Posted on 03/31/2014 8:27:20 AM PDT by A_perfect_lady
I don’t speak for anyone but myself.
I find it interesting that you dismiss Bill Whittle as not “actually saying anything” in that video, and further denigrate and dismiss him because he isn’t a teacher, or because he sold cars for a living.
What’s wrong with selling cars for a living? When a person goes home from their job of selling cars, do they simply drink beer with their gut hanging out, or is it remotely possible that someone who sells cars for a living might be well read, or dare I say, intelligent? Or does a car salesman require a college degree to be viewed as qualified to have an opinion on anything?
Or is only someone who works with the The Chicago Annenberg Challenge worthy to have an opinion on Education? It sounds like you would trust the judgement of someone like that over someone who sells cars even if he is certifiably wrong and his policies are destructive.
Just because a person has been immersed in education doesn’t mean their viewpoint is, by default better than a viewpoint held by Bill Whittle who was, after all, only a lowly car salesman. It *might* be better, and their viewpoint *might* have insight the car salesman doesn’t possess, but immersion in a system doesn’t make viewpoints more valid or sound. Otherwise people like Al Gore really would be experts on how to run a government.
You don’t need to be a pilot to have the viewpoint that when a plane crashes, what kept it in the air was not working as designed. Likewise, you don’t have to be a teacher to see that the smoking wreckage of education and understand it doesn’t work, despite the billions of taxpayer dollars thrown at it. Just because someone says that there is a problem with the smoking wreckage of education, be it a Freeper or a Car Salesman, doesn’t mean they don’t know what they are talking about.
I haven’t seen the video in some time, but the main concept he conveys is not difficult to grasp, unless you don’t understand a basic conservative tenet: When possible, decision making of all types should be kept as close to those affected by it as possible, and people should have the opportunity and right to change to a different situation to address it.
An overarching, bloated, federal government, state government, town government, or school district is the epitome of that thought process, and Common Core is simply another expression of it. It is a 3000 mile long screwdriver being wielded by people in in the Lyndon Baines Johnson building (how fitting) to tighten the screws on people who deal with environments and demands that are foreign to them. But hey, they have expert “educators” manning the hallways there, and they know best. Not like they have ever gotten anything wrong before. As you seem fond of saying, “I mean, hey, it’s worked so well so far.”
You take offense that people on this site see it that way, and that puzzles me only if I discount the possibility you aren’t a conservative, you are too deeply entrenched to see it the way conservatives view this issue (unless comparing everyone on Free Republic to General Jack Ripper) or you personalize the issue so much that you are unable to view it with anything other than emotion.
There are all levels of mastery and I don’t think that you understand the type of sources that they will use. It will be more like the short science essays that you would read for an SRA reading lab and I am not talking about sixth and seventh graders. If you are content with your kids learning science from short bytes of information on the internet instead of a lab science, go for it.
One example that was given of a feminized science course at Yale, was the history of science. The girl who wrote the article for the college newspaper was majoring in feminist studies and the history of science. She didn’t need to take even one real science course.
“my experience was that well-written papers get a good grade, period.”
You were lucky. I had pals in journalism school, and you really had to be liberal to get a grade and graduate.
A friend’s kid was always in trouble in High School for inappropriate attitudes, no matter how the paper was written. Several of us grownups would help with the extra work involved in, for example, proving to the teacher that the first slaves in the USA were indentured slaves and not chattel slaves. he teacher rejected that the first time with a D, saying among other things that “the United States Park Service is not a valid source”. With extra research the kid got an A, begrudgingly, and it was the same with the next paper (in which it was stated that the Holocaust killed more non-Jews than Jews, a view earning a D). It took extra work to be conservative and get good grades, the go-along or true believer kids didn’t have to.
I can’t imagine what would happen if a kid said something against gay marriage or global warming today.
With education filters that strong, it’s no wonder that journalists, teachers, and schools have lots of people who at least act liberal in public.
This is what I hear, and for this reason these online Common Core standards seemed incredibly ambitious:
3. Write narratives to develop real or imagined experiences or events using effective technique, relevant descriptive details, and well- structured event sequences.
a. Engage and orient the reader by establishing a context and
introducing a narrator and/or characters; organize an event sequence that unfolds naturally and logically.
b. Use narrative techniques, such as dialogue, pacing, and description, to develop experiences, events, and/or characters.
c. Use a variety of transition words, phrases, and clauses to
convey sequence and signal shifts from one time frame or setting to another.
d. Use precise words and phrases, relevant descriptive details,
and sensory language to convey experiences and events. e. Provide a conclusion that follows from the narrated experiences or events.
... that's 3rd in a list of nine writing standards for Grade Six!
( on page 20 of 39 at the link )
Federal government is bad at many things, actually bad at most things, which is why the Founders tried to limit it to those things it might do passably well.
One problem with top down is that the effect of mistakes gets magnified. Another is that without effect feedback, top down organizations don't change. Agencies of the Federal Government don't have competition, don't really change across elections and so cannot learn. And when the fail, the bigger the failure the more money they get next year.
Reading lists matter, but they've gotten worse over the years as schools got more and more regionalized, more centralized. The fix isn't even more centralization. That just sets us up for a bigger fail.
More federal control just means more control by unaccountable educrats, of the type who did New Math and Whole Word and all the other failed but trendy teaching techniques.
It matters greatly whether or not a Federal educrat can decide that every school has to use the Howard Zinn American history book.
