President Obama signs a good but unfair memorandum.

I have to admit that I am not too familiar with visitation regulations in hospitals because I have never had to visit anyone outside of my family in the hospital, but from what I have heard visits from anyone outside of a person's family is not permitted to visit a patient in critical condition. In Sarah's Government Blog, she talks about how President Obama recently signed a memorandum allowing homosexuals to have visits from people outside of their family. As someone that supports same-sex marriage, I am thrilled, but as someone that also supports equal rights for everyone, I am a bit disappointed. While I like that the partners of homosexual patients are now able to be there for their loved one, I have to argue why can't this right be extended to everyone? Why can't we all have EVERYONE that loves us, not just our families, the right to visit us when we are at our weakest? If we want equal rights for everyone, then we should all have the same rights. In a way, I agree with Sarah that this shows that President Obama wants to the right thing for everyone, I think that he could have gone about it in a way that truly shows that homosexuals deserve the same rights as everyone else. Giving them extra rights is not the way to gain the support of the nation for same-sex marriage. We are all equals as citizens of the United States, so we should all have equal rights.

A better approach to teaching and learning

It seems to me that good teachers are hard to come by these days, but why is that? Most would agree that a good teacher know how to engage students, are knowledgeable in their subject, and understand the best ways for students to learn. In a very broad sense, all great teachers possess those traits. So, why are so many schools throughout the United States on probation while such a high rate of their teachers are rated as “excellent”? That’s what Excellence in Teaching wants to know.

Excellence in Teaching is a pilot program that was started in 2008 to improve schools throughout the U.S. and has been successful in the schools that they have been tested at for the past couple years. It targets the main reasons for faulty teacher evaluations and aims to produce feedback to teachers that will improve their methods and improve education on a whole.

A typical teacher evaluation comes from the principal checking off a generalized list of what the teachers are or are not doing well in the classroom. There are a few problems with this very vague evaluation. In order to evaluate a teacher, a principal will sit in a class and determine the teacher’s ability in that sitting. Usually, children are on their best behavior and teachers are more attentive during those times and know what to do to gain the best scores, so obviously the results will be slightly skewed and vague at best.

Excellence in Teaching wants to correct this by doing away with the checklist and replace it with conversation. So, rather than just rating the teacher, they want to discover how the students are learning from a teacher’s methods and what can be changed to increase students’ understanding. It’s similar to getting an essay back with feedback on your work and how you can improve it written throughout the paper rather than getting it back with a simple grade stamped at the top and you’re left to question why you got that grade.

I think it is great that so many schools have started to evaluate teachers through this program. If every school in the United States adopted Excellence in Teaching’s methods of evaluation, then the quality of learning would definitely go up and the number of successful students would rise along with it.