Where is balance? -- Re: Academic priorities
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From: Bill Leary on 10 May 2005 18:51 "Derek Lyons" <fairwater(a)gmail.com> wrote in message news:42841a96.5627289(a)supernews.seanet.com... > "Bill Leary" <Bill_Leary(a)msn.com> wrote: > >Consider that you're reading what amount to sound bites focused on specific > >points. The full picture, which wasn't relevant to the discussion at hand here, > >is rather different. > > It certainly is relevant - because your sound bites are focused to be > critical of the school system, yet in toto seem to point in a very > different direction. Yes, the sound bites were intended to be critical expressions based on personal experience. But you still do not have any "in toto" to work with so, you've repeated your error. > >The root problems were (1) the generic nature of the education system and (2) > >the overriding drive to keep each group of kids together. The very concept of > >"stay back" and even "do it again" (or anything similar) seems to have been > >deleted from the minds of everyone involved in education. As a result, the > >status reports I got weren't truly reflective of the progress the kids were > >(not) making. > > Which brings up the question I originally asked - where were you all > that time? You've, again, decided that what's on the screen is all there is. Read the paragraph you've responded to again, and while doing so keep in mind that it's a three sentence summary of twenty years of dealing with the education system. A (little) more below about "where I was." for anyone who's actually paying attention to this. > >By the time I became aware of it, due to a disciplinary issue, it > >was really too late for the oldest one and remedial help only partially > >effective on the middle one. The third one has managed to hit honors a couple > >of times this year, but it's still a "catch up" situation. > > It sounds like you didn't actively pay attention to what your kids > were doing, and blame the resultant problems on the school system > rather than shouldering that share of the blame that derives your own > lack of oversight. I didn't mention any of that because, again, it wasn't relevant to the subject at hand. But, exactly how much of blame do you figure is my share? 10%? 90%? Can we assume whatever number you apportion, you blame the schools for the rest? Or do you have someone else on tap for that? But if you do go with the schools, exactly what deficiency what are you blaming them for? Doing a poor job? Failing to report the kids progress accurately? Failing to bring the extent of the problem to my attention? And if so, at what point should they have done so? The first hint of trouble? After it was clearly established? Who's definition of "clearly" do we use? As to "where was I?", I was paying close enough attention that we moved from one town to another after our first kid finished first grade to get him into a better education system. And it worked wonderfully the first few years. In fact, each of the kids did well in the early grades. Still, I continued to meet with the teachers the entire time. I checked on the kids themselves as well, and had some misgivings about progress, especially after grade six. But from the reports we got, the discussions I had, and the things I was told, all seemed to be going pretty well. But... In retrospect, had I known better how to interpret the jargon, I'd have known that things weren't going as well as they seemed. I came to realize that I'd made two specific errors. First, in believing that professional educators knew what they were doing, and could judge progress, better than I could. Perhaps, for what they viewed as their objectives (again, reread that paragraph above), they could. But for things I wanted to see the kids do well (reading and basic math, I mentioned... there were others) it wasn't good. Second, really an extension of the first, in believing that my own educational experience was not a applicable gauge in this "modern" world. The "Well, they do things differently these days." syndrome. I was wrong on both counts. Just paying attention doesn't do the job, unless you know what you're looking for. What I'd been told to be looking for was wrong. And that isn't complete either. It doesn't mention the several wonderful teachers who did great things. It doesn't mention the couple of others who set us back. It doesn't mention the arguments I had with them, including the flawed reporting system. It doesn't mention the teacher who spent most of a school year "chatting" with the kids rather than teaching. It doesn't mention quite a lot. But I've said far more than was in any way relevant to the original point. And, in fact, paints the schools even blacker than I'd have intended. There were and are wonderful people there struggling against insufficient funding and wildly conflicting objectives. That they do as well as they do is amazing. That they do as poorly as they do is unsurprising. -30- - Bill
From: on 10 May 2005 23:12 jmfbahciv(a)aol.com> wrote: >[May I snip the cross-posts? I'm in a.f.c and I don't know >where you are.] i have restricted followups to afc snip-- >Nobody has agreed on that. This is exactly what the conflicts >in the US educational system are about. the children subject to it might like a system that emphasized what they were interested in, but no one asks them mebbe children are thought not to be old enuf to know whats good for them snip-- >I never quite learned how to hide my intellect and ignore >that itch. over the years i developed a blank and vacant stare which, coupled with a certain slackness of the jaw, usually ensured that little attention was paid to me biting my tongue also helped, especially in holding my peace >I learned how to watch people think and figure out the stuff >I wasn't getting told or at least figure that there was a gap. watching people actually think is a marvellous thing, but i find that people rarely think deeply about anything. including myself. one of my professors in graduate school had a very slow classroom style, and my classmates thought he was boring. i did not. his measured pace was because he was actually thinking about his sentences, and his answers. i remember that once he took several minutes to respond to a question of mine; the question and the answer led me to a great deal of rewarding research, altho i am afraid i have not yet utilized any of the minor results i obtained... snip-- >If you had been kept busy learning, would you have ever learned >how to think? Or know when it was time to stop all activity >and just think. This stopping can be called reexamining assumptions. and i must now pause to think about the three sentences above... thanx snip-- >To counter my family's insistence on religion over science, >I bought one nephew a subscription to _Science News_ for the sole >purpose of making him aware of all the things he did not know. >Turns out the whole family read it. His mother read it to "screen" >heresy and she started learning. The other two, stepfather and younger >brother read it because they got curious. bravo snip-- >Two of my goals was