Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Way off topic,but think about this. How many times in a baseball game does an umpire call time out for a player doing something that is against the rules, and impose a penalty? About 99% of all calls by an umpire are for obvious strikes or obvious outs or obvious foul balls, none of which occur through violations of the rules. The only function of the umpire is to adjudicate calls which are extremely close and upon which there would be disagreement between the players.
The main reason for that is because baseball is not a physical contact sport, and as a result, players can freely prosecute the game with winning or losing determined on the merit of play, not arbitrary judgments about who is playing fair. (Which, briefly touching on the topic, is perhaps the way schoolrooms ought to be.)
Furthermore, even if the umpire penalizes a player for beaning a batter, the only penalty is that he may be ejected from the game (if thought to be intentional) and the game proceeds without either team having gained an advantage from the umpires ruling. Score, balls, strikes, out, positions of runners, all remain the same after the beaning, and it has no bearing on the outcome of the game. And even the ejection is something new, that was introduced around the time you started watching games. Before that, if it was intentional, the players would just duke it out, and then get back and pick up the game where it left off. And somebody would bean someone else, to get even.
OT again (forgive me, toobusytoday), but I just had to post these links:
Jeter's Acting Job Not A Hit With All : NPR (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129918964 - broken link)
Both speak to baseball traditions. And then there are the steroids.
Football referees make more calls in a single game, that affect the outcome of a game, than you can find in a whole season of baseball. Nobody is off-sides in baseball. No illegal use of hands, nobody in motion. The play runs, the play stands.
Why do people keep bringing up articles in the Washington Post and talking about them like they are serious pieces of journalism? Most people with any academic sense wouldn't line their birdcages with that garbage, it's considered one of the worst papers out there in terms of truth and facts. If you want to discuss this "issue" try finding a legitimate source.
What, specifically, did you find repulsive about the article? What is your argument to counter-act his? Your post consists of name-calling and does not contribute to this discussion. I'm a teacher who is in an Educational Administration program, and I can tell you I've read thousands of articles on how we need more technology, better teachers, more educational spending, yada yada. I guess that would count as "real" journalism, but all we're really doing by labeling journalism "real" and "credible" is reverting to the senseless no true Scotsman fallacy, which gets us nowhere.
I'll give you some real data, though, if you want it.
From my experience in school, in the 80's and 90's, lack of motivation comes from....
1st - Stop treating everyone the same!! Motivation may suprise you if you treat people as individuals capable of their own individual pursuits.
Take a class of 35 students.
-5 will probably be highly intelligent. They could go onto Stanford, Dartmouth, MIT and do incredible work. Let them graduate highschool at 16 (if they can). Or get college credit early. Stop holding them back and babysitting everyone in class.
-10 will probably be very college motivated, and get into ivy league schools or good state colleges. And do well there.
The sad truth is, 20 out of the 35 aren't really cut out for the top colleges or state schools in this country. That's just the way it is. No amout of reform can motivate the bottom 20 to perform like they're at the top. No one in Washington can change the fact that the bottom 20 out of 35 are going to stay the bottom 20 out of 35.
Put them on a different track. Probably 8 are really good with their hands. Terrible at math, analytics, science, etc. They'd do great in auto mechanical work. Or technical work. 3 or 4 shouldn't even be in class. Put them into some kind of reform school. Put the other 8 on a less accelerated academic track. Community College. Or an apprenticeship. Or some kind of entrepreneurship.
-And reform 98% of the cirriculum. It says since the 60's "waves of reform haven't produced meaningful achievement gains". Well, change the cirriculum from the 60's to 2010. Everything that I learned in the 90's was meaningless in this recessionary and transitionary new global economy.
Why in the world are kids still knocking their heads out reading...Don Quixote, Ann Frank, Lord of the Flies, etc? I don't think one sentence in one book I read in the 90's would have done you any good in the 2000's. Hard to kick up that internal motivation when what you're learning is divorced from reality.
