How long is it going to be before our education gets back to doing what it was originally set up to do? You know, teaching the kids how to read and write. I am talking here about penmanship. I can't read any of my grand children's writing! Well to be honest, mine is not so great either. But none of them use cursive. It is all printing! When the cursive looking letters are used, they are not connected together! It is a bunch of mostly unrelated letters marching across the page.
What ever happened to the the math programs where you learned the times tables, and how to do long division, subtraction et al? Now they teach them to use their fingers in various configurations as some kind of "digital" computers. After learning all these varied "new age" means of computation, they find it doesn't work so good in real life, and I am asked to help with a problem. Their reasoning process is so far removed from mine that I am useless as a tutor of this new crap, and I try to show them the way I was taught and which has served me well for 70+ years. Admittedly, I have to take my shoes off now and then when the numbers get above ten.
Most of the kids have no concept of money except on how to spend it to get more ipods and blueteeth and satellite radios. Where does money come from? Where can I get some other than Mom and Dad? You mean they have to GIVE money to someone for all this stuff we are eating and the clothes I've got? Damn, I thought it just appeared if I wigged and whined long and loud enough!
Science? What is that? Geography? Now there is an UNKNOWN AND FORGOTTEN subject! Kids 14 and 15 have NO IDEA where most countries are located in the world! Half of them are not really sure where Canada or Mexico is located!! Iraq? Iran? Isn't that over there in Europe some where close to Costa Rica or Brazil?
It is time for the teaching profession to go back to doing what they were supposedly trained to do, and lay off the self esteem classes and making sure the kids are "in touch" with themselves and their "peers". Peers? when I was a kid the only peers I knew anything about were spelled a little differently and had a lot of water all around them!
Teach the kids how to balance a check book instead of handing them a credit or debit card. Show them on a big-assed map just where they are located, and where other countries are located before you try to indoctrinate them in to trying to eradicate all the known problems of the known world at 8-18 years old! Let them discover and absorb all that esoteric information when they are really old enough to give a rats ass about it! Grade and High school is not the time for that stuff.
We fill our kids heads with a lot of crap that they really don't need to know, at way to young an age, and I really believe it gives many of them hang ups of all sorts!
Teach them how to survive day to day, and after they graduate you may send them off to a nice Liberal college where they will become totally brainwashed into the wonderful attributes of Socialism. Come to think of it, that may be just the thing to do to insure their well being as this country is well on its way to that form of government with the Obamamiester at the helm!
Oh hell, forget all that stuff I wrote above and just practice bending over and kissing your ass goodbye!! TIFN
Teachers should be paid babysitter wages.
16 hours ago
6 comments:
There's a lot of things happening these days with education, including all the testing under the No Child Left Behind Act. Simply stated, the teachers don't have time to test much beyond the tests. No Child had great intentions and wonderful goals, but turned schools into testing factories.
Second, schools got away from teaching life skills and real world stuff, although I think a lot of the examples you mention should be taught by the parents as well. Unfortunately, us parents and grandparents share some of the blame for that.
There are many more reasons, including the huge business education has become, which now includes consultants, testing agencies, disability "experts," use of uncertified teachers, construction, and even unionized janitors (you weren't one were ya big fella???). It's a big bucks game and less money comes from Federal and State sources - about 40% of my property taxes go to the school district.
Strangely, some professionals will tell you that kids really aren't any dumber these days, just that they are different as Generation X and Generation Y kids. True, there are less engineers, chemical engineers, and folks in aero-space technology, and much of our "brains" has been farmed out overseas, but really the kids aren't any dumber.
It the people who teach and test the kids that got dumber!
sam
Well, I kinda have to sorta agree with both of you. There are major problems in the school system, money being at the root as usual. Pay always has been an issue for GOOD teachers, and fewer good teachers want to teach today. Unionization has kept a bunch of slugs in teaching positions that shouldn't be there, lack of ability to discipline kids has them doing what they want, and "standardized" testing that caters to the lowest common denominator has dumbed down all grades. Additionally, parents are NOT stepping up and filling in the gaps in kids educations, because there are too many things to occupy kids time. And yes, we are outsourcing our techonolgy, smarts and capabilities. India is taking over the computers, Pakistan the nanotechnology world, Japan electronics and steel, and China pretty much everything in the manufacturing side of the house.
Well, the number of responses of the folks here on BI graphically show that they don't give a shit! Pitiful!
Well Everett education is a sensitive subject. Now the townspeople are paying huge taxes for education and frankly, it had better work. You came at the issue like a 70 year old man who knows his stuff, but education these days is more a form of "nurturing" rather than as a very tough, 13-year boot camp where spanking and corporal punishment were still practiced.
Maybe that's what you mean, how soft things got today. You've mentioned that in previous posts. But the kids are OK, Everett. -sam
You want to improve education? Get rid of the teachers union.
Yeah we can all thank a guy named Bob Potenza for that little disaster and I am sorry to say that it happened on my watch!
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