Replies

And the kids will seem just as stupid in Spanish as in English if they bothered to try.

My great aunt Marnie taught school in the early 1900's to a class of immigrants of 50 children. She taught in English and they all earned because she would hit them with a ruler if they didn't.

Now, the system encourages both ignorance and stupidity.

I would bet that your great aunt Marnie didn't have the bureaucracy from hell breathing down her neck. It was bad enough that we had the state getting closely involved in the schools, but when No Child Left Behind kicked in, the amount of pressure the Federal Government is putting on the states who are then putting it on the districts is unbelievable.

It's insane - our local district is under so much pressure, they had people out with tape measures checking teacher's classrooms to make sure they had X amount square footage of bulletin boards on this or that subject in the misguided belief that somehow having the exact amount of bulletin boards on certain topics would somehow rub off on the kids.

When I heard that, I just thought "huh, so if my teachers had 10 square feet of bulletin boards about math, then I might have done 5% better in school. My parents riding my butt to study had nothing to do with it. I just needed the government to step in and force the teachers to add a few square feet of bulletin boards to my classrooms. How did I ever make it through high school or college?