Posted on 08/03/2006 11:38:51 AM PDT by neverdem
And some kids who are below average intelligence can overcome their inadequacies and do better than gifted kids with hard work.
My special needs daughter is one of them.
But that crazy old professor likely would offend SOME KID'S parents when they heard that it was shown in school. God knows why but, mark my words, it would. Then the irate and offended parents would march into school, to the School Board meeting, write to the local press and before you know it, all over the United States, a lot of people (lemmings) would realize that they too were offended by the crazy old professor and the NEA would pronounce that no longer would that crazy old professor ever, EVER teach another child in the public school system.
There really is a "War on Boys" in today's schools, but Brandon was not the best example to use. ;-)
That's interesting, I remember when I was first read Shakspeare at school. The Merchant of Venice as I recall. We would read and sit and discuss the various aspects of the book, and I discovered that aside from the writing style, there were lessons, timeless lessons, to be learned from some of that antiquated literature.
As such, I understand the pitfalls of pursuing my pound of flesh.
Thanks for the ping!
I'm interested in hearing what you feel about vouchers...public funding, but without strings as to where it is used. Could it not provide even more competition among private schools? (I'm thinking of it as the SOLE means of funding schools--i.e., no public schools, per se.)
You remind me of what H.W. Fowler said in Modern English Usage: "'Pleistocene, pliocene, miocene' are regrettable barbarisms."
:-)
There is a "War on Boys", and the article made some very good points... but then the writer took it all in another direction. The white victimhood excuse was over the top.
Really, I was smartmouthed, too, bored in class, and landed myself in detention over and over again in high school. And I was a girl.
There's a big difference between misunderstanding the behavior of boys and disciplining them when necessary. Any teen who says to his teacher, "Why do we have to do this crap anyway?" is simply being disrespectful. The writer seems to realize that, too, but then he goes on to make excuses for such behavior. I'm a homeschool parent who would like to see all public schools shut down, but there's no excuse for a kid to speak that way to his teacher. If Brandon disagrees with the teachings there, he should address them in a different manner. "Why do we have to learn this?" would've been an acceptable question. It was not necessary to be rude.
Schools make "war on boys" when they label boys with disorders or discipline them harshly simply because they have a lot of energy or they speak out in a forward manner. But you also have to set parameters for them; when you don't, you're misunderstanding them again. Btw, I even know some homeschool moms who make the mistake of not disciplining their boys when necessary, too.
My husband and I were just talking about how, back in the 70's, our school systems each had three different schools:
(1) One main high school where we each were tracked. You could take academic courses or mainly shop classes. You could even split your time between the high school and "tech" school to learn a trade.
(2) One "alternative school" where the kids (mostly boys) who got into trouble too often in the high school went and learned a trade. (At the time, we thought all the kids there were the coolest. Interesting, eh?)
(3) One detention school.
Today, everyone is thrown into one school and expected to take the academic track. That's the problem. We should've improved upon the '70's system, and privatized it.
>We are making sure that half of our population is coming out of school poorly educated and screwed up<
Break out the violins!
Somehow, all these poor, poor, poor victimized boys still manage to come out ahead in endeavors not dependent on physical strength!
Care to speculate how that happens? They hire each other. They give each other bigger raises. They don't have to be any good! They'll whine all the while about how all women are stupid and useless, and how none of them would be hired for anything save for affirmative action...
I get really fed up with people seeing themselves as victims--especially in the case of white males. Heck, I've witnessed groups of white males bemoaning their Cruel Fate As White Males-in groups of 10 or so with an additional 2 women (who DID belong on merit, work ethic, dedication). Poor dears.
When I went through elementary school and high school, girls were TOLD their inherently could not do math well. I could have been a victim, and gone into an area 'suited' to my soft and mushy feminine brain, like art history or womyn's studies or womon's studies (no idea what that is about, but it's laughable)but instead I went into hard sciences and went through 4 quarters of calculus for engineering.
One does not have to be a victim.
I don't recall discipline being an issue for boys in the 1950s. Maybe mum and dad should instill some manners in their kinder. Maybe they should throw them outside so they do something other than sit in front of video games all day in the summer [I've known contemporary boys who whined if they had to spend a few minutes outside of AC. Think they'll ever resemble adult men? I doubt it, and I also doubt that evil, evil, middle aged women with weird personal agendas are responsible for such attitudes. I recall authentic boys having no qualms about heat, dirt, sweat, or getting up off their rears and running around. I think the parents create faux boys who are fearful of bugs, dirt, plants, etc.]
One does not have to be a victim, or to raise victims.
You've sort of been sounding like one in your posts on this thread. I quote:
"Care to speculate how that happens? They [men] hire each other. They give each other bigger raises. They don't have to be any good! They'll whine all the while about how all women are stupid and useless, and how none of them would be hired for anything save for affirmative action..."
