[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.