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nerd teacher [books]

whatanerd@bookwyrm.social

Joined 4 years, 1 month ago

Exhausted anarchist and school abolitionist who can be found at nerdteacher.com where I muse about school and education-related things, and all my links are here. My non-book posts are mostly at @whatanerd@treehouse.systems, occasionally I hide on @whatanerd@eldritch.cafe, or you can email me at n@nerdteacher.com. [they/them]

I was a secondary literature and humanities teacher who has swapped to being a tutor, so it's best to expect a ridiculously huge range of books.

And yes, I do spend a lot of time making sure book entries are as complete as I can make them. Please send help.

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Schooling in Western Europe (1985, State University of New York Press) 4 stars

Mary Jo Maynes looks to school reform in early modern Europe to show the relevance …

Furthermore, the very growth in class size that accompanied the school reforms because of their emphasis on universal daily schooling made the simple keeping of order a major part of the teacher's task. Ratios of pupils to teachers in the early and middle decades of the nineteenth century were startlingly high. In a sample of communities of various sizes in Baden, the ratio grew from around seventy to one at the turn of the nineteenth century, to a hundred to one in 1836. In individual communities where population growth was especially rapid, the numbers of children in one school taught by a single teacher could be even higher. For example, the Reformed Girls' School in Schriesheim had 120 pupils in 1818 to one teacher, and 190 in 1831. The Reformed School in Handschuhsheim, with its single teacher, grew from 140 pupils in 1800 to 200 in 1820 as a result of population growth and stricter enforcement of compulsory schooling laws. In southern France, ratios were lower but rose impressively during the same period. In a sample of communities in the Vaucluse, the average rose from twenty-five pupils per teacher around 1800 to seventy in the late 1830s. In England, class sizes in Board and Charity Schools of between 70 and 120 pupils were apparently common in the late nineteenth century, although in all areas of Western Europe increased investment in public schooling resulted in lowered ratios toward the very end of the century.

Under these circumstances, particularly given the new emphasis on the creation of an orderly environment in the classroom, new styles for controlling the masses of children had to be applied. Teachers everywhere abandoned the traditional individual method of teaching in favor of one of the alternative "simultaneous" methods. Pupils were all taught at once. All those in one section were expected to follow a lesson together, while those of other sections worked at some prescribed lesson. The pupil's time was "filled" so as to preclude the idleness that could provoke disorder.

The Brothers of the Christian Schools, who had been the pedagogic innovators of the eighteenth century, provided the model for the new schools. Even for those who did not follow their exact method, the use of lesson plans, signals, and simultaneous instruction answered some of the demands of the new pedagogy. That such a discipline could not meet the needs for spontaneity and individuality which the more humanistic pedagogy required was overlooked in the drive to pull more and more children into the classroom and to keep them orderly and occupied.

Schooling in Western Europe by 

Schooling in Western Europe (1985, State University of New York Press) 4 stars

Mary Jo Maynes looks to school reform in early modern Europe to show the relevance …

Furthermore, the very growth in class size that accompanied the school reforms because of their emphasis on universal daily schooling made the simple keeping of order a major part of the teacher's task. Ratios of pupils to teachers in the early and middle decades of the nineteenth century were startlingly high. In a sample of communities of various sizes in Baden, the ratio grew from around seventy to one at the turn of the nineteenth century, to a hundred to one in 1836. In individual communities where population growth was especially rapid, the numbers of children in one school taught by a single teacher could be even higher. For example, the Reformed Girls' School in Schriesheim had 120 pupils in 1818 to one teacher, and 190 in 1831. The Reformed School in Handschuhsheim, with its single teacher, grew from 140 pupils in 1800 to 200 in 1820 as a result of population growth and stricter enforcement of compulsory schooling laws. In southern France, ratios were lower but rose impressively during the same period. In a sample of communities in the Vaucluse, the average rose from twenty-five pupils per teacher around 1800 to seventy in the late 1830s. In England, class sizes in Board and Charity Schools of between 70 and 120 pupils were apparently common in the late nineteenth century, although in all areas of Western Europe increased investment in public schooling resulted in lowered ratios toward the very end of the century.

Schooling in Western Europe by 

Schooling in Western Europe (1985, State University of New York Press) 4 stars

Mary Jo Maynes looks to school reform in early modern Europe to show the relevance …

Although they proceed from a variety of different perspectives, the social-historical analyses of the evolution of teaching to lead to some important generalizations. Throughout Western Europe, the period of school reform transformed the teacher from a member of the community in which he or she taught, as a part of it, into a figure of authority and moral superiority separate from it. The reforms also at first masculinized the occupation as the part-time, casual, and unlicensed teachers, often women, were excluded or harassed, and the new normal schools recruited predominately males. The reformed teacher was everywhere in a peculiarly contradictory position. Underpaid in comparison to local notables, and more highly regulated by religious and lay superiors, he was nonetheless supposed to display independence and authority in dealings with the people of the community. Drawn from "the people," the teacher was no longer one of them. It is hardly surprising that teachers were, during this period, a discontented lot. In the political character of the teachers it trained, as in so many other respects, the contradictory nature of the reform revealed itself.

