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I am tired of teachers and the schools being blamed for problems that are really the result of our society and culture. Yes, we have too many unmotivated, lazy students.
Yeah, they are supposed to be motivated to read Catcher in the Rye and compare Romeo and Juliet to West Side Story. That was so intellectually challenging.
Location: RI, MA, VT, WI, IL, CA, IN (that one sucked), KY
41,937 posts, read 36,951,955 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by psikeyhackr
Yeah, they are supposed to be motivated to read Catcher in the Rye and compare Romeo and Juliet to West Side Story. That was so intellectually challenging.
psik
That is a bit of a cop out. I never cared for literature, or English/Social studies, but I loved the sciences and math. To be a decent student you don't have to embrace all courses, but there should be something you like learning. From what I hear from my teacher friends is that in lower end districts there are just far too many kids completely checked out.
I'm in agreement with the earlier posters about removing the miscreants and stopping to try to normalize everyone and teaching to the lowest common denominator, but parents have to be the single largest factor in a kid getting their education. My brother and I were expected to do well in school, we were expected to go to college, our entire family valued education and it was part of our family culture. I have no answer how to change that deficiency when it exists.
That is a bit of a cop out. I never cared for literature, or English/Social studies, but I loved the sciences and math.
The Lit people call it sarcasm.
I got straight A's in math and sciences. I only got B's in English Lit because it was so easy. But I read more science fiction than I read stuff for English. Curiously none of my science teachers ever suggested reading it. The humanities people make school a boring chore. LOL
I started working on a program a couple of months ago that counts the science and fantasy words used in text and computes the science word density of a work. That could be used by educators to find SF works containing more science.
Arthur C. Clarke's A Fall of Moondust
ACC.AFalloMndust.txt total number of words was: 81 used 444 times
total document length: 440K SF word density 0.994 Fant word density 0.016
KSR.RedMars.txt for SF word test.
total number of words was: 132 used 1265 times
total document length: 1216K SF word density 1.035 Fant word density 0.005
Location: RI, MA, VT, WI, IL, CA, IN (that one sucked), KY
41,937 posts, read 36,951,955 times
Reputation: 40635
Quote:
Originally Posted by psikeyhackr
The Lit people call it sarcasm.
I got straight A's in math and sciences. I only got B's in English Lit because it was so easy. But I read more science fiction than I read stuff for English. Curiously none of my science teachers ever suggested reading it. The humanities people make school a boring chore. LOL
Haha, fair enough. Interestingly, I dated a English professor for several years awhile back. Until I talked to her I never knew there was such and incredible disdain for genre literature among the English lit types. She had published a couple of books, but because they weren't "literature", but a "mystery" and a "fantasy" book she received no acclaim or accolades among her peers. Her short stories did however. Bizarre to me, but each profession has its quirks.
The "No Child Left Behind" movement since 2002 has heavily focused on standardized testing, but overall results have not improved significantly (ACT scores have been stagnant since 2009). So focusing more there won't help much either.
I remember running into my old AP U.S. History teacher after I was in college, back in the early 1980. She had whipped our entire class into shape by grading HARD throughout the class--and consequently we all got used to studying hard to get the "A" (something most of us never had to do before). She lamented to me that she had the brothers and sisters of several members of my class, about 4 years after us. She said that it was simply impossible to get them to study for exams--they simply didn't care if she gave them low grades.
What changed in the intervening 4 years? Mostly, society's attitude toward kids. No longer were they expected to study hard and get good grades. Suddenly they were God's Gift to the World. Every kid was a success, just for existing.
No wonder they no longer cared about succeeding.
NCLB and the "love thyself" sensitivity movement has been a one, two knockout punch in regards to standards based education.
We now have a feel good based educational system.
This system is mandated to create equality, and the only sure way of doing that is to drag everyone down, even if its to the level of the some of the most self-destructive elements of society.
The way things are set up now, if your teacher friend was in the public K-12 system, she'd probably get reprimanded or even fired for not boosting self-esteem and for enforcing standards on students.
NCLB and the "love thyself" sensitivity movement has been a one, two knockout punch in regards to standards based education.
We now have a feel good based educational system.
