An short indictment of the education establishment.

[LeeDarrow]

We do agree on many points. (shocking, isn't it? Shall we call a press conference? LOL)

I agree, again, the basics of things like multiplication tables and sentence diagraming and learning parts of speech are being ignored for the more high-falutin' stuff which does not necessarily contribute to a good SAT score.

Back in my HS time (I graduated in 70), trig was not a requirement, it became so two years later (which would mean that I would never have graduated as I have what amounts to a math dyslexia problem for anything above basic stuff like addition, subtraction, multiplication and division).

By relying on computers to do basic calculations, students will have serious difficulty in learning how to program those computers to DO those calculations in application work (and how many of them are going to wind up as application programmers anyway?). This is big trouble in River City, or anywhere else for that matter!

On a side issue, let's look at career issues for HS students. When I watch Discovery or History channel and see all the interesting things with forensics and animal behavior and profiling and the like, I wonder why I never heard about any of those career choices when I was in school.

While profiling is a relatively new field, the rest of the forensic arena is completely ignored (or was) by career counsellors.

One teacher I had downgraded a career project of mine when I did it on being a hypnotist! Amazing that I made the bulk of my income over the last 30 years doing exactly that! Again, no mention of the field.

Ever get a sales class in high school? How about an overview of forensic sciences? Law enforcement? Psychology (which is now becoming more a part of many high schools but was completely anathema back in the late 60's). Manufacturing theory? Data communications?

HS is supposed to do two things, prepare a student for college (or a tech school follow up) and give them a basis on which to decide what they are going to be when they grow up. Without an improvement in that area, the students are also at a disadvantage when making serious life choices.

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Panther:
And there's the problem... they're learning algebra in 5th grade without knowing their multiplication tables, fractions, etc. So when they get to those tests or contests, they can't figure out a simple averaging problem for lack of the basics. Perhaps they were to busy trying to fit and "X", "Y" and "Z" into the equation.

<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

[Allen M.]

Here ya go. This ad tells it all:

http://www.theonion.com/onion3729/infograph_3729.html




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Allen Moulton from Uechi-ryu Etcetera

[Ian]

1) Most importantly: my grades improved steadily from elementary, to middle, to high school, and thereafter in college, and in medical school, simply because each time the bar was raised and something in me drove me to meet the challenge.

I remember one moronic class ostensibly related to "computer literacy" which actually consisted of retyping te most tedious passages and correcting the mistakes. I got so impossibly bored in this "class" that I decided to correct not only the mistakes the teacher intended but ALL the mistakes she had made, and she took off five points for each modification and gave me an F (I brought this up to be my only B for the semester).
Meanwhile, in physics I was helping the teacher solve the more difficult problems and being excused from class to go work on art projects because he realized I was doing all the ncessary learning on my own. In english I was trudging along through the class which I found relatively boring, but writing a series of short stories on my own and discussing them with that english teacher and another, as well as running the debate team.

My God, did I hate that stupid woman and stupifying effect she had on the classroom.

Quoted at my latest graduation: "Education is not the filling of a vessel, but the lighting of a fire."

Paraphrasing Jefferson because I heard this years ago: "All the student requires is instruction in which books to read and the order to read them in."

I've been responsible for my own education for years, because I feel anxious and disappointed and slightly ashamed whenever my performance is submaximal. It wasn't because I was handed some secret fact sheet that one of the advanced cardiac life support instructors at my intern orientation asked me to take over teaching her section for her. It was because I got the books early and studied my tush off before I came.

In short, I've got that awareness of my faults and desire to succeed that characterized the Asian students with the low self esteem and the high math scores mentioned above. I'm not bragging; for this, I thank my parents and probably some early educators AND being an unpopular dork which prevented me from learning the predominant lesson in the public schools I attended, which was that spelling and math was stupid but what really mattered was the pants you wore, who did your hair, and who you were dating or what you were drinking. The number one problem with our education today, IMNSHO, is the overwhelming shallowness and stupidity of our culture and our failure to recognize and attack the problem.

2) All through elementary school I got awards basically to boost my self esteem. One was as a fifth grader for coming up with a way for the fourth graders to complete their enormous newspaper-ball planetarium project in time. Another was for an art demonstration I didn't participate in. I found them all vaguely embarrassing, but I think that if I took them seriously it would have killed my drive to do anything truly significant.

3) While this self esteem bullschit is obviously not one of my favorite concepts, I do need to make one thing clear: When I had hate speech directed at me, recognized hate for me in my teachers, or felt unsafe in my school, my grades would drop PRECIPITOUSLY. My average in calculus was a 90; this incorporated 5 scores, 4 taken under no particular stress and one taken while distracted by the above issues, on which I got a 68.

So while I don't think students should be coddled, I have NO idea how any of them amount to anything in schools that are unsafe or filled with other kinds of tension.

4) Some teachers are geniuses, some are morons. I have on idea how people endorsing the following ideas got a job anywhere, never mind in my high school. Unaltered quotes:

"Why do you smoke? You know why they put tar in those things? Road tar! To kill you. My uncle used to smoke all the time, on one side of his mouth so the smoke all went to his right lung. Well eventually he got all unbalanced and fell over and the paramedics came and stuck a needle in his chest and took off 2 liters of tar!!"

"Know why you have to use a condom with a resevoir tip? Otherwise when the male ejaculates, he'll BLOW THE END OFF the condom." (cue squirming of subadequate-feeling male teenagers.)

"You know retarded people? Like, they can do one thing you tell them, but not two. Cut a piecve of tape like this, this long--but not a second piece that long. I used to go to St Lukes hospital, the mental ward, where they keep them, and they'd be watching an imaginary TV, and I'd turn it off to see what they'd do!"

Torture is an untracked health class.