Things They Didn't Tell us at Teacher's College

[velvetpage]

1) Photocopier repair is an essential facet of the job.

2) Double-siding photocopies is a waste of time and effort. For every perfect double-sided copy, you will throw out at least one sheet that got caught in the photocopier and waste one minute digging said sheet out of the innards of the machine. Net result is negative on both time and paper conservation.

3) When you think a manual hasn't been sent from the publisher, check with the teacher of the split-grade class. He may have only eight grade 5's, but the chances are good that he absconded with the teachers' manual that is supposed to work for both grade 5 classes.

4) Skip the lessons which require materials that are only available in the teacher's manual you haven't got. Making up your own from scratch is NOT WORTH IT.

That's my rant for the morning. THe bell just rang.

Comments

[r-caton.livejournal.com]

Sympathy. Seriously, - sympathy.
Before working on vis. aids for the vis impaired, (gosh! '89 - '92) I used to run a workshop. Two of them at the end. One of their tasks was
Rebuilding/refurbing....
Photocopiers.
We used to test the bottom end model with about 500 straight through with no snags before passing it. Should then have been good for 500K.

Made me a bit of a photocopier nerd I'm afraid.
Depending on print runs we had a product then which was a copier/duplicator. It could....
take your original document and electronically scan it, cut it's own duplicator stencil, and WHAMMO! copies beyond the dreams of publishers, periodically renewing it's stencil when it got too grotty. Automatically I think, although it's a long time ago now.

We've come a long way from Banda spirit duplicators and the purple copies that smelt of methylated spirits that I knew when a boy....

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

I remember those! They called them dittos, and they were all but illegible.

I firmly believe that one of the reasons most kids can't write legibly or put sentences together is the advent of photocopiers in schools. When I was in school, we would have to copy whole paragraphs off the board for science or social studies. My kids get a photocopy of the same material. It means less rote learning and (hopefully) more thinking, but we did lose something in the process; specifically, we lost our opportunity to teach handwritten language and model good sentence structure. We never show them how to do that anymore.

I'm back to a pet-peeve rant. It's time for math class. :)

[r-caton.livejournal.com]

More to the point is that photocopies don't always get read thoroughly. When you have to write it down, every darn word has travelled through your cognitive centres at least once...more if you actually check that you've copied it correctly.
I think it's no coincidence that the modules I didn't pass first time at university were the ones with photocopied study notes. (got them second time of course but then they don't contribute to honours....)

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

I agree. I make my kids copy stuff off the board on a regular basis. My second year in grade 7, when my kids were the worst little bunch of s***s I've ever encountered, I taught an entire history unit from overheads that they copied. It was horrible teaching practice, but the kids who cared enough to remember did better on it than when I taught more interactive lessons with fewer handwritten notes. Of course, most of the class rebelled by choosing to fail. THat's why I hate grade 7; they've learned that you can't make them learn, and they are prepared to fail if they think it will make you mad.

In any case, the move away from rote learning has not been entirely positive. The kids do not get as firm a grounding in basic skills as they used to. The trend now is towards more modelled writing, followed by independent work; I think it's a good compromise.