Student Input

On Tuesday’s class we discussed the NYC education system, zeroing in on the recent teacher grading system. This method of evaluating teachers is considered flawed since teachers are being rated on one exam their students took. Like I also mentioned in class, a student may have a bad day and thus do poorly. But this is directly affecting the teacher, and the teacher has no control over what happens to the student on testing day. I had also said that teachers who were rated poorly might not always be the worse teachers, as I have felt from previous experience. I suggested that teachers should be measured by their impact on their students, either negatively or positively.

But I also think that students should be more heavily looked upon as a factor for success on an exam. Sometimes our teachers are not the most competent educators, but students still succeed. Now, the teacher will receive a good score without doing anything. It will give everyone a false impression. From prior experiences, if I had a teacher who barely taught, I worked by myself to get the good grades. Why should I have to sacrifice my grades and potential future for a person who does not care what I am doing? I would get the scores for myself, not for my teacher’s records. Plus, there is a sort of overwhelming satisfaction with doing well without a teacher’s presence. There are many students and parents who will go to great lengths to make sure their kids do well, even if it means spending thousands on tutors and enrichment books.

This is not to say that every student should fill out a survey to determine the amount of actual learning that takes place in a classroom. Like what was said in class, students not always objective; those who are favored by a teacher are more likely to be bias for the teacher, or vica versa. But I do believe that students should have some impact on a teacher’s ratings. Sometimes I feel that students know more of what is going and what needs to be changed than people of higher authority do.

Also, it was mentioned that students who become inspired to do well because of their teachers would perform better on an exam. Personally, I am just a bad test taker. It does not matter how motivated I am to do well or how much I know about the topic being tested, anxiety takes over. I am sure that I am not the only person who feels this way.