forshooting
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forshooting said:2. The main cause of poor management is lack of incentives. Our top graduates don't want to become teachers. They want to become lawyers, businessmen, scientists, doctors, etc. There are two primary incentives: money and prestige. Increasing the money incentive will bring prestige, not just because of the pay but because more and more talented teachers will show up in the education market.
Well said. When I was in school, I worried less about being called to the principal's office than I did about going home afterward. It seemed like the teachers and my parents were all on the same page, and each knew all about the concerns of the other.UtahBill said:MOST teachers do care. I have 3 in the family, and if you listen to when they complain about co-workers, it is most often about the teachers who don't know how to control a classroom. It ain't easy. They don't always get the support they need.
Sometimes it is administration that fails to support the teacher, but more often than anything, it is the parent who will not support the teacher. It is the parents responsibility to deliver an "open vessel" for the teacher to fill up with knowledge. It happens too often that the child is not ready for school, doesn't know how to get along with other children, or thinks that if it isn't mom or dad speaking, he doesn't have to obey. Too many of the kids have problems that the teacher cannot cure, and it wasn't the teachers who caused the problems. You can't ignore 29 kids in your classroom just bacause one of them needs some extra attention, not very often anyway. Parents are the cause of the problem, misbehavior of the students is the symptom of the problem. There are not enough good teachers in the world to overcome what the parents spent 5 or 6 years messing up.:roll:
Canuck said:by what I saw on the news showing a school in the ninth ward of new Orleans
I would say that the american education system is on par with kenya ( and I don't mean katrina damage)mabe less i mean a bloody disgracefull way to treat poor folks schools with chairs and desks from the 1960's dispicable
at least for poor black folks it is
someone has to do something down there big time
its a national disgrace the no child left behind scam isnt doing anything
except line pockets
...The primary problem with the education system is ...
The bureaucracy. The high school I attended had three floors plus a basement, took up an entire city block, had 1100 students, and the administration was the principal and a couple of secretaries.UtahBill said:But whose pockets? The teachers get more work, but not more money to do it. Certainly my wife and son didn't get a raise when the program was implemented here.
That's better than nothing, which in many cases is what we seem to have now. I see nothing wrong with a standard test to see if the students have learned the material. A standard test is a floor, not a ceiling, and any school district is free to teach beyond it.Paladin said:It forces teachers to teach to the test.
There is nothing wrong with centralized standards, but the means and methods of getting there should be open to local control. There is a difference between schooling and education: teachers should know more about the material than they are assigned to teach, but that does not imply that they should have a degree in the subject.Technocratic_Utilitarian said:Centralization is seen as bad, but instead, they go to the polar opposite and feel that they can do the best job at teaching their kids something that should be taught the exact same way in another school in the next town. Each school should far more directly tied to a central hub so that some consistancy can be maintained.
Elementary schools in particular should be a neighborhood facility, and small enough so that the children can get the individual attention available only in smaller groups.You got a group of towns in a township that all want to have their OWN elementary school. This means they all want to waste a shitload of money building and maintaining a school that doesn't house many students.
Maybe I'm reading you wrong, but it appears that you are confusing results with methods. The results (by standardized test) should have a floor of academic minimums, but I'm quite willing to let separate communities experiment with how to get there.Another problem slightly related to the above, but not entirely, is the accuracy of grading. One school in the community teaches differently from another school in the community, even though they are "technically" supposed to have the same curriculum. You end up getting a very different educations among students, even though the same basic curriculum is there. Each town needs to stop thinking it can teach something better or differently from the next town.
The solution of having a centralized test and grading system evaluates only the results, and schools are free to experiment with how to get there. Each class, biology for instance, should have a distinct target for what they expect the students to have learned at the end of the class - how to get reach that goal should be left to the individual school and particularly the teachers.Another problem occures within the classes and across the halls. You wouldn't believe how different ONE class of bio can be from another class of bio taught by a different professor. It's absurd. Everything can be different even up to the grading structure. Some teachers have totally different grading rubrics from other teachers who teach the exact same class!
Agreed. My own impression is that our system contains many, a vast majority in fact, of very good and very dedicated teachers who are suffocated by rules and regulations passed to control (ineffectively, IMO) the few teachers who can't cut the mustard. I blame much of this on the teachers unions.Another major problem are teachers unions. They are too powerful and all they want is more money more money more money for less and less work. Many teachers are more worried about their summers and holidays off than actually teaching.
