And this is the same thing. Criticizing that somebody should have done more is a null criticism. What needs to happen in any environment where you have limited resources (limited pages the journal will publish, limited time with the children) is that if you're going to say somebody needed to do "more", you need to also criticize what should be removed to make room for this "more".
By that standard, I doubt this teacher could have done much better. There's a balance to reacting to the kids, but you also need to get through the curriculum, which ultimately is there for a reason. (Most of us would probably agree there's too much emphasis on curriculum today, but the solution is not to completely ignore it.) Reacting endlessly to the students comes with its own problems.
I should have been nailed for my formulaic criticisms. But then... students "criticizing" the top 0.01% of papers shouldn't be expected to produce useful results anyhow, any more than this criticism of the teacher does. There's only so many pages and so much time.
Maybe pulling out the letter V would have distracted too much from the letter C, or whatever. I am afraid such people are just parasites to society, somehow they managed to tap into tax payer money and get paid for just sitting on their ass all day talking bullshit. Probably standing in front of a class directly they would be miserable failures. Sorry for sounding so harsh, but my spouse is a teacher, so I guess I am a little too emotionally involved...
Unless, of course, all the other kids start calling out their own names, then other words, and she does lose control of the class.
It's an excellent article. But the problem I've always had with the kind of analyses portrayed by the UVA team is that it's too easy to sit there and sound smart by making these kinds of criticisms. Similar criticisms could be made about the math teacher, whose style is more like mine was in the community college physics classes I taught, but I'll spare you, dear readers of this comment.
I think that it's better to think of teaching like trying to find the best-fit line through a cloud of scattered points. You can stand there and say, "the shortest distance to the next point is actually over here..." but completely miss the idea that if you are trying to maximize a long-term result, you may not want to draw your line in that particular direction.