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Topic Review (Newest First)
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| Sep 23rd, 2003 04:47 PM | ||
| mburbank | And I've copped to being a very bad speller ( and n even worse typist) many, many times. Check the title of my Thread on Vinth's man handling of the English language. It's a quote too, and it's the reason I started that thread, though I admit, it's become a labor of love. | |
| Sep 23rd, 2003 04:34 PM | ||
| Brandon |
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| Sep 23rd, 2003 03:49 PM | ||
| The One and Only... | Ddddddddooooouuuuuuuuble post. | |
| Sep 23rd, 2003 03:49 PM | ||
| The One and Only... |
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I'm actually the opposite of this. I feel that society should change to one in which people specialize in one field. Granted, some proficiency in other fields is practically required, but I think you get my point. |
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| Sep 23rd, 2003 03:44 PM | ||
| FS | Board a little brokie. No doubt Rog will fix it just as soon as he finishes his titanic struggle with the son of Abe Lincoln in Blackout II: Honest Abe's Babe. | |
| Sep 23rd, 2003 02:54 PM | ||
| Bennett | damn it! why does it still show UPSHUT as the last poster in this Thread! | |
| Sep 23rd, 2003 02:29 PM | ||
| mburbank |
Say Vinth! They invented adverbs. You should try them, especially when talking about education. Not that we don't know how horrible you write. Poster child. |
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| Sep 23rd, 2003 02:19 PM | ||
| Bennett | We should start an educational cold war with France. we'd get a bunch of really smart kids, and threaten to use them. And we'd keep producing a bunch of smart kids. Then we could threaten them by sending aforementioned youngster to study abroad in neighboring countries, where they would best Europes finest in highly touted chess and Bop!t tournaments. | |
| Sep 23rd, 2003 02:11 PM | ||
| glowbelly |
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i stopped reading the article there, incidentally. french bashing is so pre-iraqi-freedom war thingy. 
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| Sep 23rd, 2003 02:00 PM | ||
| VinceZeb |
Yeah, because we know how horrible we were doing compared to the world when we held children and teachers accountable for their actions! Dumbass. |
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| Sep 23rd, 2003 01:58 PM | ||
| UP_SHUT |
http://www.ed.gov/nclb/landing.jhtml I quickly skimmed through their slideshow, and here are some interesting things I picked out. "The goal is 100 percent proficiency for all students in 12 years." "When we raise academic standards, children raise their academic sights." "Ensuring that every child reads by the 3rd grade." "Standards provide guideposts for academic achievement, clearly telling teachers, students, and parents where they are going." "The Challenge: To establish clear expectations of what students should know and be able to do for schools, teachers, and students. The Solution: Require each state to establish its own standards in the core content areas of reading, math, and science. " This is utterly impossible due to many factors. The presentation stated that things will be much more flexible to achieve this goal. No matter how flexible the program is, its not going to change the children they're trying to teach. What they are trying to do is make a proficiency level that everyone must meet. They're trying to make unintelligent children learn faster and intelligent ones learn slower. This isn't going to accomplish anything. Slower children who are being pushed to learn something their minds cannot will become frustrated and give up, while advanced ones being held back will never learn to their full potenial because of some ridiculous line someone set. Also, you CAN NOT force a child to learn if they don't want to. Sure, make them sit in school and hope that they will get over it and study. You can put a book in front of them and demand that if they don't do well on this test they'll be held back from everything. You know what that kid is going to do? The minute they turn 16 drop out. Now, if they decide to "not leave them behind", the only thing this will do is spend more resources on a lost cause. Personally, I don't think shipping them off to a different school is a bad idea. If the school itself is presenting the problem to the student then maybe the change will be good. If someone doesn't want to learn something they can leave. Standardizing education will only lead to problems. If it is done correctly it can fix many of the ones we have already, but if done the Bush way everything will be fucked up even worse. "Provides separate, measurable objectives for all children and for specific groups (disadvantaged, racial/ethnic, disabled, LEP)" I am fed up with this racial and ethnic bullshit. People of different minorities fought to be treated equally by the majority, so just because they have darker colored skin or female gender they get easier standards? Its bad enough that they're putting these retarded things on us already, and then the general public gets screwed over once again. Sure, the minority public was screwed in the past. But there is ABSOLUTELY no reason for this now. If someone truly wants to succeed they can, whether they have blonde hair and blue eyes or not. Maybe some of these whiney assholes will get over their physical differences and stop pretending they have mental ones. Sometimes it can be a tough barrier, because a social issue infuences how you think. But if these races would stop influencing their children that they ARE so wonderfully different and special then maybe they wouldn't think like that. "Why 100 percent? Anything less means children will be left behind." Then maybe some need to be. Its the way nature works. Everything is one big competition, and the process is called survival of the fittest. Its nothing new, either. I'm not saying we should leave children behind, but maybe we should accept that we all can't be good at math or a fast runner. Alot of time has been wasted on hopeless plans. And hey, maybe one day people will stop being a bunch of elitist jackasses. 