Okay, good, let's start with that. You are much better off making your own case than linking me to a video you haven't seen in a while. I think if you looked at it afresh you'd realize it's not really very good. Let's look at what you said, because it took him 9 minutes but it took you about 3 sentences. Well, there were three good sentences in there, and that was one of them. Here's another:
...decision making of all types should be kept as close to those affected by it as possible, and people should have the opportunity and right to change to a different situation to address it.
AGAIN, right! Now... what is one of the glaring problems of the smoking wreckage of education? A liberal curriculum implemented by teachers who are either liberal or apathetic. Let's get as close to the affected as possible: the classroom.
We need conservative teachers. Wailing about the state of education when the majority of conservatives won't touch it with a 3,000 mile long pole is pretty useless. You need conservative teachers to get into those classrooms and teach meaty, weighty stuff.
THAT is how you fix it. You can protest Common Core till you're blue in the face. It won't do any good because you are still complaining from the outside. You're like a woman whose cat is up a tree and you call for help getting it down. Neighbor arrives with pellet gun and you say "Not like that!!" Fire fighters arrive with hose and you say "Not like that!" Local lumberjack arrives with saw and you say "Not like that!"
You need to get up that tree yourself if you want that cat down your way. Not just you, of course. Conservatives in general.
Now you'll come up with a list of reasons why conservatives don't become teachers. It's morally wrong to work for the government (unless you're military). It's morally wrong to join a union (great, there goes any career with cops and firefighters too). Whatever it is, excuse after excuse.
Okay, keep operating that way. Be like that woman I was talking with earlier, chanting about dismantling it and not offering a single reasonable plan as to how, or what we'd do with the millions of feral youth who'd roam the streets then. Pretend it can be done with diatribes and bumper stickers (I got a Free Tibet bumper sticker for you too.)
You cannot put the toothpaste back in the tube. It's out. You'll get rid of federal involvement in education about the same time you get rid of the Federal Reserve. Good luck with that one too. I'm so sick of conservatives whose answer for everything is to just roll back time to just before the Titanic and start over. You can't. It's too late. So your choices now are whine on the sidelines or get in there and change it from within.
No kidding, there’s a big error in the very first question. Napoleon did not die in battle, he did in exile.
But that was my point. Common Core in English isn’t about a reading list. Previous standards in California actually tried to MANDATE material. They would give you books and say “You have to use these books!” (Of course, like I said, they didn’t check on us, but most teachers are too lazy to mount much of a rebellion.) Common Core offers examples (and they are good ones, things Freepers would like) but it’s really more about skills than content. That means a good teacher can choose good content. This is actually an OPPORTUNITY for conservatives to get in there, become teachers, choose content that molds character, and turn the tide. The hand that rocks the cradle... you know the phrase? Well, conservatives have let the liberals rock the cradle for decades. And look where we are.
I appreciate this from you. I agree that original founding documents and real literature are essential for a good education. This definitely helps me toward accepting common core for my one child in SoCal public school.
Thanks.
You’ll want to keep an eye on what they actually do pick, though. And I’m hearing that math is going to be a mess.
Who cares? It’s still a good quote.
I disagree. Just leave Einstein out of it, if that's not too much to ask.
At least it’s an improvement in California.
When Aunt Em came there to live she was a young, pretty wife. The sun and wind had changed her, too. They had taken the sparkle from her eyes and left them a sober gray; they had taken the red from her cheeks and lips, and they were gray also. She was thin and gaunt, and never smiled now. When Dorothy, who was an orphan, first came to her, Aunt Em had been so startled by the child’s laughter that she would scream and press her hand upon her heart whenever Dorothy’s merry voice reached her ears; and she still looked at the little girl with wonder that she could find anything to laugh at.
Are they thinking this through ?
Who tf do you think you are?
I thought as much. Don’t go punching out with “Who cares?” if you’re not ready for the blowback.
I think your basic premise is simply off base, that we steer conservatives into education, and that is going to fix a problem.
Trying to fix the problem by encouraging young conservative people to become teachers is like trying to encourage women to become engineers. It is a liberal proposition. Talented women either want to be engineers, or they don’t. Using the example of women in engineering, a subject liberals think all kind of nonsense about it, it is typical of their approach they take by throwing time, money and effort by trying to force a change using bureaucracy and my money, and yet, the numbers aren’t much different. Yet they persist, because some people in a building in Washington think the under-representation in engineering fields of human beings with breasts and vaginas is an extremely important issue to be addressed.
Never mind the sexual anatomy of the engineer doesn’t have a thing to do with whether a catheter used by a physician will work right, or an airplane is designed by an engineer to handle well in a cross wind.
Because people have the freedom (or still do, for a little while) to go into field they are interested in, that presents a problem: most kids have more exposure to the profession of teaching than nearly any other profession by the time they graduate from high school. And whether it is accurate or not, there are a large number to whom it is not a draw. Now, being a guitar player, artist, or pilot (like Bill Whittle) that is interesting to them. Never mind many professional pilots feel as romantic and challenged by their jobs as school bus drivers, the perception is important.
You don’t want people to do what they want to do, you want them to do what you want them to do because it is perceived to be for the greater good. It doesn’t mean there aren’t young conservatives who are going to be attracted to teaching and be good at it, in the same way there are certainly women out there interested in engineering who become fine engineers.
That national group you founded and currently lead, “The Conservative Education Association” whose charter is to find ways as teachers to encourage young people to enter the field of teaching, how is that working out? It probably isn’t, because you likely don’t run an organization, nor is it likely any of your conservative compatriots do either.
How about this? You work hard at what you do to improve your situation and make it your task to steer young conservatives into the field and mentor them?
I will work hard at what I do to improve the field I work in, and am going to encourage and mentor young people under me and foster the ideas of conservatism in their work ethic and their.
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