hahaha. And the article has a picture of what, 4th graders? I'm pretty damn sure the 4th graders aren't allowed to rate their teachers.

stupd tchr kthx. cu l8r

Do teachers over in Ireland/England also have tenure like here in the states?

So, what Ms. Turner is saying is that what happens in the classroom, stays in the classroom? How... ethical, and at the same time, not at all surprising. Sure, if I got to choose, no one, including my boss, would get to know how badly I do my job.

bravo smitty

I had a teacher in high school who only really taught us the one week a year that she got her annual teacher's review, and she made it clear that if any of us screwed it up for her we'd be dead.

/Yay! Public school educations rock!
//I've spent the last 12 years undoing the damage done to my education by those people.

National Association of Head Teachers


C'mon Baby, teach me some head..

The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites

Yay! An English education makes you stupid and horny.

/Know I am.

"I didn't like her as a teacher... she had a weird smell of vodka to her."

Well I didn't realise Frank McCourt was back in school.

Mugato

L.O.L

If the teacher is not doing the job it has to be dealt with, but it has to be dealt with properly.

"The website is not the way to do it," Ms Turner said.

In other words, "we don't want the public, especially the parents, to know what a lack luster job we are doing educating your kids. We prefer to keep it under wraps".

This is nothing new.

Genius, submitter. +1

Also, I think these websites should stay up. ratemyteachers.com is a great website, and I'm assuming the other one in the UK is equally good. If you want to change your rating, change your teaching. BTW, this is completely awesome FTFA:

Among the posts on one of the sites, ratemyteacher.co.uk, were ones which read: "A useless piece of garbage who wouldn't know chemistry if it ran him over"

Yeah, let's have teenagers with grudges rate teachers. That should turn out nice and fair. It's not like they are in any way impartial.

Sue the website for slander/libel. It's on their page, right? now have them prove the accusations.

I love ratemyprofessor.com

I needed an easy credit next semester... a gen ed. I was between a class that sounded interesting and a class that sounded easy.

One was taught by a professor who had terrible marks against him and talked about the "presentations" you had to give.

The other class was taught by a professor everyone liked.

Made my decision easy.

If the teachers were doing their jobs correctly, they wouldn't have to worry.

Also, these teachers are frowning upon freedom of speech, which upsets me. But it's nothing new.

Can't stop the kids from blogging... welcome to the internet... If parents started researching their kid's teachers, would it will cause teachers to start doing a worse job of teaching in order to score higher points on the site, ie more fun but less real education. Teenagers are not always the best judge of what is good for them. Perhaps a parental rating site in in order.

I like ratemyprofessor.com. It seems like it's pretty accurate for the most part. I've only ever written two bad reviews about my professors, and it was because those two are literally the worst professors on the face of the earth. Both of their classes were a giant waste of time.

/Anyone who uses only powerpoint presentations to lecture should be shot.

"We need students to be active, we need them to be involved in their education, but this isn't the way to do it."

But thats exactly what We are doing. Because of ratemyprofessor, now, everyone knows you suck as a teacher if your colleagues Cal 2 class is full and yours is dead empty (and his is the 8am lol).

and AppleDane

What happens when the students prove their accusations true? You'd have to fire the teacher. I bet they wouldnt go for that.

Disdainful:
I wonder how you spell "professionalism" in text speak?

"I h8 my job."

Took me a moment to figure out but TOUCHE' smitty......

Good one.

If I may make an observation, IF the teachers took the criticism as a chance to learn about themselves and to become better teachers then maybe they would change the whole learning experience for the better for the kids entrusted to their classrooms.

But who I am to give such sage advise, I'm just a network geek at a local community college.

For every kid that will say you "can't teach (subject) " there's a kid that thinks you're the best (subject) teacher out there.
Usually, the ones hitting the point of having to go to a website are the ones with major grievances. Their words are worth shiat.

Teenagers hate anyone who tells them "no", teacher or parent or stranger on the street.

So don't make it a case of "If the teachers were doing their jobs correctly, they wouldn't have to worry".
That's bullshiat. We can be doing our jobs 100% perfectly in one kid's eyes, but there will always be some angsty rat who doesn't like that we gave him homework.

I was a teacher and there were always flyers around campus for one of these teacher ratings sites. It was sad because I witnessed plenty of students avoiding a teacher's class just because they had bad reviews.

In theory review sites would be good if there were some sort of moderation. The thing is most of those reviews were complete nonsense. In some cases students (and non students) were just being pranksters but other times it was more malicious. I had a student submit a half dozen of really nasty reviews for me using multiple accounts just because she was getting poor grades on her design projects. Truthfully I was being kind by working with her so much, getting her an in class / out of class tutor and spending my own unpaid time to help her out. The girl had no business being a design student, not by a long shot, but I tried my best. The kicker is I caught her writing the reviews right in class, multiple times. And I still helped her.