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| Sep 23rd, 2003 11:50 AM | ||
| punkgrrrlie10 |
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| Sep 23rd, 2003 09:42 AM | ||
| mburbank |
That interpretation Gardners theory is so far off base I didn't even see fit to comment on it. The approach is multi-disceplanary, and requires students to be profficient in all aspects, not given a free ride bcuase they excel at one. |
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| Sep 22nd, 2003 10:39 PM | ||
| Brandon |
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| Sep 22nd, 2003 10:26 PM | ||
| kahljorn | my friend told me about this book, where all the kids stopped wanting to goto school. So they put all of them in a Giant Arena and made them all kill eachother off. | |
| Sep 22nd, 2003 10:19 PM | ||
| Perndog |
If you're a kid that's socially aware enough to want a good education, your school's doing it's job as far as you're concerned. Some schools may not maintain great averages but will at least graduate their share of successful students, and in schools like that (mine, for example) where the majority (75% maybe) of the students come out okay I think it's the parents of the other 25% who should be picking up the slack. I realize there are poor schools and this is an issue that deserves government attention, but I am not well enough informed to suggest a plan - I don't intend to have children for a good six to ten years, and when I do, I'll probably homeschool them. Regarding the article, however; I dislike their statistics, because percentages and averages are poor measuring sticks that hardly account for factors like distribution, and anyone with a high school diploma qualifies for some college out there. But I very much agree with their attack on the curriculum. I was happy as a junior high student when I realized that things weren't going to be changing to quickly in my little town, and I would still general information and skills instead of having my fragile little psyche nurtured. This kind of system is making poor academics a self-fulfilling prophecy by changing all of the wrong things in the hopes of fixing the problem. Of course, no one really wants to hear how I think school should be taught, and it would never be put into practice anyway... |
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| Sep 22nd, 2003 08:54 PM | ||
| El Blanco |
Thats just shipping the problem to a new place, not actually addressing it. I always get wary when throwing money at a problem gets brought up. Its not that I don't think that more funding will help, it just isn't the panacea some believe it to be, especially with our government's shining track record of efficiency. I'd much rather see the money being spent done so a little better. |
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| Sep 22nd, 2003 06:12 PM | ||
| ScruU2wice | In chicago they experimented with a program which allowed kids in the schools with the lowest standerdized test attend other schools, but the program failed because no one wanted to try it :/ | |
| Sep 22nd, 2003 06:05 PM | ||
| mburbank |
Man, I'm just busting your chops for nothing today. Put it down to my amazingly shitty mood and take it with a grain of salt. |
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| Sep 22nd, 2003 05:47 PM | ||
| The One and Only... |
Education is an issue for me because I'm a kid. I want the best education possible. All that aside, I think you kinda missed my point. What we need is education reform more than anything else. There are reasons why poor areas of town typically have poor schools. I am very fortunate. My public school are quite good [/sarcasm]. In other words, pumping more money into such an uneven system isn't going to get us anywhere, especially with the "No Child Left Behind" mentality. Don't get me wrong. I'd love to see government get out of schools. However, that just isn't feasible right now, and would make educational opportunities quite unfair. |
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| Sep 22nd, 2003 04:37 PM | ||
| mburbank |
In my daughters school they just had to fire the librarian becuase we're so low on funds. Where we used to have one phys ed. teacher for each school, we now have one for the town. The science specialist has been dropped from full time to part time. My daughters school is a magnet school and runs on a year round schedule. They meet the educational standards better than almost any public school in Massachusetts. Every year since the school opened, they cut the approved budget line for air conditioning becuase it's the only way they can keep class sizes down, the only thing all the research agrees always works at improving students achievement. Next year we will be forced to go to a regular school schedule becuase of declining tax revenues in my town. You don't have kids. You are one. You don't know anything about education, it's just nother button issue you've been programmed to cut n' paste on. Sourcing an article doesn't mean posting the original authors name. It means saying where you got it. Why? So one can take the source into account. You do know you should do this, don't you? For instnce, if your source is paid for by a firm heavily invested in privatizing education, or a lobbying group pushing school vouchers, it might call the articles credability into question. If the article i funded by a 'think tank' that is actually just a fund raising operation for political special interest, the article may have been tailored to provoke just the response you gave it. Have you checked any of the information in the artcile to see if you can find other sources for it, or do you just blindly believe it's conclusions like fish swallowing a hook if it's burried in a fat worm? I NEVER post an article here unless I've found corroborating sources. It's not any sort of gaurantee, but it helps. |
