320:
I'm glad too.
I'm also glad I already had military retirement, so that I could afford to be a teacher in my second career, instead of something that paid better.
There are some trends in education that I really don't like, and they are not about politics or the culture wars.
They're about technology. With which we are in love.
The research for decades has shown that the best student learning takes place in a classroom with a good teacher. But we are making the teacher more of a deliverer of IT and less of a hands-on educator.
Research has shown that people retain what they read in a book better than what they read online, so we are buying e-textbooks that the kids read on their Chromebooks.
Research has shown that students retain information better when they take pen-on-paper notes than when they enter information via a keyboard, so we are having them do their homework digitally on Chromebooks and submit it via the www.
"Technology" and "innovation" are the buzzwords. So we toss out the tried and true and buy expensive hardware and software, both of which have to be regularly updated. And we don't feel like we have to pay teachers well enough to attract good ones, because teacher-quality will soon be irrelevant.
From my subjective perspective, I'm leaving at the right time.