Anyway, these sites mean well but they don't work. Teachers can stuff their own accounts with reviews and students can write reviews even if they never attended the class. And it shouldn't make a bit of difference to the teachers but it does. Some students would plan their schedules based solely on review sites and the administration read the reviews as well. Scary stuff.

My google-foo has failed me...

Does anyone know if Ireland has a voucher or "choice" system in place for education? Something that would allow students/parents to pick and choose the school they attend rather than leaving it to the school district lottery?

The image showed some pretty young kids, and the general gist of the student comments leads me to believe that we're talking about grade schoolers, albeit in their last few years in the system. If the students/parents are directly involved in choosing the schools, than rating are oh so important.

If this is, as I suspect, a grade school settings and the students/parents are not in control of school choices, than this things get a little grayer. I must admit that if I had been warned that my AP Chem instructor was going to be bi-polar, I'd have skipped the class, but the bottom line is that in a public school setting similar to the US, you really don't have many choices. Sure, you can pick shop or home ec, but if you wish to go down a certain path educationally, you're going to have to face some crap teachers. The trick is to learn what you can from them and forget the garbage - My first semester programming instructor was a walking "What Not To Do" manual.

/But seriously, does anyone know?

"We're talking here about teachers' professionalism," she said.

Yes, we are:

"She spends all our lessons on her mobile texting her boyfriend"; "I didn't like her as a teacher... she had a weird smell of vodka to her."

Very professional.

TFA "The fact that somebody is making money out of attacking people isn't appropriate," Ms Turner said.



Disagrees.

Huh... maybe they should be teaching Freedom of Speech.

damn whiny teachers complaining that their students are sharing negative opinions of them. newsflash: students do it anyways, regardless of medium. welcome to the internet age.

/most of the teachers i've ever had sucked.
//there WERE some gems, though.

Did anyone else read that as rapemyteacher.com? And was then confused when reading the rest of the head line?
/ANyone? *crickets*

klisejo

What happens when the students prove their accusations true? You'd have to fire the teacher. I bet they wouldnt go for that.

What happens when the accusations are NOT true? Only that a teacher's job will be near impossible, because the kids, the parents, and the colleagues will look at the teacher as worthless and not worth enter into real cooperation with him/her.

Even the existance of a site like this is problematic. teachers will now have the fear of getting "a bad review" if they tell the sheltered brat off.

Yeah, I'm a teacher. And, yeah, I have had kids say to me "OH MAN, MY PARENTS ARE GONNA SUE YOU!" when I did something they didn't like, like drag them out in the hall and tell them off for being jerks in class. Now imagine what would happen if they had internet and a page like ratemyteacher.dk for Denmark.

Grade school kids do not have rights, other than a right to get an education, and there is a reason for that. Now, the parents have rights. Why don't the parents listen to their kids, and then complain to the principal, who then could bring the complaint forward. No need for a public undressing.

Yes, there are bad teachers. But this is not the solution.

Smiths: That's bullshiat. We can be doing our jobs 100% perfectly in one kid's eyes, but there will always be some angsty rat who doesn't like that we gave him homework.

Yeah, you're right, but for every rat there should be at least one kid that appreciated what you did for them over the course of the semester. Throughout my college career, I made a point of rating teachers both good and bad, and more so when I knew that my opinion was not the popular one. Always give plenty of examples, and trust that anyone reading will be able to make a good decision with what is given. If all goes well, you'll end up with a room full of kids that appreciate the subject and your teaching style.

To say that sites like ratemyprofessor.com are unfair or generally bad for teachers is on par with Wal-Mart saying that public store ratings aren't fair because the only people that would bother to rate them were ones that were told that they couldn't return used batteries without a receipt. There are asses everywhere, but to say that ratings sites are bad because a few people are asses is just crap. What do you have to hide?

>
Everywhere in the world, I presume.
Worst imaginable job. I'd rather work as a prison guard. There your "customers" are caged. Bonus: You won't have to cope with their parents.

she was txt messaging her boyfriend from the back row?

What happens when the accusations are NOT true? Only that a teacher's job will be near impossible, because the kids, the parents, and the colleagues will look at the teacher as worthless and not worth enter into real cooperation with him/her.

If they're not true, then it's likely the bad comments are vastly outweighed by the good comments.

Just looking at reviews for some of my past professors, I have yet to see a single one that I really liked receive overwhelmingly bad comments.

At the very least the teachers should be given the right to reply.

Eh, I don't really see the point in ratemyteacher, since most kids don't have any choice in who their teacher is, anyway (at least where I went to school). I'm sure it's just an excuse for a bunch of kids to talk bad about their teacher (however legitimate their complaints are/aren't). That being said, once an idea is on the internet, it tends to stay there. Even if that particular site gets shut down, some new site will crop up. Or they'll make it part of myspace or whatever the kids are using these days.