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| Sep 22nd, 2003 04:24 PM | ||
| The One and Only... |
Don't worry, pumping more money in education will fix it... Throwing money at the schoolhouse frauds Suzanne Fields (archive) Source: http://www.townhall.com/columnists/s...20030922.shtml September 22, 2003 | Print | Send The news from the schoolhouse is running from bad to worse. First the bad news: American high school students trail teenagers from 14 European and Asian countries in reading, math and science. We're even trailing France. It gets worse: The collapse of standards has plunged many of our public schools further into depths of "know-nothingness." And it's not a matter of money. On average, the high school student in the United States ranks 14th, behind Britain, France, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, South Korea and Japan, among other nations, according to "Education at a Glance 2003," a report compiled for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Before your eyes glaze over, you should follow your money. "Countries that spend more are countries that tend to do better," says Barry McGraw, education director for the 30-nation OECD. But that's not true in the United States. We spend $20,358 for each student in public schools and college, up to three times more than other countries. In a separate study, the Manhattan Institute, drawing on U.S. Department of Education statistics, finds that of the 70 percent of all students who graduate from American public high schools, only 32 percent qualify for college. Of the 51 percent of blacks who graduate, only 20 percent qualify for college; of the 51 percent of Hispanics who graduate, a mere 16 percent qualify for college. Asians score highest by both measurements. "The main reasons these groups are underrepresented in college admissions is not insufficient student loans or inadequate affirmative action," researchers found, "but the failure of public high schools to prepare these students for college." There are, of course, many reasons why so many students can't qualify for college. Most of them never get the cultural support to overcome the general debasement of public education. Nobody knows this better than the teachers, which is why so many public-school teachers send their kids to private schools. The deterioration of public school education is most prominently observed in social studies, where, as education scholar Chester E. Finn, Jr. observes, "the lunatics have taken over the asylum." The attitudes of elite educationists have reduced education to ideology, and a venomous ideology it is: America's contribution to humanity is an odious conspiracy of dead white males. The pedagogues worry that attentiveness to the details of democracy might cause children to discover that the ideology is false, that democracy actually is the best way mankind has found to organize a government of the people, by the people, for the people. J. Martin Rochester, a professor of social studies at the University of Missouri at St. Louis, in an essay in the book "Where Did Social Studies Go Wrong," turns up the heat on those responsible for dumbing down education and collapsing discipline. "Co-operative learning" is the euphemism for reducing learning to something only the least among us can master, something like making it up to a crippled child by breaking the legs of everyone else. "Co-operative learning" draws on the free labor of smarter students to bring up low achievers, which reduces average learning abilities for everybody. "Constructivism," the theory that children can "construct" their own meaning from personal experience, is pushed on youngsters who can't construct a proper sentence. "Multiple intelligences theory" searches for "the specific genius" within each child, equating the skill of slam-dunking a basketball, for example, with the ability to perform open-heart surgery. The reliance on fun-filled, action-packed, visual media over fact-filled textbooks and lectures treats whole classes as though suffering attention deficit disorder. Textbooks, such as they are, make matters worse. They not only give the visual equal space with the words, but lack authority and we pretend that uninformed students can think critically, with informed judgments, when they have no stored knowledge. One textbook directives instructs teachers: "We must stop exhorting students to be 'good citizens' according to our own unquestioned view of good and help them instead to ask 'good questions' about their own values and those of others. Controversies, rather than fixed knowledge and values, will play a central role in the structure of social studies education." This is an education theory from Alice in Wonderland: "Verdict first, trial later." How can students create "controversy" when they haven't learned what to criticize? We might turn around these dismal statistics of deficiencies in math and science; math and science are less infected with the attitudinal diseases of political correctness. But we're all at risk of catastrophe if we can't restore reverence for the common culture initiated by the Founding Fathers and traced through changes in our chronological history. A character in a Damon Runyon short story said it plain: Life is tough, and it's really tough if you're stupid. Thomas Jefferson said it more elegantly, prescribing "an informed citizenry." But what did he know? |
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