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I’m tired of all this bashing of college students, book banning and trashing the liberal arts. As a retired school librarian it saddens me that it might just keep getting worse. I once sported a bumper sticker. “We still read”. https://www.forbes.com/sites/michael...h=2104520a4c90
Thanks for all your years of service. It’s not your fault, no one is stopping this train.
Status:
"I don't understand. But I don't care, so it works out."
(set 9 days ago)
35,635 posts, read 17,975,706 times
Reputation: 50665
Quote:
Originally Posted by ansible90
Nope. Does not count, because too many grammatical errors are introduced by "autocorrect."
What grammatical errors does autocorrect "create"?
Granted, if you spell a word incorrectly, autocorrect often guesses wrong about what you're trying to say. But without autocorrect, you'd still have the misspelled word sitting there.
This forum doesn't appear to use autocorrect, and thus all the misspellings. It just underlines the misspelled words and inexplicably, posters decide not to correct the errors that are pointed out to them.
I've posted on this before, but the decline in Americans' literacy has been happening since the 1960s, and it was intentional...
Currently, only about 1/3 of US 12th graders are proficient at 12th grade-level Reading and Math (NAEP results), and US students and adults perform so poorly on OECD, PISA, etc., tests compared to their international peers. Even our top scorers are in last or nearly last place.
Good article on how and why this happened and is still happening:
Quote:
"While students in the bottom quartile have shown slow but steady improvement since the 1960s, average test scores have nonetheless gone down, primarily because of the performance of those in the top quartile. This "highest cohort of achievers," Rudman writes, has shown "the greatest declines across a variety of subjects as well as across age-level groups." Analysts have also found "a substantial drop among those children in the middle range of achievement"
...The contrast was stark: schools that had "severely declining test scores" had "moved determinedly toward heterogeneous grouping" (that is, mixed students of differing ability levels in the same classes), while the "schools who have maintained good SAT [Stanford Achievement Test, for grades K-12] scores" tended "to prefer homogeneous grouping [ability/skill-level grouping, aka tracking]."
If attaining educational excellence is this simple, why have these high-quality schools become so rare? The answer lies in the cultural ferment of the 1960s.
THE INCUBUS OF THE SIXTIES
In every conceivable fashion the reigning ethos of those times was hostile to excellence in education. Individual achievement fell under intense suspicion, as did attempts to maintain standards. Discriminating among students on the basis of ability or performance was branded "elitist." Educational gurus of the day called for essentially nonacademic schools, whose main purpose would be to build habits of social cooperation and equality rather than to train the mind."
Educators intentionally dumbed-down US public schools with the intention of creating a more equal (emphasis on equal educational outcomes) and cohesive society. Of course, we got neither. All we got was a severely dumbed-down populace.
Also read A Nation At Risk, from 1983. It warns about the exact same thing:
I’m tired of all this bashing of college students, book banning and trashing the liberal arts. As a retired school librarian it saddens me that it might just keep getting worse. I once sported a bumper sticker. “We still read”. https://www.forbes.com/sites/michael...h=2104520a4c90
"I’m tired of all this"
Could care LESS what you are "tired" of!
I don't have an account and refuse to get so, what does this say?
Well, it sure seems like the teachers union members have done a bang up job pumping out illiterate kids, guess we need to give them all pay and benefits increases now.
I remember reading articles where college professors were complaining that their students actually turn in papers with the same abbreviated, pop culture text shortcuts to speech that they type into their phones. Seems they were not making that up.
"it sure seems like the teachers union members have done a bang up job pumping out illiterate kids"
Yet my previos state would AUTOMATICALLY give "teachers" a RAISE when they got their Masters degree WITHOUT improving their students GPAs.
Status:
"I don't understand. But I don't care, so it works out."
(set 9 days ago)
35,635 posts, read 17,975,706 times
Reputation: 50665
Quote:
Originally Posted by Quick Enough
"it sure seems like the teachers union members have done a bang up job pumping out illiterate kids"
Yet my previos state would AUTOMATICALLY give "teachers" a RAISE when they got their Masters degree WITHOUT improving their students GPAs.
There is a big argument going on, whether public school teachers should be given bonuses or raises based on the success of their students.
Here's the problem with that. Public schools have to take all the students that enroll within their service area. Teachers would have good cause to try to get underachieving students out of their classrooms, or get them designated Spec Ed so that their lack of success in testing won't reflect poorly on the teacher and affect her pay.
Everyone - the parents, the students, and the other teachers - know who the good teachers are, and the ineffective teachers. There's no clear objective way, though, that doesn't negatively impact low achieving students, that allows for compensating the better teachers.
Nobody wants the students who are poor students to be passed around from classroom to classroom because teachers don't want them to reflect on that teacher.
So, getting a masters is one objective way. And I would argue that a teacher who attains a masters is more qualified, and more dedicated to a long teaching career than one who stops at her bachelors.
Where in the world did you come up with this nonsense? Do you even know any Classroom teachers? If you think they are so overpaid, apply for a teaching job.
"]Where in the world did you come up with this nonsense?"
If you are going to make claim, BACK IT UP!
The U.S is ranked 13 in the world. IMO, nothing to brag about.
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