education
"Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?" – George W. Bush, January 1, 2000, Florence, South Carolina
Yes Mr. President, all too rarely.
I was in a fast food place in a small college town yesterday. Being close to campus and at noon, the place was full of students. I knew they were students from the sorority and fraternity t-shirts, book bags, etc. Waiting in line I couldn’t help but overhear some of the conversations. “The only thing I ever eat here before...” “I don’t never...” “He don’t got...” How do kids get into college when they can’t speak English? These didn’t look like recent immigrants either. I hear the same things everywhere.
I remember parts of a Simpsons episode where Bart gets an F in English and Homer asks in amazement, “How can you FLUNK English? You SPEAK English.” Why can’t our education system teach a kid how to match a verb and a noun in an appropriate manner?
My nephew has a borderline learning disability resulting in a reading problem. He and his parents struggled through grade school and are now struggling through junior high. It seems the curriculum is designed to gets kids (and their teachers) through the standardized tests and very little else. Teachers whose performance (and maybe even their salary) is based on the statistics revolving around these tests are willing to let a couple of kids fall through the cracks in an effort to boost the scores for rest of the class. How many kids are we losing?
I hear about kids from one state not being able to get into colleges in other states because their basic reading, writing, and arithmetic skills are so poor. Even when they get into in-state schools, many have to take remedial classes in these subjects just to get by. They can score high enough on the standardized tests to get by, but aren’t proficient enough in these skills to survive in a higher education setting. I’ve heard other stories about kids getting teaching degrees in one state but aren’t qualified to teach in other states.
I don’t want to slam teachers. We need to slam the system that trains teachers to forget why they became teachers. When I was in college, if a kid flunked out of engineering, business, parks and recreation, etc., they got into the education department and became a teacher. Not their choice, but a matter of necessity; they had to have a degree. What kind of teacher will these people make? Don’t get me wrong. I also knew kids who sincerely wanted to be teachers. They were driven, called if you like, to this vocation.
Having the deepest pocket or the biggest gun isn’t going to maintain this country as the “world power” we’ve grown accustomed to. Kids from foreign countries have been outperforming our kids in academia for years. A well-educated populace is what will maintain our standing in the world in the future. We’re sinking fast.
Yes Mr. President, all too rarely.
I was in a fast food place in a small college town yesterday. Being close to campus and at noon, the place was full of students. I knew they were students from the sorority and fraternity t-shirts, book bags, etc. Waiting in line I couldn’t help but overhear some of the conversations. “The only thing I ever eat here before...” “I don’t never...” “He don’t got...” How do kids get into college when they can’t speak English? These didn’t look like recent immigrants either. I hear the same things everywhere.
I remember parts of a Simpsons episode where Bart gets an F in English and Homer asks in amazement, “How can you FLUNK English? You SPEAK English.” Why can’t our education system teach a kid how to match a verb and a noun in an appropriate manner?
My nephew has a borderline learning disability resulting in a reading problem. He and his parents struggled through grade school and are now struggling through junior high. It seems the curriculum is designed to gets kids (and their teachers) through the standardized tests and very little else. Teachers whose performance (and maybe even their salary) is based on the statistics revolving around these tests are willing to let a couple of kids fall through the cracks in an effort to boost the scores for rest of the class. How many kids are we losing?
I hear about kids from one state not being able to get into colleges in other states because their basic reading, writing, and arithmetic skills are so poor. Even when they get into in-state schools, many have to take remedial classes in these subjects just to get by. They can score high enough on the standardized tests to get by, but aren’t proficient enough in these skills to survive in a higher education setting. I’ve heard other stories about kids getting teaching degrees in one state but aren’t qualified to teach in other states.
I don’t want to slam teachers. We need to slam the system that trains teachers to forget why they became teachers. When I was in college, if a kid flunked out of engineering, business, parks and recreation, etc., they got into the education department and became a teacher. Not their choice, but a matter of necessity; they had to have a degree. What kind of teacher will these people make? Don’t get me wrong. I also knew kids who sincerely wanted to be teachers. They were driven, called if you like, to this vocation.
Having the deepest pocket or the biggest gun isn’t going to maintain this country as the “world power” we’ve grown accustomed to. Kids from foreign countries have been outperforming our kids in academia for years. A well-educated populace is what will maintain our standing in the world in the future. We’re sinking fast.
posted by steve | 10:47 AM
1 Comments:
Right on, Brother. Standards are much harder at Mizzou than when we went. Now when kids aren't doing well, they don't necessarily go into the College of Ed. They're already there. Now, they just major in elementary ed. Not kidding. Some of my daughter's "dumbest" friends are going to teach the little kids of tomorrow. (The other ones are TAM majors, textiles and merchandising.) My daughter is a math ed major with a learning disability, dyslexia, and a 3.7 GPA! She'll be a great teacher for high school kids if they get that far! Be very afraid for the children.
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