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.
I have no idea what Project Gutenberg is. I can operate technology just fine. I have no idea how an engine works on a technical level. I can drive just fine.
I sure am glad you don't decide who graduates high school and who doesn't.
I could list a million things around you every day that you don't know about in depth. Doesn't mean you shouldn't graduate high school.
Project Gutenberg is a project to provide free ebooks. Usually these are the classics that literature classes want students to read, but they are slowly adding more and more books - most of those books are no longer under copywrite, so they can be freely downloaded. They can be used by individuals or by classrooms.
Project Gutenberg is a project to provide free ebooks. Usually these are the classics that literature classes want students to read, but they are slowly adding more and more books - most of those books are no longer under copywrite, so they can be freely downloaded. They can be used by individuals or by classrooms.
Most lower class and lower middle class families work like this:
Dad works in a factory or as a desk jockey, comes home plops his fat ass down in front of sports center he may make small talk but most likely doesn't get into any in-depth conversation. Mom comes home from being a desk jockey, plops her fat ass on couch with an iPad or smart phone. Or it's a single parent who is too busy with other things, like raising more illegitimate children or night school they can't even do well in their selves or they just have almost a resentment towards education and life choices and reserve themselves to failure which carries over into their children.
These days it really doesn't matter if its a poor or middle class household. Single parent or married couple, all parents are sleeping on the job. I know I can always do better and I have had to jump on my wife for dismissing my children like her "quality time" on the computer is so important. Sometimes I have had to think about what I just said to my kids and then either rectify the situation or watch what action they take next.
Here are how most parents act when a child needs guidance.
Child asks for guidance, parent (mom or dad) says some dismissive borderline hurtful thing they don't realize is detrimental.
Neither mom or dad knows how to do anything with out a calculator (or with) and both parents are not all that great at grammar spelling or sentence structure, they really don't need to know it for the most part in their monotonous in-the-box thinking job. They usually say something dismissive like "I haven't been in school for 20 years" or "I was never good at math" or "Isn't the school supposed to teach you?." They essentially pass the buck for being lazy, unintelligent, or apathetic. Or they will get down right crappy with their kids and say something like "Didn't you pay attention in class? or "Get on the internet and figure it out." Parents will belittle the school or teacher with a comment like: "Figures this is a terrible school with bad teachers, no wonder you don't learn anything."
Children pick up on the things their parents say. Most kids hear: "I'm too dumb, lazy, and apathetic to help you so why bother asking." Then they hear: "It must be something you are doing." Then they hear "Well your school sucks, it's not your fault, they aren't teaching it right."
After a while this creates apathy towards school in the kid and the parents always fall back on their go-to scapegoats, The kid or the school. They never look in the mirror and ask themselves if they are part of the problem. "I provide monetarily, I take my kids to the park, soccer games, after school stuff." I'm a great parent, it's those schools they are to blame.
One day it took a single friend to make me realize I was not doing my job. My son came in and asked for help with a little game he was creating and drawing and asked me if I could give him some input. My single friend and I were sitting at a computer watching YouTube videos (Your know really important stuff.) I told him that this was adult stuff and we are busy and he needs to figure it out for himself. My friend looked at me and said "I don't really think this is as important as helping your son." I immediately dismissed him saying "He always makes these little games and asks me what I think, they are all the same nothing new." But then I started thinking about it. I went to my sons room and he was crying, I didn't realize how important it was, even if he just asked me questions about Pokemon types. And then it hit me I had been doing this since he was little. I felt about 1 inch tall. My wife still does it, but I call her out on it.
Liberals want to blame the problem on things that happened 6 generations ago, district funding, teacher pay, standardized tests, the list goes on. Finnish schools, creativity, blah blah.
Conservative want to blame, liberal indoctrination, illegal immigration, teachers unions, lack of religion.
It's none of these things.