The goal of any kind of "reform" should be to cultivate lifelong learning. Not just this shortsighted, barely pump them up, pass a test and go home. If kids read hard books as teens, and get frustrated or discouraged, it's going to limit them from finding books in their 20's and 30's.
Why do people keep bringing up articles in the Washington Post and talking about them like they are serious pieces of journalism? Most people with any academic sense wouldn't line their birdcages with that garbage, it's considered one of the worst papers out there in terms of truth and facts. If you want to discuss this "issue" try finding a legitimate source.
I believe, if you are actually serious and have even a modicum of objectivity, that you are thinking of Reverend Moon's Washington Times.
Why do people keep bringing up articles in the Washington Post and talking about them like they are serious pieces of journalism? Most people with any academic sense wouldn't line their birdcages with that garbage, it's considered one of the worst papers out there in terms of truth and facts. If you want to discuss this "issue" try finding a legitimate source.
Ridiculous; the Washington Post is one of the nation's finest newspapers; you're confusing it with some other paper, likely the Washington Times..
I went to HS with a kid who breezed past us all when we were in grade ten, where he stayed for about a half a year. He graduated at 14 or 15, and had his bachelors degree from the state university in 3 years, and is now a fairly prominent psychiatrist. It didn't look to me like he was working very hard at his studies, he was just one of the guys and joked around a lot, and nobody made fun of him or bullied him. He was also very tall for his age, so didn't look like a little kid to the rest of us.
Whatever motivated him was not something external being applied to him. He just had a brilliant mind and a genuine love for using it.
I went to school with a few people like that. I think the difference with many (not all of course) of these type of students is that they were not only motivated by a brilliant mind, but it's quite possible that someone, somewhere along the way, taught them how to teach themselves. They probably also didn't hold their hands the entire way.
I don't think we give kids enough credit for using their autonomy in learning. Everything is packaged in glossy wrappers with sparkly covers, or "super cool" graphics, and while some of that is definitely good, it can also make things too easy IMHO. I find it's also distracting with my kids. They're too busy doodling on the picture of some critter on the side of the page than figuring a problem (in a home workbook for example).
I also see this daily when my kids start typing a few letters of a word into Google and up pops what they're looking for before they've even spelled the whole word, or even if they spell it incorrectly to begin with. Watching this often prompts me to make them stop what they're doing and spell the word they were typing - much to their chagrin.
Are they even teaching business mathematics in high school anymore? I've heard that they aren't in my area, that that type of instruction is going the way of computer programs. While I like using such programs, I know instantly if I've transposed a number and the balance comes out odd because once upon a time, I had to use my brain.
Why? Where would graduation from high school at 14 get you?
I find that most students do not want more and harder work than their peers even if it would mean early graduation. Most of them want the path of least resistance.
Gosh. It would get you a lot. If I had been able to hit college at age 16, I would have gone in a flash.
Or, if students had the opportunity to get on to a technical college to learn a trade, I bet you would see some motivation there, too. Or join the Army. Or see the world. Anything besides mouldering in the classroom and doing busywork for another 3-4 years.
Most kids would like nothing better than to be out on their own and make their decisions, earning their own money. Unfortunately, they're pretty much trapped by educational orthodoxy in a system that really doesn't allow that.
I sincerely loved reading your entire post and I completely agree with the gist of it. Despite a lot of pushing in the direction of academics/ "education"/achievement/trophies, etc., there is an inherent disdain for learning, wisdom and curiosity about life in general, in today's society.
I don't care how many times a day parents drill their children on letters - the love of learning is simply NOT there - in families or students' minds.
It's all about the extrinsic goodies at the end of the road. This kind of orientation leads to anything but a truly educated society.
Quote:
Originally Posted by scsigurl3000
Some of the online foes have made a point of following me from place to place, denigrating me in public in whatever ways they can. One fellow who runs a forum on fiddle music banned me from the forum for using the term "art music" -- as if it were some sort of insult, rather than a term of art in musicology which simply means non-folk music.
"Folksiness" is the snobbery of our times.
Most of the times, I find it worse than the original forms of snobbery.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
