New York school eliminates homework - parents outraged

[ArmorPierce]

I'm seeing people lumping in homework in the same area as common-core testing. That homework is a waste of time because it is just teaching to a test, that there shouldn't be any more than 15 minutes of homework.

Are you kidding me, 15 minutes? You cannot do anything effectively in 15 minutes unless it is plug and play tasks.

It more sounds to me that people just don't want to do work and don't want objective measures of productivity. Result of doing this is that people will succeed or fail purely based on subjective and arbitrary measures.

I am actually against homework for busy work in of itself. I am in favor of homework as recommended for studying towards standardized tests. Do it if you want or not, the point is to ensure you know the material and you can demonstrate it in a test.

[Terralthra]

Annecdotal personal evidence is even more useless than usual when talking about education. Your memory of your personal school experience is highly subjective, self-edited and (typically) distorted. Parents watching their children go through school are a bit more rational but obviously still biased and looking at a very small sample.

Best succinct comment from a non-education professional in this thread. Second Simon's upvote.

If you want teachers to control the attitudes and behavior of all of the children in the classroom at all times, perhaps you should be willing to pay teachers a salary commensurate with babysitting 24-30 children and teaching them, too. As a (fairly young) college professor, I make between $60-$80 per class-hour just to teach, with no babysitting whatsoever: if a student's behavior is inappropriate, I simply tell them to leave the classroom. Now, that's college-level teaching, and Simon teaches secondary school, so maybe there's a bit of a pay-cut there, so we'll figure what, $45/hr?

Then let's see, that's 27 (mean) children times $10/hour per kid (average baby-sitting wage) makes $270 + $45 for teaching them stuff and Simon would get $315/hr. 6 hour school day, 180 school days per year. $315*6*180, making for a gross yearly income of $340,200 per year. That's...about 6 times what the average high school teacher makes in the US.

I guarantee that if you offer teachers $350k/year salaries, you will get plenty of people with boundless energy and enthusiasm for preventing bullying. Until and unless you're willing to spend that kind of cash, no, it's not the teachers' jobs to make students not act like little sociopaths. That's parents' jobs.

So basically your solution for workers who do not perform their work properly is to reward them with money and hope they feel gracious enough to improve as opposed to firing them and hiring someone else for the position? Well, I must say that in a different world where there are more jobs than people and the unemployed are in high demand I imagine that would be our only recourse. Thankfully we do not live in such a world. And we can just keep firing them until we run into one for whom not starving is motivation enough.

There are so many problems with this paragraph that I am not sure where to start. The idea that you can simply fire existing teachers for not doing things well outside their job description and hire unemployed people off the street to do the job just as well or better is...so out of touch with reality that it's beyond wrong. It's unconscionably, horrifically wrong.

First, we do, in fact, live in a world where qualified, competent teachers are in short supply. We know this because the US has a significant subsidy program to try to incentivize competent, qualified people to go into the teaching profession. Due to demographics and an increasing understanding that smaller class sizes increases student success, the US is in the position of needing hundreds of thousands of new teachers every year for the foreseeable future. This is such a problem that many school districts, desperate for teachers and substitutes, are waiving significant requirements (like teaching credentials) if the person in question is qualified to teach otherwise (bachelor's in the relevant field) and interested enough to apply for the waiver.

Second, even if we somehow get to the point where we aren't hurting actively for teachers and thus can afford to fire people who don't do far more than their job requirements with respect to bullying, where exactly do you think you're going to find replacements? Unemployment for Bachelor's degree holders is 4%, a third less than that of the general population, and even with the aforementioned waivers, that is the bare minimum required education to teach. Among those with professional degrees or Master's degrees (like, you know, teachers), it's even lower, in the low 2% range. And I guarantee you, that 2% doesn't want to teach. I know this because there are teaching jobs open, and they do not want them.

Thirdly, even if we ignore that there is a known need for more teachers already, and that there is not an existing pool of qualified candidates, let's pretend that we don't want a piece of paper saying a person is competent to teach or qualified in their subject area. Why would we want this? You just said that making sure people are educated in their youth is incredibly important, more so than food. But not important enough that you won't just hire anyone off the street?

