9 Mar
2000
9 Mar
'00
12:15 p.m.
There's a reason for the old saw, "Those who can, do, while those who can't,
teach." The typical teacher candidate graduated in the bottom third of
his/her high school class, went to a clearly second-or-third-rate college
and did poorly there. Because of the emphasis on "diversity" there has been
a preference for minority candidates who relied on waivers of the customary
standards to get into and through the usual educational programs, then
relied on minority preferences to get past the hiring standards, and lastly,
now rely on the system's unwillingness to take negative action agains a
member of an ethnic minority to keep them on until they attain tenure, after
which they'll do what they like, regardless.
In my years on school committees I saw plenty of hoops being jumped-through
by administration to meet their requirements without violating the various
restrictions imposed on them by the various ethnic and cultural programs
imposed from without. Unfortunately, as more of these administrators come
from minority cultures, other problems begin to
surface. In the middle
school attended by both my boys, there was a principal who
used federal
money as a justification to bring "troubled" (meaning criminal) youngsters
from other districts in with the "hope" of
giving them another chance.
Several of us on the steering committees tried to put an end to this, as it
seemed to result in disproportionately high incident rates involving
ethinically charged circumstances.
I surely hope this is just evidence that the pendulum's swung too far in one
direction.
Dick
-----Original Message-----
From: Joe <rigdonj(a)intellistar.net>
To: classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org <classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org>
Date: Thursday, March 09, 2000 12:38 PM
Subject: Re: languages
Chris,
Good explanation, you cleared identified a part of the problem but it's
not all the student's fault. An even worse problem is that the students are
taught by teachers that aren't any better educated than the students
they're teaching. We can thanks years of preferential college admissions
and hiring practices for that. Furthermore the quality of teachers as
declined steadily with the rise in power of the NEA and other teacher's
unions since most teacher's are more concerned about their income than in
teaching. Other factors such as the decision to teach in "native languages"
haven't helped either. Every part of the educational system is lowering
it's standards to accomodate the worst (insert your choice here; student,
teacher, school system, income, etc etc). And every part of the system is
failing to support the other parts. The whole educational system is in
chaos.
I wonder if the US is the only country that is having these kinds of
problems in it's "educational" system?
Joe
At 09:57 AM 3/9/00 -0800, Chris wrote:
>Richard Erlacher wrote:
>
>[Stuff deleted]
>
>> I think the reason our kids don't learn languages well is because the
tools
>> that should have been taught with English,
>
>[more stuff deleted]
>
>I recently had the sad task of judging science fair projects from three
local
>high schools. It was pathetic. Since this thread
is about language
skills
>I'll ignore for the moment the more or less
complete lack of understanding
>of the scientific method and the extensive use of crayons in constructing
>the presentations and focus on the stellar language skills that were
almost
>uniformly present across all of the entries.
>
>The short form summary is that if I'd written in the fashion of these high
>school students when I was in second grade I'd have been taken out and
shot.
>Certainly there were large collections of words,
some of them
polysyllabic,
>but in general they were not arranged into anything
that was parsable as
>an english sentence. Written materials depended on spelling correctors
>to eliminate spelling errors, sometimes with frightening yet amusing
>consequences ("...our science fairy teacher...").
>
>There were a few entries which were clever, well constructed, well
executed
and innovative.
Talking with the instructors I learned that these were
from the bright but bored students who twiddle their thumbs while their
neanderthal classmates struggled with basic coursework (in California the
instructional system is geared to address the needs of the lowest common
denominator; resources are generally not available for exceptional
students). The entry judged Best of Show was constructed by one such
student in a few hours on the day immediately preceding the judging.
It's a sad situation.
It's beyond sad. It's criminal.
FWIW, California is now going to start imposing financial penalties upon
high schools whose students do not perform at some minimal level. The
problem, of course, is that the students are already lacking fundamental
skills that they should have received at the elementary level, thus
penalizing the high schools is not going to fix the problem. Rather, it
will cause even more resources to be diverted to already unsalvageable
students while penalizing those who actually have a chance to do something
useful with their lives.
*Grumble*,
Chris
--
Chris Kennedy
chris(a)mainecoon.com
http://www.mainecoon.com
PGP fingerprint: 4E99 10B6 7253 B048 6685 6CBC 55E1 20A3 108D AB97