Pure and simple, it is uninvolved uneducated parents.
input garbage and garbage is your output. Bad home life = bad school life. Anti-intellectual parents = anti-intellectual kids. Schools can not fix this. You could take the smartest kid in America and put him/her in a bad home situation and even if he/she is in the best school with tons of great teachers and funding and he/she will slide academic achievement wise very quickly. And if we're honest behavioral and mental health wise as well because the two are interrelated.
I have no idea what Project Gutenberg is. I can operate technology just fine. I have no idea how an engine works on a technical level. I can drive just fine.
I sure am glad you don't decide who graduates high school and who doesn't.
I could list a million things around you every day that you don't know about in depth. Doesn't mean you shouldn't graduate high school.
What do you mean by "In Depth"?
And what does any of that have to do with Project Gutenberg?
It is a source of FREE BOOKS? Aren't teachers in favor of reading? Aren't people talking about keeping education costs down?
So doesn't Project Gutenberg sound like a perfect match? So why haven't teachers told each other about it and nearly all of them know about it by now? Has it been 10 years or only 8 that I have been using it? Like that isn't enough time to spread the word?
They are teaching kids to write resumes at the school I am doing wi-fi for. Isn't that about jobs? Isn't that about MONEY?
Double-entry accounting is only 700 years old. Bicycles are 200 years old but we expect most kids to learn to ride a bike.
Oh yeah, there is a free accounting book. Only 100 years old.
Most lower class and lower middle class families work like this:
Dad works in a factory or as a desk jockey, comes home plops his fat ass down in front of sports center he may make small talk but most likely doesn't get into any in-depth conversation. Mom comes home from being a desk jockey, plops her fat ass on couch with an iPad or smart phone. Or it's a single parent who is too busy with other things, like raising more illegitimate children or night school they can't even do well in their selves or they just have almost a resentment towards education and life choices and reserve themselves to failure which carries over into their children.
These days it really doesn't matter if its a poor or middle class household. Single parent or married couple, all parents are sleeping on the job. I know I can always do better and I have had to jump on my wife for dismissing my children like her "quality time" on the computer is so important. Sometimes I have had to think about what I just said to my kids and then either rectify the situation or watch what action they take next.
Here are how most parents act when a child needs guidance.
Child asks for guidance, parent (mom or dad) says some dismissive borderline hurtful thing they don't realize is detrimental.
Neither mom or dad knows how to do anything with out a calculator (or with) and both parents are not all that great at grammar spelling or sentence structure, they really don't need to know it for the most part in their monotonous in-the-box thinking job. They usually say something dismissive like "I haven't been in school for 20 years" or "I was never good at math" or "Isn't the school supposed to teach you?." They essentially pass the buck for being lazy, unintelligent, or apathetic. Or they will get down right crappy with their kids and say something like "Didn't you pay attention in class? or "Get on the internet and figure it out." Parents will belittle the school or teacher with a comment like: "Figures this is a terrible school with bad teachers, no wonder you don't learn anything."
Children pick up on the things their parents say. Most kids hear: "I'm too dumb, lazy, and apathetic to help you so why bother asking." Then they hear: "It must be something you are doing." Then they hear "Well your school sucks, it's not your fault, they aren't teaching it right."
After a while this creates apathy towards school in the kid and the parents always fall back on their go-to scapegoats, The kid or the school. They never look in the mirror and ask themselves if they are part of the problem. "I provide monetarily, I take my kids to the park, soccer games, after school stuff." I'm a great parent, it's those schools they are to blame.
One day it took a single friend to make me realize I was not doing my job. My son came in and asked for help with a little game he was creating and drawing and asked me if I could give him some input. My single friend and I were sitting at a computer watching YouTube videos (Your know really important stuff.) I told him that this was adult stuff and we are busy and he needs to figure it out for himself. My friend looked at me and said "I don't really think this is as important as helping your son." I immediately dismissed him saying "He always makes these little games and asks me what I think, they are all the same nothing new." But then I started thinking about it. I went to my sons room and he was crying, I didn't realize how important it was, even if he just asked me questions about Pokemon types. And then it hit me I had been doing this since he was little. I felt about 1 inch tall. My wife still does it, but I call her out on it.