Schooling in Western Europe by 

Schooling in Western Europe (1985, State University of New York Press) 4 stars

Mary Jo Maynes looks to school reform in early modern Europe to show the relevance …

In all, the thrust of the professional reforms of teaching left the teachers in a new and improved, but hardly enviable position. In practice the reform certainly severed their ties with the local community all over Western Europe. If salaries were rising and the work of the teacher taken more seriously, if classrooms were fuller and teachers equipped with a new kind of training and new credentials, all this came at a high cost. Teachers were left in a peculiarly contradictory position—caught between the needs of the communities they served, the demands of their secular and religious superiors, and their own sense of self in part at least shaped by the training they were now receiving. Teachers who made strenuous efforts to enforce the new regulations about school attendance or teaching standards often paid for their efforts by losing the goodwill of the peasant families who found the older style of teaching more compatible with their needs. In their frustrations with dealing with an often unappreciative local community, teachers sometimes resorted to a kind of partnership with liberal notables nearby or in the state hierarchy, attaching themselves often to opposition movements seeming or even claiming to be in sympathy with popular needs, but often in fact divorced from the people they had to serve.

Schooling in Western Europe by 

Schooling in Western Europe (1985, State University of New York Press) 4 stars

Mary Jo Maynes looks to school reform in early modern Europe to show the relevance …

In fact, the increasing assertiveness of teachers as a corps as they were groomed in this new image brought out some of the contradictions inherent in the reform process. Teachers were, as the reformers had expected, by and large recruited from among the lower classes—they were for the most part, the sons of peasants, artisans, and poorer shopkeepers. For them, a successful teaching career meant a route out of the marginality that plagued their families or a solution to their families' problem of establishing its children in respectable careers. As greater claims to respectability were made for the teaching profession, and as material conditions of teachers began to improve, the career became even more desirable to the children of these classes, and applications for teaching posts and for places in the normal schools rose.

Simultaneously, a sort of ésprit de corps began to develop among the teachers of the new breed. Seeing themselves as agents of the future and of political reform, they were often involved in what they saw as a related fight to improve the condition of the people and the status of public education (and its educators). Often, this struggle brought them into conflict with local community leaders or pastors who had more traditional conceptions of what a teacher should be. And they could not always count on support from their superiors in the educational bureaucracy, who often had an interest in assuring that teachers remain modest in aspiration, and submissive in behavior.

Schooling in Western Europe by 

Schooling in Western Europe (1985, State University of New York Press) 4 stars

Mary Jo Maynes looks to school reform in early modern Europe to show the relevance …

Another closely connected change was the decline of side-occupations, or rather the switch to "respectable" ones. In some areas, certain additional occupations were simply forbidden. Bavarian statutes issued between 1801 and 1845 forbade the following occupations as unacceptable for a teacher: keeping a bar or a shop, handicrafts, agricultural labor (except in his own plot), lottery collections, playing music in inns or public dances, "calling out" for funerals, and the like.

Schooling in Western Europe by 

Schooling in Western Europe (1985, State University of New York Press) 4 stars

Mary Jo Maynes looks to school reform in early modern Europe to show the relevance …

Another aspect of the reform of the teacher's role and image involved the level and nature of payment for teaching services. Teaching salaries had to be raised enough to allow the teacher to subsist (and since the ideal was for him to become a family man—his family, as well) without the need to resort to those side-occupations now considered to be demeaning. Furthermore, the teacher had to be assured of that income without relying on the goodwill of the community. Such dependency, so much a feature of the older, decentralized structure of school arrangements, was unsuitable once the teachers were expected to project an image that set them apart from the community and transformed them into state functionaries.

Schooling in Western Europe by 

Schooling in Western Europe (1985, State University of New York Press) 4 stars

Mary Jo Maynes looks to school reform in early modern Europe to show the relevance …

The earliest teacher training schools were the so-called Lehrseminarien in the German states. The first one was opened in Berlin, the capital of Prussia, in 1756, and by the end of the eighteenth century, Prussia boasted a state-supported network which included thirty major seminaries and eleven auxiliary ones, each having between fifty and a hundred pupils. The first seminary for female schoolteachers in western Germany was established in Koblenz in 1784, although such establishments remained exceedingly rare.

