Posted on 03/06/2011 11:45:45 AM PST by Nachum
Okay, folks, place your bets. Was it clueless incompetence on a cosmic scale? Or, was it John Deweys collectivist wet dream turned Clockwork Orange?
One of these ways or the other, we became a country with 50,000,000 functional illiterates, people who can't read a cereal box, never mind instructions on a pill bottle when that exact skill might save a life. Prisons are full of people who can't read. The country's schools wallow in mediocrity. All thanks to educational malfeasance, decade after decade.
Illiteracy_in_AmericaJ'accuse! J'accuse! The so-called experts in charge of reading are derelict and destructive. Please, remove these parasites from our weary carcass.
Reading was always something that kids learned, almost automatically, in the first few years of schools. Kids learn the alphabet, then A is for Apple, then the sounds of the letters, and soon everyone is reading.
(Excerpt) Read more at rightsidenews.com ...
I don’t know the stats, but more teachers quit than you would think. Both of my parents were teachers and it isn’t the cake job many people make it out to be. There’s a reason I never considered it for myself and it has nothing to do with money.
I was fortunate that I had really good teachers for kindergarten and 1st grade. They had a good balance between not discouraging me and not leaving the rest of the class behind.
One quibble. Lots of people can’t learn to read using the phonics method. My wife learned to read by sight. My younger soon also. He doesn’t pick up information by ear. Why he can’t sing a lick. So he was in the 7th grade before he found a teacher who would LET him learn. He and my wife are good at “Wheel of Fortune”puzzles, because the whole word is in their heads.
Part of the problem is that putting every teacher on the same salary scale does not go according to the law of supply and demand. English teachers are not as hard to find as math and science teachers. Yet one of the cuts proposed here in Texas is to stop giving bonuses to math and science teachers.
A lot of the illiterate kids had a TV in the house but no books. The only reading matter was cereal boxes.
Crap. They have to want to learn to read to begin with.
“Hole language” is the biggest cause of the holes in people’s language skills.
You need to sit in on some classrooms, and it might change your mind. When teachers spend half or more of their time engaged in behavior control, there is a problem that originates someplace besides the schools.
“It is fast, easy, and practically free.”
Before public school in America, kids were mostly taught at home.
The literacy rate was way higher back then than it is today.
I never said it WAS a cake job. As I said, everyone has issues with parts of their job. I could not teach in a public school - I could, but I would probably be fired the first day. If I could teach with the same ability my teachers had, it’d be different. I probably could teach in private schools without much problem.
What I am saying is that teachers make a choice to go into teaching. If it’s really not tolerable, like any job, you need to leave and get a different job. I had plenty of friends at school who went into teaching because it was one of the easiest schools to get a degree in (they always were shocked at what I was taking in engineering).
My daughter teaches in a public elementary in a nice suburb here in Indiana.
42% of the students in her grade come from intact families.
(def: birth parents living together in the family home)
Remember this is one of the GOOD locales.
What % of kids in inner city schools even KNOW who both parents are?
The Great Society destroyed the black family structure.
It’s difficult to believe any education system can fix this.
I agree with everything you say. I actually think I would’ve bombed education courses in college because I would’ve found them tedious. Granted I would’ve bombed engineering too because my mind isn’t geared that way. I can’t think of a major that does a worse job at preparing someone for their career than education. Other than student teaching, there is nothing learned that helps with the actual job.
Oops, ...over her son’s inability...
Better?
That made mah haid hurt.
I took up drinkin' to ease the angst.
Now I'm consigned to a lifetime of dissolution and livin' under bridges.
See what you done?
“Crap. They have to want to learn to read to begin with. “
Sorry, that theory has been PROVEN WRONG time after time in the inner cities and elsewhere...in fact anywhere where the kids are taught right.
“You need to sit in on some classrooms, and it might change your mind. When teachers spend half or more of their time engaged in behavior control, there is a problem that originates someplace besides the schools.”
Do you REALLY expect kids to behave when they purposely are not being taught jack?
“If they really want to fight back, they need to leave the group, and join with those outside the cess pool. You take your life in your hands, trying to fight this from within. “
I agree...and most of the good ones do leave...which is why we have the beasts that are left. It’s a real bummer for the kids.
“Not all, but the overwhelming majority.”
Thanks, but the majority’s probably not as overwhelming as you think. And our conversation centers on semantics and weasel-words, many will say, but such phrasing is, so often, the difference between a racist and a cynical realist.
And my above, to Publius, is also to umgud in reply to his post 22, of course.
There have been teachers in my family going back for at least three generations. Sadly, my aunt was the last one of our clan to enter the field, and she was driven out in the early 70s.
Even that far back, the leftists were driving the good teachers out, with their "new and improved" methods and thuggishness. I don't know if a good teacher stands a chance in the public school systems today.
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