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Re:Experience as a teacher turns out to be worthless by comatose_kid on Sunday May 18, 2008 @10:25AM (#193362)
I just used the title of the original blog post.

What other metric could be used for evaluating teachers?

Re:Experience as a teacher turns out to be worthless by sanj on Sunday May 18, 2008 @12:29PM (#193435)
Derivative of test scores.

A good teacher should make your scores improve. The absolute numbers are much less meaningful.

Re:Experience as a teacher turns out to be worthless by Jesin on Sunday May 18, 2008 @04:14PM (#193576)
No, it really depends on the teacher. My precalculus teacher (probably the best math teacher I've ever had) gives progressively harder tests/quizzes as we learn more about each topic. He ignores the textbook and writes the tests himself.

(Incidentally, we've recently been covering derivatives.)

Re:Experience as a teacher turns out to be worthless by rw on Sunday May 18, 2008 @04:30PM (#193590)
What do we want to measure in students? Skills, creativity, "intelligence"...?

Standardized metrics are themselves dubious when we are dealing with highly chaotic systems (see: combinatorial explosion, etc) with drastically different properties.

Re:Experience as a teacher turns out to be worthless by vitaminj on Sunday May 18, 2008 @08:50PM (#193755)
I don't know, nor do I think a good metric necessarily exists. Teaching doesn't fit in neatly with the typical production metrics we use in industry, eg. widgets per hour. Those outputs are directly measurable.

But what is the unit of output for a teacher? Test scores could only hope to measure teaching quality indirectly. It'd be like using record sales to assess the quality of a musician... and we'd all agree that Britney and Mariah aren't the best musicians going around.