In France, the first écoles normales for the training of primary school-teachers, called instituteurs or institutrices with official state sponsorship were opened in the 1820s; by the early 1840s, the départements with state encouragement and aid had opened 76 normal schools for men and 16 for women, enrolling 3,012 and 283 pupils, respectively. In England, training colleges became a serious state project finally in the 1840s, and the establishment of the Queen's Scholarship made them available to poor but ambitious offspring of farming and working-class families. Indeed, this provision of training at little cost was a central part of the program everywhere. The schools were designed to attract pupils who would see the teaching profession as an avenue of mobility from manual labor. Their design was to provide a limited education and to produce graduates who would know enough to teach, but who would be neither too haughty nor too ambitious for the life of a country schoolteacher. Both the curricula at the normal schools and the pattern of recruitment and training reflected these ends.

Schooling in Western Europe by 

Station Eternity (Paperback, 2022, Penguin Publishing Group) 3 stars

Amateur detective Mallory Viridian’s talent for solving murders ruined her life on Earth and drove …

A Mismarketed Book of Far Too Many References

1 star

I'm going to start from this premise: If they had properly marketed this book as a sci-fi thriller or an action sci-fi or something, I probably would have fewer problems with it. I probably wouldn't have spent 300+ pages trying to keep track of clues (that didn't exist) so that I could solve a mystery (that wasn't really there); I would've just gone with the flow, as I did for the remainder of the book. It got better (not good) once I did that, but the marketing was literally the worst part because it established incorrect assumptions and expectations. They told me it was a sci-fi mystery/detective novel... I literally got zero of one of those genres, despite all claims to the contrary (by people who I'm guessing didn't even read the book or have no concept of what makes a mystery).

Beyond that, while it would've been a more …

Station Eternity (Paperback, 2022, Penguin Publishing Group) 3 stars

Amateur detective Mallory Viridian’s talent for solving murders ruined her life on Earth and drove …

A Mismarketed Book of Far Too Many References

2 stars

I'm going to start from this premise: If they had properly marketed this book as a sci-fi thriller or an action sci-fi or something, I probably would have fewer problems with it. I probably wouldn't have spent 300+ pages trying to keep track of clues (that didn't exist) so that I could solve a mystery (that wasn't really there); I would've just gone with the flow, as I did for the remainder of the book. It got better (not good) once I did that, but the marketing was literally the worst part because it established incorrect assumptions and expectations. They told me it was a sci-fi mystery/detective novel... I literally got zero of one of those genres, despite all claims to the contrary (by people who I'm guessing didn't even read the book or have no concept of what makes a mystery).

Beyond that, while it would've been a more …

Station Eternity (Paperback, 2022, Penguin Publishing Group) 3 stars

Amateur detective Mallory Viridian’s talent for solving murders ruined her life on Earth and drove …

I am 361 pages in, and there have been NO CLUES AND NO MYSTERIES TO SOLVE.

One of the praises for this book on the back reads: "If Jessica Fletcher ended up on Babylon 5, you still wouldn't get anywhere close to this deft, complicated, and fast-moving book." It's driving me insane when I see it because I don't know how this book is 'deft' and both 'complicated' and 'fast-moving' aren't inherently good things. But also, it's an insult to both Babylon 5 and Jessica Fletcher because even Jess (who solved some of the most convoluted crimes I ever saw on a detective show) wouldn't have written this shit because she would've found it too convoluted and absurd and WITHOUT A MYSTERY TO SOLVE.

Station Eternity (Paperback, 2022, Penguin Publishing Group) 3 stars

Amateur detective Mallory Viridian’s talent for solving murders ruined her life on Earth and drove …

Content warning In which I'm still annoyed by this book.

Station Eternity (Paperback, 2022, Penguin Publishing Group) 3 stars

Amateur detective Mallory Viridian’s talent for solving murders ruined her life on Earth and drove …

Content warning In which I'm still annoyed by this book.

Station Eternity (Paperback, 2022, Penguin Publishing Group) 3 stars

Amateur detective Mallory Viridian’s talent for solving murders ruined her life on Earth and drove …

Content warning Could spoil characters and plot, but... you can't?

Station Eternity (Paperback, 2022, Penguin Publishing Group) 3 stars

Amateur detective Mallory Viridian’s talent for solving murders ruined her life on Earth and drove …

I'm losing my mind with so much of this.

There still are far too many blatant Hitchhiker's Guide references, which makes me feel like I should just read that series instead. There's a Gneiss elder (who is a ship) who... recites poetry to everyone who boards, which is reminiscent of the Vogons who recite poetry to stowaways.

The most interesting names for aliens are those that the author points out as "sounding Indian" (Devanshi), which... that's definitely a look. Others are named Tina, Algernon, Ren, and Osric. None of them have names that sound like a version of 'space'. Again, if your influence is Hitchhiker's (as the acknowledgement stated), then... you had an example of fun names! And you could've played with names to have fun. (Other alien names are mostly nouns, like a space station named 'Eternity'.)