Liberals want to blame the problem on things that happened 6 generations ago, district funding, teacher pay, standardized tests, the list goes on. Finnish schools, creativity, blah blah.
Conservative want to blame, liberal indoctrination, illegal immigration, teachers unions, lack of religion.
It's none of these things.
Pure and simple, it is uninvolved uneducated parents.
input garbage and garbage is your output. Bad home life = bad school life. Anti-intellectual parents = anti-intellectual kids. Schools can not fix this. You could take the smartest kid in America and put him/her in a bad home situation and even if he/she is in the best school with tons of great teachers and funding and he/she will slide academic achievement wise very quickly. And if we're honest behavioral and mental health wise as well because the two are interrelated.
This starts at home.
I cannot agree with you more.
Every night I come home from work and I sit at the kitchen table with my kindergartener for an hour or so teaching her things. Sometimes even teaching her things a at a first or second grade level. Why? Because I can go nice a slow and give her one-on-one attention and actually make sure she absolutely understands the material before we move on. Some of my parent friends think I'm overbearing and nuts. They think I'm creating a kid who is going to be bored in school as a child and hate me as an adult.
Recently it has come to light that my child is at the top of her class, and doing extraordinarily well both academically and behaviorally. My parent friends think my child is only doing so well because she is some sort of genius. It doesn't even occur to them that it is because of the hours she puts in. My child is bright, but she is far from a genius. She is successful because she gets an extra hour of one-on-one move at your own pace schooling every single day.
And as for her attitude towards me? Does she hate me for making her sit and work? Lol no, she adores me because I'm the one who takes the time to explain things to her when the teacher doesn't have time. I'm the one who makes sure she has a solid grasp of a concept so that when they get to the concept at school, she knows the answer and is proud of it. I'm the one who doesn't make her do busy work, if she understands a concept I move on to the next one. Every once in a while she will encounter something at school we didn't already cover at home and it will trip her up (like reading an analog clock), and she will run home and ask me to teach it to her right away, please please, and I do, and the next day at school she understands the lesson and brings home her classwork with a big smiley face on it and is so proud. I don't think she's going to hate me.
My parent friends? Almost none of them spend time working with their kids at night. They "don't have time". Or they believe (and this is the one that really gets me) that they should not help their kids with their homework because it will mess the teacher up! And that the only thing they should do is check that homework is done, and never check for correctness, because that's the teacher's job. That's ridiculous! The parent should be checking whether or their child understood the concept that was being covered in the homework. And if the child does not understand it, the parent should sit down and teach it to them until they can get their homework right! And if the parent finds that their kid is still having trouble, then the parent needs to find some other way to help their child, be it extra tutoring, a computer game, an assessment by a medical professional, whatever. But the parents never try. They put their heads in the sand, hope their kid's teacher is good, and whine about the teacher/school if their kid doesn't score high on a test. Their kids are doing poorly in school and the parents blame it on the school. Never on themselves. It drives me bonkers.
One of my parent friends actually moved into another district this year because their son was doing so badly. I'm glad they did, they are in a better district now, but these parents never spent a second trying to teach their own son. They even admitted to me that they thought that they should, they thought their son would do better if they sat down with him and worked with him, but they still just never did it. These are smart, caring, and motivated parents too, motivated enough to move house just to change school districts. But the parental hands off approach to educating their kid is so ingrained in our culture, they don't even know how to do what they want to do.
I do have one other set of parent friends who sit down and work with their kids, and have done so for years. Their oldest son just took a test recently and made it into an academically elite private prep school co-op thing. Go figure.
I read something once on a blog post that I think is so true. Parents of kids who don't do well in school think that it is the school's responsibility to teach their kids. Parents of academically successful kids, on the other hand, think that it is the parent's responsibility to teach their kids, and the school is just a useful tool.
If all parents took personal responsibility for the education of their own children, then across the board children's educational outcomes would improve. That's a given. But how on earth do you force parents to do that? You can't. Which is why we have schools becoming like parents.
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.
