[anigbrowl]

I don't care about an answer key being wrong - typographical errors are a fact of life, and as long as they're not too common that's fine. What I care about is teachers using an answer key. I never heard of such a thing until I came to the United States. At least in Ireland, where I grew up, teachers are expected to be good enough at the subject they teach to do the damn homework assignments. There are no such things as answer keys for textbook problems.

Every time I bring this up with an American teacher they go into this long litany of how busy they are and how poorly they're paid and so on. I don't give a fuck. If you are using an answer key, you are No Good and I don't take you seriously. I refuse to give a fuck about any of your other problems if your brain is not minimally engaged with the subject material in which you purport to be competent.

[mattlutze]

Teachers in the US regularly work 9-12 hours a day already building lesson plans, actually teaching, dealing with administrativa, etc.

It's common sense to run through a homework assignment to certify the key they're using. But I don't understand how it would be logical to suggest they're no good as teachers unless they spend another 1..n hours a night writing all their assignments by hand and not using prepared material from the books.

[anigbrowl]

I don't care any more. If you're using an answer key then you're prioritizing something else over your core task and you don't have a leg to stand on in political terms. I'm very pro public education, and I would like to be pro teachers, but I am simply not going to lend any support to them as long as they rely on a strategy of whining to get what they want. Relying on answer keys is shameful. The implacable opposition to any sort of standardized testing is bullshit. Academic rigor should be teachers' trump card in political negotiations, and yet they keep acting like it's some sort of unwelcome imposition.

I'm well aware of all the pressure on teachers to act as substitute parents, social workers and so on. But none of their input on these subjects has any value when its divorced from a foundation of academic rigor as their first priority. Without that foundation you cannot have any political leverage. American teachers seem to have forgotten this basic political truth. If the general public does not perceive teachers are intellectually competent and engaged, then it is not going to give any weight to those teachers' opinions on other topics. A degree is education is not a substitute for command of the course material, it's a complement to it. If you can't do a problem like 3 x 7 x 26 in your head then you are innumerate and should not be allowed to teach a math class.

[mattlutze]

From the position you've taken here, I'm getting the impression that you haven't taken the time to learn what the job/business of teaching actually requires, and have instead substituted that knowledge with an idealized model of your own design.

Yes, it would be lovely if all primary and secondary school teachers simply walked into the classroom 5 minutes before class like it happens on TV and spate forth a soliloquy of insight and exploration. That fantasy is simply that.

As a side note, on this line of thought, it'd be similarly shameful for a developer or engineer to use 3rd-party libraries, refer to APIs, crib from pattern cookbooks, etc.

I mean, you do rebuild from scratch the functions you need from jQuery, right? It'd be ridiculous to use reuse the work someone else published, after all.

[anigbrowl]

Well, you have the wrong impression. I've given extensive thought to this, talked to a lot of teachers, spent many years reading teachers' point of view in essays, articles and so on, and generally bent over backwards to see things their way, even (or maybe especially) on practices or ideas that I find counter-intuitive.It's not that I'm uninformed on the topic; I simply don't agree with you.

Also, I'm not a developer. Even if I was, your analogy would be faulty because I am not suggesting teachers originate all of their teaching materials - as you well know. I didn't even suggest that teachers should originate all homework assignments. I am fine with using the ones in a textbook in many circumstances.

Instead I specifically singled out the practice of using answer keys. Not only do some teachers just employ them mindlessly and so incorrectly grade students' work, but all the students are aware of the existence of answer keys and their widespread use by teachers. Do you think that makes the students respect teachers more or less? Do you think that might have any effect on classroom discipline?

I find it depressing that your response to the very narrow argument I was making (ie that answer keys were bad, and if you have to rely on them you are probably not competent to teach that subject) has consisted of one rhetorical fallacy after another instead of addressing the basic point. As I pointed out yesterday, the math problem described in the article, which involves multiplying 2 x 7 x 26, is so simple that any numerate person should be able to do it in their head in a few seconds. If someone can sit there grading homework and not notice that the answer key is wrong - because most or all the competent students in the class would have supplied the actually-correct answer, and at some point the teacher should have noticed that that this problem seems to have been generating a disproportionate number of 'wrong' answers - then something is terribly amiss.