This system is mandated to create equality, and the only sure way of doing that is to drag everyone down, even if its to the level of the some of the most self-destructive elements of society.
The way things are set up now, if your teacher friend was in the public K-12 system, she'd probably get reprimanded or even fired for not boosting self-esteem and for enforcing standards on students.
God forbid if she failed anyone.
You are absolutely right on that one. I answered the call to put subject matter experts in the classroom in order to "raise the bar" only to be handed a limbo bar..... I've come to the conclusion that there is a rule analogous to the 80/20 rule in business that says that 80% of your results will come from 20% of your effort but the education one is flipped. 80% of your effort will go to the 20% of students least likely to benefit from your efforts. This way we spin our wheels and look busy while we drag the top down by just ignoring them. And don't tell me to differentiate. You can't spend the vast majority of your effort on the bottom 20% and have much left for the other 80%.
You are absolutely right on that one. I answered the call to put subject matter experts in the classroom in order to "raise the bar" only to be handed a limbo bar..... I've come to the conclusion that there is a rule analogous to the 80/20 rule in business that says that 80% of your results will come from 20% of your effort but the education one is flipped. 80% of your effort will go to the 20% of students least likely to benefit from your efforts. This way we spin our wheels and look busy while we drag the top down by just ignoring them. And don't tell me to differentiate. You can't spend the vast majority of your effort on the bottom 20% and have much left for the other 80%.
The one size fits all grandiose programs often have these kind of glitches, though it does not mean the people who started the initiative had ill intent in mind.
So until the voters feel otherwise, NCLB will remain the law of the educational land and the "love thyself" self-esteem movement will continue unabated.
national wide privatization, school vouchers and chatters schools..
There have been numerous studies that show charter schools don't improve student performance, and there is entirely too much "chatting" in schools already.
1. Get rid of the federal Dept of Education. All they really do is come up with reams of new regulations for special ed, anyway.
2. De-emphasize standardized tests.
3. Put the focus on teaching and teachers. They're the ones delivering education.
4. Back off on the silly, micromanaging, top-down, one-size-fits-all approach, ie NCLB, RTTT, Common Core, that kind of flavor of the month foolishness.
5. As a homework assignment, all administrators, school board members, and other education bureaucrats like state legislators read and take a test on The Peter Principle. Those not achieving a passing grade will be either dismissed or put on a 12 month growth plan.
1. Get rid of the federal Dept of Education. All they really do is come up with reams of new regulations for special ed, anyway.
2. De-emphasize standardized tests.
3. Put the focus on teaching and teachers. They're the ones delivering education.
4. Back off on the silly, micromanaging, top-down, one-size-fits-all approach, ie NCLB, RTTT, Common Core, that kind of flavor of the month foolishness.
5. As a homework assignment, all administrators, school board members, and other education bureaucrats like state legislators read and take a test on The Peter Principle. Those not achieving a passing grade will be either dismissed or put on a 12 month growth plan.
That'll do for a start.
I don't agree with #2. We need to make standardized tests part of the student's grade. What is wrong with standardized testing right now is that everyone has a vested interest EXCEPT the person taking the test. They have zero motivation to even try.
We need common assessments so that we can compare school to school and to insure that each school is teaching enough of the right material. If I didn't believe this before my dd took chemistry at another school, I'd believe it now. Her "honors" chemistry course covered less material than the consumer chemistry course where I teach. I don't want to know what they teach in regular chem or consumer chem. It can't be much. Yet both schools meet the state's requirement for chemistry to graduate. My dd took "honors" chemistry and never learned RedOx or thermodynamics, or how to predict reaction products or any number of things that I consider central to chemistry. While I would cut these from a lower level chemistry course, I would teach them all in an honors level course. Common assessments would stop this as students being unable to pass the common assessment would be a big red flag.
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. I've come to the conclusion that there is a rule analogous to the 80/20 rule in business that says that 80% of your results will come from 20% of your effort but the education one is flipped. 80% of your effort will go to the 20% of students least likely to benefit from your efforts. This way we spin our wheels and look busy while we drag the top down by just ignoring them. And don't tell me to differentiate. You can't spend the vast majority of your effort on the bottom 20% and have much left for the other 80%.
How to improve America's school system
