Place Value
Teacher Appreciation Week was just celebrated last week.
What did you do for a teacher to show them how much you appreciate and value what they do?
What value do you place on education and the educators that do so much to make a difference in the life of a child, and therefore, this world in which we all live?
To explore this very critical topic a little, I want to play around a little with these two words: PLACE and VALUE.
In Math, place value refers to the value of a digit based on its position in a number.
For example, in the number 463, the digit 4 has a place value of 400 because it is in the hundreds place. The digit 3 has a place value of 3 because it is in the ones column.
Sometime I think about place value in terms of how we rate, rank and value teachers in the education profession.
I could change the syntax of the words and ask “what VALUE do we PLACE” on teachers?
This totally changes the meaning, doesn’t it?
When we place a value on a teacher based on their student test scores, it seems like we are just ranking them and putting them in a place among other numbers and digits.
So, a teacher whose student test scores are ranked 26th out of 30 schools in the district will not have much value placed on what they have done and on who they are as a teacher.
There are so many mitigating circumstances and uncontrollable variables that can affect those scores, and therefore, that ranking.
Zero is the absence of value, and is just a placeholder.
YET, it can seem to add great value to a number.
For example, 5…50…500…and so on.
Which has more value?
It seems to me that the more zeros, the more value???
Wait, what???
That’s not how math works!
The more zeros a student has, the more value?
Hmmmmm, I say, scratching my head!
What do I mean by all this?
When we rank teachers (and students) among hundreds and thousands of others, they are placed in a column that has a certain value.
For example, say there are 200 science teachers in my district, and my student tests scores place me as 191 out of 200 and my colleague science teacher, also at my school, ranks 75 out of 200, does this mean that the other teacher has more value than I do?
Should parents, students, admin and the rest of the world value me less?
Also, the word “appreciate” has the root word PRICE in it?
Can we put a price on what teachers do?
If so, then, I say we add more zeros to their paycheck since this will add more place value to what they do!
Think about i!
The teaching profession needs more value placed on what it does and how it contributes to society and the future of our children.
Instead of de-valuing what teachers do and disassembling the entire educational system, we need to place more value on what they do with more respect, more support and more zeros added to their paychecks.
Stop with the rankings, competition, business-oriented approach. Children are not products that can be standardized and mass produced on an assembly line to perfection.
Image credit:
“Numbers” by morebyless is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
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