2023年下半年高中英语学科知识与教学能力真题

Passage 1

     Every teacher faces a unique set of' challenges. Students are so different from year to year, ay today, subject to subject, even hour to hour, that planning is often an exercise in taking risks and working with uncertainties.

    Usually, the reaction to content will differ from student to student in the same class. We often teach to half the class, struggling to reach the rest. A handful of students are sometimes deemed unreachable. Some teachers, when confronted with these dilemmas, shrug their shoulders. The curriculum, as they see it, is beyond their control. lt is determined by the state, by the district, by the end-of-year tests, or by the textbooks. All they have to do is instruct. If the curriculum is inappropriate or boring or irrelevant, there is nothing they can do.

    It does not have to be that way. Teachers can and do make curricular decisions, whether they realize it or not. They choose to emphasize certain topics, hurry through others, or maybe even skip a portion of' the official curriculum, Many will introduce their hobbies or interests, such as quilting, skiing, or the Renaissance, even if it is not a designated topic in the curriculum guide. They do not do it to be "subversive" necessarily, but because those decisions are best for the children they teach. They are exercising their professional responsibilities.

    Parents and administrators do not object when teachers' curricular decisions are responsible ones. Only the foolish or harmful decisions are likely to lead to negative consequences. Indeed, the best teachers we know are the ones who adjust the curriculum to meet their students' needs.

    These exemplary teachers have earned their reputations because their students are motivated to learn. They not only lead the horses to water, they put salt in their oats to make them drink! But not every teacher has the gift of making outstanding curricular decisions. And sometimes even the most astute teachers will make mistakes.

    The possibility of making poor curricular decisions is reduced when students are given the responsibility of choosing content. Students tend to select topics that interest them, thus avoiding motivation problems. Their choices reflect their actual needs, rather than those perceived by adults. Lt makes for a more efficient curriculum development process. Curricular decision-making power belongs in the hands of students because it is their lives that are being affected-their day-to-day school lives and also their future lives. Giving them this power is not a fad, or a way for teachers to pass the buck. It is a method of developing autonomy, motivating children to learn, and developing strong citizenship skills.

Passage 2

     During the second-half of the last century countries were placed in one of two mutually exclusive camps: north or south, east or west, advanced or emerging, developed or developing. Simple though this categorization of countries had been, it reflected prevailing realities. In 1970, for instance, the global distribution of per capita income showed a clear divide between richer and poorer countries. These between-country differences were equally applicable to other development conditions, notably health and education. However, as Hans Rosling emphasized during his last presentation at the World Bank, for the 21st century this binary distinction between countries is outdated. Boundaries between developed and developing regions are less clear today because of the extraordinary social and economic progress achieved in the large majority countries. Global economic activity is less geographically concentrated and increasingly dispersed across production networks that connect metropolitan areas around the world.

    Yet, although discrepancies between countries have narrowed, emerging evidence suggests that inequality within countries is rising, Atkinson, Piketty and Saez (2011), for instance, show a marked concentration of wealth on the top tail of the income distribution, particularly in the United States, other English speaking countries, India, and China, while Laker and Milanovic (2013) report along-term and continuously increase in the within-country component of global inequality. And if the benefits of economic growth are unevenly distributed within countries, upcoming technological changes and urbanization are likely to intensify these divisions further.

    As a result, the emerging face of income inequality for the 2lst century is one of coexisting discrepancies at the local level. For India, Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen's (2011) essay describes the drastically uneven development progress achieved across its states, while Gangopadhyay et.al.(2010)document India's pockets of poverty at the narrower district level.

    Inequality at the local level is not limited to income. It extends to other aspects of human well-being and exists in all countries. Homeless people living by the side of modern highways are common sights in metropolises from Tokyo to Mumbai to Sao Paolo. Life expectancy in the poorest neighborhoods of Baltimore is below 69 years, the same as in lrag. Similar examples of coexisting unequal development outcomes are evident in Nogales, Arizona and Nogales, Sonora, spotlighted in Acemoglu and Robinson (2013) as an example of drastically unequal economic development. The new face of inequality requires active and comprehensive combination of social and growth enhancing policies that target the bottom quintiles of the income distribution more than ever.

    Governments must not sit back and rely on economic growth alone to transform the living conditions of the underprivileged. In Dreze and Sen's words, policymakers must look for comprehensiveness in social policy, in particular. Successful conditional cash transfer programs, for example, must be accompanied by other well-targeted social programs and universalistic policies that ensure local provision of good-quality essential services and other public goods (roads. electricity, drinking water, public transport). Building an infrastructure for collecting data is another important part of understanding and addressing local inequality. Efforts to promote open use of data that is extensive, detailed, and periodically updated are an important part of this job.