me to see people react so negatively to a classroom tool that me and my students appreciate--and yes, if you ask them if they want the mic on or off, they always want it on. However, I always see both sides of the coin, and if I had to choose, I'd rather my school use the money to reduce class sizes. Unfortunately, if that money had been invested in hiring new teachers, it would had paid for 1-2 teachers for only one year. And that paltry sum certainly would not have built any kind of structure. Perhaps that's why this idea is such an easy Band Aid to affix to a big problem.
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