Class Discussion: Education 3/16/11

This discussion on education particularly has been my favorite so far. I've never really thought about our education system until we started on the topic, and it's given me several new perspectives. Before we started on the topic, I had a vague definition of what tenure is, and I thought it was just an increase in a teacher's salary for every year he or she works in the same school. However, I didn't know that a teacher acquires tenure after three years of experience in the same school and that's when their salaries increase, but it seems like an almost-guarantee for teachers that they'll have that job for life; a job-protector, that is. It's in the best interest for bad teachers to sit there and do nothing while students are being cheated out of their education. No wonder we have so many "dropout" factories in our nation. Also, our class discussion presented the idea of making high schools into mini-colleges, and it's probably a great idea in that students can choose which time of school day best suits them and what specific classes to take that'll help them get into the next big step: college. I look forward to our next topic.