Get yourselves educated
PSS needs more smarts, not more money. More money only means more nonsensical trips that could be done on Google+ or Skype, more useless payments to educational companies for outdated software, buying books and other printed materials that are outdated before they even arrive on Saipan, and more perks for administrators and teachers. It means nothing to our students who will getting the same old, outdated, lame, useless education they have been getting for the last 36 years. Its 2014, FaceTime is here folks.
The statement by Board of Education chair Herman Guerrero that “we need to look at education 20 years from now” shows how out of touch he is with reality. By the time a course syllabus is written today, it is already out of date. You guys in charge need to be thinking about what education will look like next week, not 20 years from now. I’ve asked over 300 students, “Has any teacher ever asked you what you want to study today?” The result was zero yes, 300 no. I can’t find a single adult connected with PSS that knows what education is doing around the world today. All you have to do is YouTube your grade, i.e., 11th grade classroom or 3rd grade classroom or whatever, and there are millions of videos showing what teachers in other countries are doing—and teachers in other countries are much more inventive than in the U.S. by a wide margin.
Commissioner Sablan says more money will fix all her problems. I say your curriculum is your problem. I say 1950s “teaching methods” is your problem. I say 10,000 bored, unengaged, brain-dead students is your problem. Students want to “learn” and if you will just get touch screen tablets for each student, they can teach themselves and your teachers can observe and guide where necessary. They might even actually help students that have problems at home by spotting abused or neglected kids early on. She only needs to YouTube “education in Finland” and see what they accomplish by letting each principal run their school as a separate entity.
All of you with a stake in education—students, parents, teachers, administrators and others—need to get on YouTube and do it before school starts. There are millions of new ways to let students learn that we are not, but could be, implementing here. What students need is a touch screen tablet with the 3R educational apps on them for Kinder to Grade 3, and an Internet hookup for Grades 4 to 8. After Grade 8, they need to be directed to vocational, technical or academic studies. It isn’t rocket science, but you are not going to make a rocket scientist out of a student that wants to be a cook, and you shouldn’t even try. Let them learn what they are interested in as soon as they can read, write and do ’rithmetic. Every 7th and 8th grade student needs to spend time looking at www.bls.gov too. There are over 18,000 job categories and young people here only know about 30 of them. Oh yeah, stop teaching American measurements, 80 percent of the people in the CNMI use metrics. Congratulations, Loria Hocog. I can’t find a single item, anywhere on the Web, ever said or any accomplishment ever achieved by any of your predecessors. I hope you will be a transparent, vocal, in your face (BOE’s face) student rep. I also hope you know you are getting short-changed in your education.
Gary DuBrall
Chalan Piao, Saipan
The CNMI did try the laptops at home, touch screen versions, and they were great for listing to music, watching movies, and now students take them to school to charge their phones. PSS is already ahead of you on instructional methods. Their SIOP (sheltered instruction operational protocol) makes instruction real. Students become responsible for their learning, and the administrators observations focus on what the students are doing, not the teacher.
V. Welch,
“PSS is already ahead of you on instructional methods.”
Why do we deal with many graduates from the PSS which does not comprehend basic math or can’t spell or write proper English? Many of our PSS graduate seems to be routed through the
system and they have no clue on how to write a check or write proper English.
I was on my way to the United States and I had a privileged to be sitting next to a gal who was heading to San Diego to attend the state university from the CNMI. According to her, her parents are teachers at the PSS in Saipan. She seems very articulated and she came from a well to do family (Welch). My question is while Ms. Welch was given all the opportunities to excel in our school in the CNMI, why there are many of our unprivileged students are behind when it come to our educational process or educational goals? Why many of our unfortunate families are living day by day without electricity and running water?
Now the PSS wants more money. For what? Maybe to finance more of their off island trips or maybe they need more money to pay themselves at the administration level. Are you making any sense? No matter how many or how much you spend on technology at PSS, it boils down to the economic situation of a student at home in order to succeed in school. Lucky for your children, they got it made but for many of us in the CNMI we are living day by day and lucky if we have food on our table each day.
By the way, like I said to Ms. Welch, “Thanks your parents for their contribution educating our people in the CNMI.”
Thank you for the compliment on my daughter. One of the things I do to help my children with their education is let them know that they are responsible for paying for their college. In other words, I have very little to do with their success in college; it is their own motivation and drive to succeed.
The professional developments that PSS provides are research based and have been proven to increase student learning. When the administrators make their unannounced classroom visits they expect to see the instructional methods taught in the workshops being used in the classrooms. The administrators expect to see students working in teams, all students involved in the academic discussions, and they expect the students to be able to verbalize the goals and objectives of the instruction. This type of instruction is part of the federal No Child Left Behind act(NCLB). NCLB is a bold, and expensive, initiative that requires that schools prove that all students are learning. No longer can schools get by with advanced students high scores raising the testing averages. An example of some of the programs designed to assist the students being left behind are after-school tutoring, summer tutoring, retired teachers being hired to help struggling students, and the hiring of English Language Learner teachers. Just a note, in the past teachers were paid to attend training that was held on week-ends and/or after working hours. Teachers are still attending the trainings, but they are not getting paid extra for it.