to develop ocean farming, including >living there, to counter the food shortages that I foresaw >and try to develop a desalination mechanism to counter the >lack of potable water that I foresaw. you may have read an article called 'The Oil We Eat' by Richard Manning, in Harper's Magazine. the URL is http://www.harpers.org/TheOilWeEat.html i understand that you have some limitations in accessing the web, so i should be glad to email you the article in text format if you cannot find it in the newsgroups (it was posted in several newsgroups including alt.agriculture) while some of the polemic in that article might be debatable, i think that the main thesis is correct: that fossil fuels are central to the production and distribution of food. therefore when prices of such fuels rise, prices of food will follow. this will result in considerable dislocation, and will affect the smallest of us the most. children are very small, and their needs rarely concern our rulers. potable water is even more of a pressing concern, with aquifers dropping by meters per year, coupled with increasing salt water infiltration into coastal areas as the ocean inexorably rises you were prescient
From: Andrew Swallow on 16 May 2005 10:23 Brian Inglis wrote: > On Thu, 5 May 2005 12:27:29 +0000 (UTC) in alt.folklore.computers, > Andrew Swallow <am.swallow(a)btopenworld.com> wrote: [snip] >>Screwdrivers are a different matter. The woodwork room should be >>equipped with screwdrivers and the children made to return them at the >>end of the lesson. So there is no honest reason for children to be >>carrying one during the day. Bad reasons include using sharpened >>screwdrivers as weapons and sabotaging school desks. > > > Did you ever do woodwork? You forgot about chisels, plane blades, > scribers, and other tools with sharp edges and pointy bits. > These are all things that the *school* should provide in the woodwork room. They are not things that children should be taking through the front gate. The search was at the entrance. Andrew Swallow
From: Charles Shannon Hendrix on 22 May 2005 16:16 ["Followup-To:" header set to alt.folklore.computers.] On 2005-05-01, jmfbahciv(a)aol.com <jmfbahciv(a)aol.com> wrote: > [frustrated emoticon here] I've been trying to explain for a thousand > posts but can't seem to manage. If a person is not aware of a piece > of knowledge, then that person will never learn they need it when they > could use it. Right, and this is an unsolvable problem. No matter what you learn in life or how, there will be some things you will not be exposed to and/or learn. Most public education is so severely limited, that it's a governor on your brain right from the start. It's like corporations... blind to anything outside their walls. Schools are the same way. Just look at the history of computer science for ready examples of when people fail to learn anything outside their own little world. > People never use general relativity nor special relativity. Some > people even believe that this is all nonsense and refuse to learn > about it. However, their lives depend on people who, not only know > about it, but use it in their "real life". You sound like a speaker for the NEA. Why do you assume that home schooling will not teach those things? I'll grant you that a lot of people don't know how, but I've seen too many counter examples to make a blind indictment of the idea. I know of people who teach at home and cover *MORE* than any local public school does, and do a better job. Same for private schools, which have consistently higher standards than any of the public schools around here. > Sure. But they also have to know areas of knowledge that already > exists. If they're never exposed to exotic knowledge, they are doomed > to reinventing it. The whole point of a formal education is to learn > about what you don't know and wouldn't have imagined that didn't know. That's the point and the theory, but not always the practice. The problem there is everyone fights about how it should be done. Some people get fed up with the fight and send their kids to private schools of their choice, or teach them at home. > Another point: if kids aren't exposed to different areas of knowledge > how are they going to find out what interests them the most? Like I said, formal/public education doesn't always cover those things. If as a parent, I can cover things a public school cannot, then why send my kid there to get an inferior education? > That doesn't work because the activities and other people to > interact with are chosen by the same parents who will unconsciously > exercise their biases, ignorance, and limited knowledge. You aren't making a good case at all. A parent can send his kid to many places to get a wide variety of experiences. If instead they follow public education, they send their kids to *ONE* defined school for their area. That gives kids far less variation than they would get by going to various activities scattered around a region. > He stated that he couldn't find any examples. The conclusion was > that those kids got no exposure to things that he couldn't > personally do or explain. This isn't ringing alarm bells? That individual situation might, but not the idea as a whole. Just like with formal education, it depends on the teachers and the policies. It is foolish to think that parents will be garanteed to be more limiting than a school. Many schools are like parents but with ten times the bias and prejudices, or worse, they are socially engineered nightmares. -- shannon "AT" widomaker.com -- ["The trade of governing has always been monopolized by the most ignorant and the most rascally individuals of mankind. -- Thomas Paine"] ----== Posted via Newsfeeds.Com - Unlimited-Uncensored-Secure Usenet News==---- http://www.newsfeeds.com The #1 Newsgroup Service in the World! 120,000+ Newsgroups ----= East and West-Coast Server Farms - Total Privacy via Encryption =----
From: Charles Shannon Hendrix on 22 May 2005 16:59
["Followup-To:" header set to alt.folklore.computers.] On 2005-05-01, Steve Richfie1d <Steve(a)NOSPAM.smart-life.net> wrote: > Less than 1% of such knowledge is ever taught in schools. Sure it might > be nice to have this particular 1%, but at what cost?! Certainly at the > cost of NOT learning SEVERAL percent (with plenty of overlap) by other > means. Hey, if not for public schools, I'd never have learned to cuss, fight, cheat, lie, fear, or cause fear. BAH is right... formal education is very important... :) > They certainly understand special relativity as we have discussed how > ridiculous shows like Star Trek are in completely ignoring Lorentz > transformations and other aspects of relativity in their plots. I thought the idea behind a wave-motion engine assisted by a warp field was to avoid those problems... -- shannon "AT" widomaker.com -- ["It's a damn poor mind that can only think of one way to spell a word." -- Andrew Jackson] ----== Posted via Newsfeeds.Com - Unlimited-Uncensored-Secure Usenet News==---- http://www.newsfeeds.com The #1 Newsgroup Service in the World! 120,000+ Newsgroups ----= East and West-Coast Server Farms - Total Privacy via Encryption =---- |