Posted on 09/13/2005 9:04:51 AM PDT by ZGuy
During my first semester of teaching, many years ago, I was surprised to encounter the philosophy that the brightest students did not need much help from the teacher because "they can get it anyway" and that my efforts should be directed toward the slower or low-performing students.
This advice came from my department chairman, who said that if the brighter or more serious students "get restless" while I was directing my efforts toward the slower students, then I should "give them some extra work to do to keep them quiet."
I didn't believe that the real difference between the A students and the C students was in inborn intelligence, but thought it was usually due to differences in attitudes and priorities. In any event, my reply was that what the chairman proposed "would be treating those who came here for an education as a special problem!"
A few days later, I handed in my resignation. It turned out to be only the first in a series of my resignations from academic institutions over the years.
Unfortunately, the idea of treating the brighter or more serious students as a problem to be dealt with by keeping them busy is not uncommon, and is absolutely pervasive in the public schools. One fashionable solution for such "problem" students is to assign them to help the less able or less conscientious students who are having trouble keeping up.
In other words, make them unpaid teacher's aides!
High potential will remain only potential unless it is developed. But the very thought that high potential should be developed more fully never seems to occur to many of our educators -- and some are absolutely hostile to the idea.
It violates their notions of equality or "social justice" and it threatens the "self-esteem" of other students. As a result, too often a student with the potential to become a future scientist, inventor, or a discoverer of a cure for cancer will instead have his time tied up doing busy work for the teacher.
Even so-called "gifted and talented" programs often turn out to be simply a bigger load of the same level of work that other students are doing -- keeping the brighter students busy in a separate room.
My old department chairman's notion that the better students "can pretty much get it without our help" assumes that there is some "it" -- some minimum competence -- which is all that matters.
People like this would apparently be satisfied if Einstein had remained a competent clerk in the Swiss patent office and if Jonas Salk, instead of discovering a cure for polio, had spent his career puttering around in a laboratory and turning out an occasional research paper of moderate interest to his academic colleagues.
If developing the high potential of some students wounds the "self-esteem" of other students, one obvious answer is for them to go their separate ways in different classrooms or different schools.
There was a time when students of different ability levels or performance levels were routinely assigned to different classes in the same grade or to different schools -- and no one else collapsed like a house of cards because of wounded self-esteem.
Let's face it: Most of the teachers in our public schools do not have what it takes to develop high intellectual potential in students. They cannot give students what they don't have themselves.
Test scores going back more than half a century have repeatedly shown people who are studying to be teachers to be at or near the bottom among college students studying in various fields. It is amazing how often this plain reality gets ignored in discussions of what to do about our public schools.
Lack of competence is only part of the problem. Too often there is not only a lack of appreciation of outstanding intellectual development but a hostility towards it by teachers who are preoccupied with the "self-esteem" of mediocre students, who may remind them of what they were once like as students.
Always remember this.
"Those who can, do.
Those who can't, teach.
Those who can't teach, teach teachers."
All the girls I ran around with in college were going to be teachers. They were all as dumb as dirt..still are. However, they graduated and went into some school system (they all had relatives who were 'dug-in' in the school system) and got their ticket punched right away. They are making (always made) more money than me. When I graduated, and since I was not going to be a teacher, I had to make my own way. I did not have relatives to pave the way for me.
He also got some digs in at the educrats at the end of his Narnia story The Silver Chair (paraphrasing):
And when the Head's [of the school] friends saw she was no good as a Head, they got her made an Inspector so she could interfere with other Heads. And when she saw that she wasn't much good even at that, they got her into Parliament where she lived happily ever after.
Cheers!
He also got some digs in at the educrats at the end of his Narnia story The Silver Chair (paraphrasing):
And when the Head's [of the school] friends saw she was no good as a Head, they got her made an Inspector so she could interfere with other Heads. And when she saw that she wasn't much good even at that, they got her into Parliament where she lived happily ever after.
Cheers!
He also got some digs in at the educrats at the end of his Narnia story The Silver Chair (paraphrasing):
And when the Head's [of the school] friends saw she was no good as a Head, they got her made an Inspector so she could interfere with other Heads. And when she saw that she wasn't much good even at that, they got her into Parliament where she lived happily ever after.
