Rowhouse Logic - Breathtaking Inanity

Let’s get hypothetical. Let’s take a middle school special education teacher who teaches life skills to children with Down’s Syndrome, Fragile X and severe Autism. Let’s assume that this teacher spends the majority of her work day teaching her students, well, life skills. These are skills that will enable those children to live the most productive lives possible, enabling them to function and contribute to society, and ease the burden of care on their families as they mature and become adults.

Let’s just take one small hypothetical example; a middle school life skills teacher who focuses a large number of her reading lessons on survival words and phrases such as “Fire Exit”, “Caution”, “Stop”, “No Trespassing”, “Do Not Cross”, “Poison”, “Do Not Touch” and “Danger - High Voltage”. Some other lessons would probably involve reading and executing simple cooking recipes and other similar exercises. If you understand the disabilities involved, just a little, you probably understand why this sort of thing would be very important.

Let’s take this example a little further. Under the No Child Left Behind law, all public school teachers must prove themselves to be highly qualified. This generally involves plunking down $86, and taking something called a Praxis Exam. In order for a life skills teacher to teach severely learning disabled children, above the seventh grade, in any type of language arts, he or she must prove themselves highly qualified to do so, by taking the appropriate Praxis Examination.

Now, you would probably imagine that in order to gain a position with a title like “life skills teacher”, that an individual would have had to have achieve a masters degree in special education. You can probably safely assume that in achieving that degree, they would have taken a number of classes with brutal titles such as “Teaching Survival Skills to the Severely Disabled”. You can probably safely assume that they had to do a significant amount of documented work in the field in order to fulfill their educational requirements.

Let’s take this example to its reasonable conclusion. When our veteran life skills teacher sits down to take her Praxis Exam, in order to become highly qualified to teach middle school life skills students and keep her job, you would probably assume that the majority of the language arts portion of that test would not involve comprehensive knowledge of Shakespeare’s works. You would be very wrong. Dead wrong, as a matter of fact.

How ’bout them apples?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 25th, 2005 at 11:59 pm and is filed under Politics, Education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.