Saturday, August 20, 2016

RoJo: Replace Teachers With Videos

RoJo, Our Dumb Senator, has a new, brilliant idea on how to improve education - get rid of the teachers and replace them with DVRs. Via Amanda Terkel at HuffPo, we learn that RoJo shared this latest bright idea at a political forum in Wisconsin:

Johnson also touted the benefits of online education and suggested that teachers really weren’t all that necessary anymore:

JOHNSON: We’ve got the internet ― you have so much information available. Why do you have to keep paying differently lecturers to teach the same course? You get one solid lecturer and put it up online and have everybody available to that knowledge for a whole lot cheaper? But that doesn’t play very well to tenured professors in the higher education cartel. So again, we need destructive technology for our higher education system.

WISPOLITICS: But online education is missing some facet of a good ―

JOHNSON: Of course, it’s a combination, but prior to my doing this crazy thing [of being in the Senate] ... I was really involved on a volunteer basis in an education system in Oshkosh. And one of things we did in the Catholic school system was we had something called the “academic excellence initiative.” How do you teach more, better, easier?

One of the examples I always used ― if you want to teach the Civil War across the country, are you better off having, I don’t know, tens of thousands of history teachers that kind of know the subject, or would you be better off popping in 14 hours of Ken Burns Civil War tape and then have those teachers proctor based on that excellent video production already done? You keep duplicating that over all these different subject areas.
Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers gets a round of applause for her response to RoJo's inane comment:
"Leave it to someone from a party led by a reality TV star to confuse videotape with the learning experience of a classroom," she said. What Ron Johnson doesn't get is that education happens when teachers can listen to students and engage them to think for themselves - and that can include using Ken Burns' masterful work. But this is typical for a party with an education agenda as out of date as Johnson's Blockbuster Video card."
Although RoJo is obviously being a damned fool again, he should be commended for one thing - at least it appears he got past his irrational fear and hatred of movies like The Lego Movie.

With all of the gaffes, blunders and purely idiotic things that RoJo has done and said lately, one has to wonder if he even wants to win this November.

4 comments:

  1. His argument doesn't take into account that students have different learning styles. Watching a DVD may work for some, but not for all.
    Apparently RoJo had problems learning grammar if he can say "have everybody available to that knowledge". What a clown.

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  2. I actually like this idea and want to extend it further by replacing Ron Johnson with a cardboard silhouette until after he loses the election, we would save tons of airfare and the piece of cardboard would be just as effective!

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  3. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  4. Senator Johnson's comments show the same factory mindset that is typical of Republicans. "Why can't we turn education into an assembly line? Why can't we just mass produce graduates? Why can't we run schools like a business?" It's all part of the same trend we've seen for decades.

    I doubt he did very much volunteering in education. If he had, he would know that teaching the material accounts for about half of what a teacher has to do. My wife teaches, and from what I hear, most of her time is spent being a cheerleader, motivational speaker, coach, and psychologist. I used to volunteer teaching people to read and write using a very strict method of direct instruction, this meant that I didn't have to know HOW to teach people how to read, I just needed to be able to read FOR the adults and tell them what to do. Even here, working with adults that were learning because they wanted to be there I spent tons of time keeping them from getting discouraged.

    And, finally, there's something I say to everyone who suggests that we can just stream education to kids over the internet, "What do your kids use the internet for now?"

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