Ratemyprofessors, on the other hand, has proven an invaluable tool for me. Even if a professor gets a bad review, I might still take them, depending on what the comments say. Some students give professors bad reviews because they give "all essay tests," for instance, but that's something I look for in a professor. (yay, essays)

I had aspirations to be a prof once ... matched a friend year for year at uni and then fell down a bit at the Masters stage, dropped out and got a job. He went on to do a PhD and got a teaching job in America.

We corresponded for a few years until my "friend" decided I was too low-brow to keep up with his ivory tower aspirations and he began speaking to me like I was an idiot. We fell out.

Then I found him again on ratemyprofessor.com He pupils despise him and think he's an antisocial R-tard. I once read, out of the unremitting string of abuse, one glowing review ... so I feigned a student account, logged in and commented directly beneath the favourable comment, "Jesus Christ, David, you must have written that one yourself."

Yeah, I'm petty.

It's also interesting to search for your old school on youtube.

Mine produced this hilarious schoolyard sucker-punch.

/goodtimes.
//not really - hated this place.

"I think part of being a teacher is training young children, and indeed sometimes adults, to respect others and respect their feelings and not to go out of their way to damage people."

Sorry, I must say this, to quote one of my favorite comedians, "Respect is earned not bestowed."

And I couldn't agree more. We had several teachers at my high school who earned all of our respect almost immediately and there were others whom didn't deserve it and weren't given it.

Honest Bender
I'm pretty sure you're right, otherwise Penn & Teller couldn't get away with what they do. I can't openly say "Dr. Ruth is a quack" without evidence supporting it but I believe I can say "I feel Dr. Ruth is a quack" without a problem, as one is a purported statement of fact while the other is an opinion. Then again I'm no lawyer...

/Probably could have been
//Damn computers
///No wait... damn users.
////Runs off to post to ratemyprofessors.com
//Runs back for slashies
//Slashies

Grade school kids do not have rights, other than a right to get an education, and there is a reason for that. Now, the parents have rights. Why don't the parents listen to their kids, and then complain to the principal, who then could bring the complaint forward. No need for a public undressing.

Agreed. Completely. Just so you know. :)

Preka: If they're not true, then it's likely the bad comments are vastly outweighed by the good comments.

So we shouldn't have libel laws because if someone is really good, people's good comments will always outweigh the bad? And you don't think there is a potential problem with the same person submitting multiple reviews?

Grade school kids do not have rights, other than a right to get an education, and there is a reason for that. Now, the parents have rights. Why don't the parents listen to their kids, and then complain to the principal, who then could bring the complaint forward. No need for a public undressing.

Also, people like tossing around the non-necessity of...pretty much anything they disagree with, really...as if it somehow matters.

In much the same fashion that grade school kids don't have rights, you do not have a right not to be "publicly undressed" (within the confines of slander/libel laws). Too bad.

So we shouldn't have libel laws because if someone is really good, people's good comments will always outweigh the bad? And you don't think there is a potential problem with the same person submitting multiple reviews?

Opinions can't be libel, so it's not really relevant unless someone starts going on about, say, the teacher getting naked and dancing on top of their desk when it didn't really happen. That would be libel. I have yet to see anything like that.

Several of the accusations were fact based: "she had an odd smell of vodka to her," "she spends all our lesson texting her bf." If someone could prove these accusations of fact untrue, there would be a potential libel case.

If you wrote that the teacher's exams were poorly constructed or their lectures were worthless, mindless dreck, that's opinion, that's OK.

Several of the accusations were fact based: "she had an odd smell of vodka to her," "she spends all our lesson texting her bf." If someone could prove these accusations of fact untrue, there would be a potential libel case.

You'd have a rough time with "smells like vodka". I don't see a libel case springing up out of the texting one though. If it does, get back to me. Until then, I Jack's utter lack of surprise.

SilenceEchoed: What do you have to hide?

It's nothing to hide, I was just annoyed by the comment about "doing the job right so people won't have anything to complain about"

Teaching is like following a bunch of tributaries to the ocean. They all end up at the same place, but there are different forks, bends, currents, etc. on the way there. Now if a teacher is not hitting the goal, then yes I will agree they are not doing their job "right".
However, if the lessons are being taught, the work being completed, and the subjects learned, then no one has a right to complain about "not doing the job right".

I've taught silent classes and rowdy classes. Both have completed everything I laid out by the end. Would some of the noisy kids say I was a poor teacher? Of course. However, so would some of the silent kids.

My only preference is that I would rather have the student, his parent/guardian, and my superiors sit down with me and we discuss what is disagreed upon with my methods, as opposed to just "OMG DIS TEACHER SO DUM HE GIVZ 2 MUCH HW!!1! R-TARD!!!"

/Would like to second the respect is earned, not given