Listen to yourself. You are a bitter victim.
Although I'm sure you would not let your obvious bitterness cause you to victimize third grade boys, you are undoubtedly a bigger person than the women who run our school policy in the country, because they do. It is pc anger and resentment--getting even stuff--like the stuff that oozes from your posts that is at the heart of this problem in the education system.
I have suggested twice that you educate yourself about the situation by reading a well-written and informative book. You show no interest in that. Instead, you just keep spewing anger at men. Go for it. It'll only make you unhappier than you already are.
I'm out of here. Bye.
And that is probably all too true - that the teacher never heard of him, either!
Our culture seems to oppose passion about anything and I find the curious lack of ethusiasm in today's kids - even the good ones - unnerving and depressing.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
I have noticed that too, where is the exuberance that was so obvious forty years ago?
I am of at least two minds about vouchers :-). As an improvement over the current situation, especially for children in the worst public schools, I support vouchers. Anything that gives parents another option for their children is positive, just for that.
However, as long as there is a "public school" system, I don't think vouchers are the solution. The problem is that, although you say, "no strings attached," it's very hard to have government money without strings. The experience of colleges in this matter is very instructive, as is the experience of "virtual schools" - public school at home - in various states. Once they give out the money, they begin making demands.
In a situation where there was no government school system, with its vested interest in expanding its funding and number of employees, a voucher program might be more conducive to genuine freedom in education. Still, philosophically, I favor private pay or private charity. Americans are generous people, and when they are allowed to spend their own money, they will do it both more productively and more charitably than the government does.
Very intersting, Kay! I understand that "Whole Language", while trendy, has a terrible record in teaching you anything. Pretty funny that trendy learning embraced Communism; perhaps this is because Communism best resembles how school systems are run. No wonder nobody learns anything nowadays!
On the other hand, your schooling did seem to motivate you to discover more, so perhaps it worked in that fashion, while my schooling felt merely dreary. Both of us seem to have learned how to read and write pretty well, so it seems like we're about even there.
I think it's very likely that Shakespeare is too deep to be absorbed properly during many of the years in which it is taught. I certainly felt nothing but bitter resentment in having to learn another vocabulary, that I would never use again, just to read his stuff. That's a definite downside to someone who invented his own vocabulary!
If I have to memorize stuff, it had better be something that will serve me in later life, not just to get through one class. (I am absolutely awful at memorization and that might have hurt me there.)
I still think that to make people love learning it has to connect to something in their lives. I find it difficult to believe that there are no contemporary writers who are not also geniuses. Have we lost all our IQ points in the last 500-odd years since his death?
I don't remember feeling that I was reading something wonderful, just something difficult to understand from my perspective. When you start reading something and the first sentence has half a dozen footnotes to words you won't understand, it tends to make appreciating greatness impossible.
Xenalyte, I will sya that you are probably right and that reading it out loud would have been more effective. But then I would have had no way to comprehend the strange vocabulary at all!
But perhaps the main thrust of my question should be "Are the late 20th and early 21st Centuries so vapid and irredeemable that we have to go to someone who died 500 years ago to find greatness in writing?"
If that's true, it doesn't speak well of us today, and is awfully sad.
About as gloomy as a Shakespearian tragedy.
D
Interesting. I had not looked at the details, but just the table of contents on the site.
The books we're using are from a Christian publisher and present conservative ideas as examples of good thinking!
You may be correct. When I suggested that more accountability in public schools was the answer, holding unions, superintendants, principals, and teachers accountable may not be achievable until the current system is scrapped.
I'm so thankful that my child is attending a private school, but I fear for our country's future that most children have no alternative other than the public school system.
If we could eliminate Federal, state and local government from the education business altogether, our taxes would be cut dramatically. Local and state by 50%. So then the education consumers (parents, students) would have the CASH in their pockets to make choices without any government voucher system at all.
A starting point would be offering your county's school "business" to private education companies. (This industry would grow fast.) They take over and bill parents. Sell school buildings to either the education company or other investors, with lease back to education company. Eliminate county and state school-related taxes, which are huge part of current real estate tax bills. Cut sales taxes, get rid of all government employees associated with these schools. (Many would probably get jobs with private companies.) An example of this is already happening, in part, as Kelly Education Services takes over substitute teacher "business" in my area.
Bump for later reading.
Having read a classic once doesn't make one educated. A book you didn't want to read leaves your head the day the assignment is done and you will never consider it again - or consider reading it again either.
Teenagers may not be good judges of merit, but they are great judges of what they don't like. Forcing meritorious art that they hate "for their own good" today at the expense of turning them off literature forever afterwards is not a win for education.
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