Cheers!
What was it C.S. Lewis predicted again?
I think there are two major problems with public schools. In most cases, the parents don't care and the students don't care. From my 2 years of experience teaching, there are a lot of C-D students who should be A students.
A LOT of Mensans have not done as well in school as they might have; many have not even finished a college degree but have gone out in the world to work in bookstores or construction jobs. This makes perfect sense. Mensans can sense something is misaligned between the goals of public school and their own abilities. Public school is not designed to educate the very bright ones, but to produce machine parts for industry.
Many years ago my son was in a local high school, and wanted to take "Band". Unfortunately, the only English class available for him to take was for the "slower" students; but he had to take English.
After his first day of class, he came home and told me that he had a problem -- the kids in class could barely read. They were so bad that, by the time a student finished reading a sentence, he had forgotten what the sentence was about. I told him to get a good book, sit in the back of the class, and quietly read -- it would keep him out of trouble, and it was English. So he did.
About a month later, I was called in for a Parent-Teacher conference. The teacher proceeded to tell me that it was unacceptable for my son to sit in the back of the class reading unassigned material.
I told her it was my fault because I told him to do this so he wouldn't get bored. I had done the same thing when I was in Junior High many years earlier. I asked her if he was disrupting the class. She answered negatively.
I asked her if he would respond correctly when she called on him. She said he did, and that was part of the problem -- he was reading other stuff, and still responded correctly, and that made the other kids feel inferior.
I asked if they were reading at about 2nd grade level; she concurred.
I then told her that they were feeling inferior because they were, in fact, inferior.
She got mad and told me that my son had to stop reading other stuff in class, and that he needed to "learn how to be bored".
I told her that if that was the best she had to offer, I would be checking him out of school permanently and homeschooling him.
We compromised on moving him to the Study Hall during her class period, and writing book reports on the books he read while there.
Amazing. But no doubt this happens alot.
Our son was taking honors math, honors social studies, regular science and afterschool sports. So the counselor suggested that taking honors english would be too much for him. So we let him enroll in regular "college prep" english. He came home and told us he was classed with the dregs of the school. We were not able to get him transfered until the semester break and as he moved back into his honors group he rejoined all his friends who promptly asked him where he had been.
The bottom line is that this counselor was also not trying to do the best for his students. What we learned from this is that the best students take honors classes, and if your child can do the honors work, thats where you want them.
The dumbing down of schools, particularly bright children being held back: (paraphrasing)
"you even have bright children being held down so that the others will not suffer a trauma--Beelzebub, what a useful word!--by being left behind."
He went on to describe children "who would be capable of tackling Aeschylus or Dante being forced to listen to their coeval's attempts to spell out 'a cat sat on a mat'.
The point of the essay dovetailed nicely with Sowell's piece, that the driving force of this is the sentiment of envy--"I'm as good as you are"--since nobody who really believes it has to say it out loud: the St. Bernard does not say it to the toy dog, nor the scholar to the dunce, nor the pretty woman to the plain.
The essay went on to cite Machiavelli (IIRC), giving the example of going out into a neighboring wheat field and snicking off the tops of the heads of grain taller then their neighbors: no pre-eminence among individuals is to be allowed; and to note that in England, the pre-eminent were beginning to limit their own growth in order to get along...
Quite aways ahead of its time, it was...
Cheers!
'In most cases, the parents don't care and the students don't care'
Hear hear. That was my experience as well. The notion that teachers are at the bottom of the academic pile in college may be true of elementary teachers but is increasingly not the case for some HS teachers in some states. In OR to teach high school one must first get a degree in the subject matter to be taught then go an additional year for an MAT (Master of Arts Teaching) I went through that program and it was quite rigorous, not everyone got automatic A's, it was in fact a lot of work. I think the school I taught in was mostly staffed by well trained, intelligent and hard working teachers. The problem as you said, the students' attitudes. It was apparent very early in the year which kids' parents valued education and which didn't. Parents who don't care have kids that are poor students.
Thank God for homeschool ping.
Bingo ... This is "it" in a nutshell. Mediocrity IS the desired outcome ... it makes for compliant workers who are satisfied to take orders, fit in, and generally not cause trouble.
We have Thomas Sowell in our curriculum!
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