Nooowwwww... Chickens!
-PJ
Posted on 05/02/2023 9:34:02 AM PDT by AT7Saluki
My worthless high school was a dedicated college prep one.
If you weren’t in going to college, you weren’t much in the eyes of the principal and his lackeys.
About a little over half weren’t, including me, for all kinds of reasons.
The only useful thing offered was three years of auto mechanics or Ag.
My school district was the richest in the state at the time.
They didn’t do anything except push football, band, and cheerleading for anything outside of academics.
I’ve never gone to a reunion and no interest in going. From bits I have heard over the years, there is only a small bloc of attendees going to them. Most of the names I heard I really have no desire to talk to.
I learned the hard way you need to reconcile all bank accounts and credit cards to the penny with their statements every month to achieve mastery over your cash flow. And it’s a good way to learn Quicken and Excel.
Bingo. In post #12, I wrote that, somewhere along the way, people started looking down on "personal finance" or "consumer math" courses.
You gave the reason why. These days, high school students follow a cookie-cutter education intended as college prep.
This class should be mandatory.
My grand nieces middle school teaches a class in financial education. Given a sheet listing occupations and their yearly average income. They get to chose from list at the beginning of unit. As the course progresses they are required to make a budget. It’s a very popular class.
“...they don’t teach “writing” either....or times tables.”
As for times tables, you can blame the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. They are responsible for nearly all of the hare-brained changes in the teaching of math. Their position is rote memorization is really really bad and stifles the mathematical creativity of the students. So kids get to the 8th grade not knowing any of the times tables. On a practical level this means that doing fractions without a calculator becomes nearly impossible. Back in the day, fractions were considered 5th grade level math.
I remember calculus being mandatory——
NUT I do NOT remember a single class in check register/bank statements/ household bills details, etc.
How do they feel about “rote memorization” of the alphabet?
I believe it ended when schools graded themselves not on kids being successful in life after school, but on being “successful” getting into college like college in and of itself was the goal.
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I think that is true. My high school was college prep, and I only learned typing by going to summer school.
To be fair to the argument for higher math and such, I used a little extra math and programmer wizardry to optimize some of those financial steps. So even in normal home economics decisions it can be helpful to have some of the advanced math offered in high school. But as helpful as those skills are, they don't come close to learning even more important skills such as personal responsibility and being your own financial accountant to make sure cash coming in is more than cash flowing out. Basically, excelling at practical application of simple math is way better than never applying math even if you're good at calculus.
It’s not on a state test. So it doesn’t actually matter ... except to the students. And they don’t matter.
Hate to say it...but we had inkwells and steel pens.
It will only become mandatory if they can insert climate change, diversity, equity and perversity.
I learned typing at home as a teenager. My father really encouraged me when I was 14 and told him I wanted to learn how to make software reading books like my friend was doing. One day my father realized I was spending more time hunting and pecking keys than I was spending figuring out what program code to write. So he asked me if I wanted to learn to type, I told him I did, and he bought me a typing tutor app for my Commodore-64 that came on a 51/4" disk. (By the way, having a floppy drive instead of a tape drive was like driving with nitro. LOL) About once per week he asked me to show him how much better my typing was and I'd show him. Then he'd ask me to show him whatever software I made and he'd patiently listen to me give him a code review. LOL
As I remember it, addition was 1st grade, subtraction in 2nd, multiplication in 3rd, division in 4th, fractions in 5th, and decimals in 6th. We were introduced to concepts earlier, but we were expected to have mastered them by the end of each year.
Today kids are introduced to fractions in 1st or 2nd grade, in fact that’s the problem. They are introduced to all kinds of things, but they aren’t allowed to master anything. My knowing times tables seems like magic to them. I’ve seen 8th graders, not special ed students, struggle with their fours tables. They mash buttons on their calculators and if they press the wrong button they are clueless as to why they got the wrong answer.
Nooowwwww... Chickens!
-PJ
Somehow, with all that great old time education, we have managed to elect an idiot as our President and a Congress of greedy, lying fools.
Maybe we needed better education about people.
I've often wondered why necessary knowledge isn't taught in high schools, instead of crap. Almost six decades ago, I was in auto-shop classes, as well as having taken metal-shop and wood-shop in middle school. Also was fortunate to be selected in middle school to attend an electronics class held at a high school. They don't teach any of this stuff to kids nowadays. My wife took typing and economics classes in high school. What we learned then helped us in our adult lives and made us successful.
8th grade for me.
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