Agreed in part. Rote memorization is necessary to accumulate facts on which critical thinking is based. For example, plane geometry is a great introduction to critical thinking but you need to have the fundamental axioms memorized to get very far with it. In the soft and quasi-sciences (economics and sociology, for instance) "critical thinking" is too often a buzzword for the personal agenda of the teacher (think Ward Churchill).The Curriculum is also a problem. There needs to be a higher focus on critical thinking instead of silly rote memorization of facts. Education should be geared not toward creating some "mythical" well-rounded person, rather a useful, rational person.
I disagree with you on English literature. Shakespeare had a most amazing grasp of the human experience (love and hate, heroism and cowardice, tragedy and comedy, elation and despair, conviviality and loneliness), unparalleled by any other author. The drawback to his work is that it is written in what is almost a foreign language now, but that should be treated as a learning challenge rather than an obstacle.Come on, this patently absurd that in our country one is forced to take MORE years of learning about Shitspear(TM) than one is of math or science. We should be teaching children the Scientific Method and its applications, not Romeo and Juliet.
Agreed that nonessentials should not be emphasized as much as they are, but sports do teach teamwork and the benefits of working cooperatively with others - and that DOES go a long way toward building good citizens.We should kick the nonessentials to make more time for essentials. Sports? Waste of time. Highschools are neither colleges nor are they training grounds for people to bounce basket balls.
Agreed, but the operative word here is "correctly." When I was in 7th grade, we had a student teacher come in to our health class (all boys) and of course student teachers always got a hard time from us while we determined what kind of a person he was. The first day that he had the class to himself, one of the guys started with an off-color remark. Brownie walked to the door, looked out in the hall, closed the door, came back and sat on the edge of the desk, and gave us a lecture that began "Now, listen guys" and proceeded to speak very bluntly and frankly, without mincing words, about real life, with emphasis on responsibility and consequences. Our normally rowdy class listened very quietly and attentively - no one had ever talked to us so candidly before - and no one ever gave that student teacher a hard time again that year. The lecture he gave us was not on the curriculum, and at that time could probably have ended his teaching career, but - for that era and that class at that time - it was definitely the correct way to get his point across.You should ALWAYS have a sex ed class as a mandatory, because that is extremely useful, if done correctly.
Not sure what you mean by this, but I don't see anything wrong with individualism as long as it is accompanied by the concept of individual responsibility for individual actions. The idea that freedom can be separated from responsibility, that you can sue someone else when you spill hot coffee on your own lap while you're driving, is ridiculous.Another thing to improve education is to erradicate the "rugged individualism" and "Common-Man" mentality that has infested our country ever since Andrew Jackson put forth the idea of The New Democracy geared toward the lowest common denominator.
IMO, this is something that the self-appointed elites have brought about by themselves. We do have poorly educated people with doctorates who have their own poorly informed opinions and show contempt for differing opinions by those who have less schooling but are actually better educated than the self-appointed elite.Modern society is one of vast anti-intellectualism and fear of "elite conspiracy." If you are a well-educated person, you are cast asunder with what are now actually invectives, instead of praise--you are called "intellectual" or "elite" or even "intellectual elite!"
Woodshop? To get a job in AZ as a Framer, you need to speak spanish and be able to operate a saw and a nail gun. I took woodshop back in the 60's, and it was boring.purplezen said:I do not understand why so many have a problem with "nonessentials" such as sports, Shakespeare, woodshop etc.
Firstly, do you want students to be bored to death? Woodshop, sports etc are involved and may be more suited for students who want to work with their hands or actually become involved in sports, dance etc etc. Just because its not academic doesn't mean these activities do not teach skills.
Strict "academic" curriculae with a focus on math, science and little else will produce a technical, yet dull populace. Great for the "industrial machine", but where are the other opportunities?
As for Shakespeare, reading classics such as Shakespeare is an exercise in reading comprehension and broadens one's depth of thinking in terms of morality, ethics yadayadayada. There is alot to be learned from literature and I believe stories and myths play a great role in creating a person's dreams and goals. I just don't think a curriculum focused on the "realities" math and science with total disregard to the "unrealities" literature and philosophy won't nurture ideals, imagination and wonderment.
I already think middle school and high school are too limited in their curriculae and its a shame people have to go to college to be taught psychology, philosophy, sociology and the 100 other fields you see in college handbooks.
Agreed, absolutely. A four-year college degree today accomplishes what a high school education did half a century ago, and what an eighth grade education did a century ago.UtahBill said:Schools should help us prepare our children for life as adults.
Technocratic_Utilitarian said:You should not have cooking classes, nature worship classes, or stupid **** like home economics, woodshop, metal shop. Any and all electives ought to have an academic component. You don't need to go to school to learn how to build a damn bird-house; there are plenty of cheap labourers in East Asia who will make them for us--go buy one at walmart and get back into something useful.
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