What I Learned in School Today
It’s amazing to me when my kids come home from school and tell me what they learned at school during the day.
Some things are as they have always been.
Gym teachers (I still don’t call them PE teachers- habit I guess) still join with the jocks in mocking the smart kids or the ones who participate in the band or the drama club or other non-jockey activities. My kids happen to belong to all of these groups. But they are not classic jocks though they do play a lot of sports and play them pretty well. They just don’t do that clique and I couldn’t be more proud of the stands they have had to take and have actually taken.
Some math teachers appear to not have a deep background in math. I happen to have done a lot of math during my academic and professional voyages so know a few things about math. Some of these teachers do okay but the schools could do a lot to improve the way that kids understand math. Not just be able to do it but also understand it.
History? Usually buried within the subject called Social Studies. My boys have been lucky enough to have had a couple good SS teachers but still, now in 7th grade, they have learned precious little about the Constitution other than what they have been taught at home or learned on their own (which is a good bit I might add). Why do they learn about diversity, and immigration, and civil rights, and slavery, and other such deep and more adult topics long before anyone even bothers to mention anything about our founding documents? Wouldn’t it make sense to start with why people first came to this land and then what they did to found this country and then move on from there? Every vector has a starting point yes?
Perhaps because it is easier to cultivate-for-purpose young minds when you present to them a simple good-bad, right-wrong, black-white scenario and then use their only possible answer to sell your own wares. Not possible? Not the plan? Okay, believe what you will, it’s still a free country.
ELA? For those uninformed (and I have a solid foot still in that group) that means “English Language Arts” (http://www.corestandards.org/other-resources/key-shifts-in-english-language-arts). I suppose we now need to differentiate between English Language Arts and what may be coming later on. Dunno. I only know that since my kids have started down this enhanced path their use of the language has degraded and their desire to read has faded. We work hard to fix that at home and will only have to work harder in the future I’m sure. Maybe it’s the local implementation of these so-called standards within our school district. Dunno. Just know what they are learning seems far removed from English and from what I would call Language Arts.
Maybe it really stands for Enhanced Liberal Arts. Dunno. Just sayin’.
Add in things like flipping the classroom (the way I read this is that the onus of actually teaching kids is flipped to where it needs to be done by them at home, maybe with help from mom and dad, so that the teachers can be “free” to provide individual attention to specific students during class- great concept and a rather clever way to shirk any responsibility for being able to teach a class; hell, folks could just have their kids try to learn online and then hire a tutor to fill in the gaps; I wonder though how many kids get left behind when the teacher needs to spend so much one-to-one time during the 50 minutes they have over twenty kids in class?) and I think we finally have the recipe for vaulting the U.S. over the twenty or thirty countries that are ahead of us in too many areas.
How about this. Get rid of the frickin unions that are about everything except for the students and a quality education (if this bothers you then here is a challenge- make Karen Lewis take a 7th grad ISAT test and see how she does- if she does well then you can call her an educator and then I will believe she is all about the poor kids); break the teacher-union-democratic party-progressive policy circle and just hire and reward the best teachers; hold teachers responsible for results, fire the bad ones quickly, but hold the administrations even more so; pay only for performance especially at the admin levels; interview and survey the parents AND the kids. You’d be surprised how many kids know what’s what and are more than willing to share their thoughts. In the end they are the real customers and they are the ones most helped- or hurt- by the system.
Get real. And get aware of some of the crap they are feeding your kids and I don’t mean greasy potato chips Mrs. President.
I plan to have a lot more to say on all this. To me there is not really a more critical need in this country then to educate our kids properly- in ALL areas. More on that to come…