I have absolutely no respect for anyone who for what ever reason feels unmotivated to do his job. It's your job. Your duty. Your responsibility. You took it upon your self to devote your working hours to it. And there are people who depend on you doing it right. And if that means nothing to you, than you are a very rotten person. And it does not matter how bad it sucks, because life sucks by definition. It sucks for all of us. And it will suck for ever more. So that is not an excuse.

My job is to teach, it's not to babysit nor to provide therapy to people whose parents haven't told them that bullying is wrong. I'm sure Simon could provide his local school district's contract and policies regarding teacher responsibilities showing the same thing.

This is ignoring that literally every competent teacher I know goes above and beyond their job responsibilities on a weekly basis. Most of us chose the job on purpose because we wanted to help, not for the massive paycheck. Anyone qualified to teach is qualified to do much higher-paying jobs.

If you want teachers to control the attitudes and behavior of all of the children in the classroom at all times, perhaps you should be willing to pay teachers a salary commensurate with babysitting 24-30 children and teaching them, too. As a (fairly young) college professor, I make between $60-$80 per class-hour just to teach, with no babysitting whatsoever: if a student's behavior is inappropriate, I simply tell them to leave the classroom. Now, that's college-level teaching, and Simon teaches secondary school, so maybe there's a bit of a pay-cut there, so we'll figure what, $45/hr?

Then let's see, that's 27 (mean) children times $10/hour per kid (average baby-sitting wage) makes $270 + $45 for teaching them stuff and Simon would get $315/hr. 6 hour school day, 180 school days per year. $315*6*180, making for a gross yearly income of $340,200 per year. That's...about 6 times what the average high school teacher makes in the US.

I guarantee that if you offer teachers $350k/year salaries, you will get plenty of people with boundless energy and enthusiasm for preventing bullying. Until and unless you're willing to spend that kind of cash, no, it's not the teachers' jobs to make students not act like little sociopaths. That's parents' jobs.

More realistically, instead of paying one person six times as much, pay six people the same amount.

I assure you that if you took my 27-kid section and split it into three 9-kid sections each of which had two full time teachers making the same $XY000/year* salary I do, you would get amazing results. Probably a lot better than if you had the same section being taught by one person making $(6*XY)000/year*.

Indeed. That's why my faculty unions negotiate class sizes very carefully.

If you're actually being given four or six hours of homework a day, you have grounds to complain- but that is pretty sharply at odds with what I see from most US (and Western-in-general) schools. This is why I asked Purple where he went to school, not that he ever bothered to answer.

I wonder why anyone would refuse to answer personal questions that might lead to his identity and location online.

Well, if you're not going to talk about where you went to school, then I hope you'll forgive me if I don't believe your claims.

You claim that you attended school during the late 1990s and early 2000s and yet were taught bizarre drunken-caveman curriculum in which your schools taught nothing of any value for a five year period between the 4th and 8th grades.

It seems far more likely that you are selectively ignoring valuable lessons you learned during those years, or that you are selectively editing out the fact that you didn't learn them in a timely manner and paid for it later by having to work harder to accomplish the same amount.

Based on evidence from this thread, as well as the climate change/nuclear power and the ISIS/Star Wars crossover thread, I'd argue Purple didn't actually learn the important thinking lessons in school that he ought to have.

[aerius]

Based on evidence from this thread, as well as the climate change/nuclear power and the ISIS/Star Wars crossover thread, I'd argue Purple didn't actually learn the important thinking lessons in school that he ought to have.

Personally I think this is the best example of Purple's failure to self-educate. It starts at the post below and gets worse as the thread goes on.
http://bbs.stardestroyer.net/viewtopic. ... 1#p3875691

Ladies & gentlemen, this is what happens when a person with no background or foundational knowledge attempts to educate himself with Wikipedia.

[Tiriol]

Since people throw anecdotal evidence around, I'll offer my two cents' worth as well:

I stopped doing homework sometimes around high school, for the most part. Why? I was a stupid teenager who didn't bother. Now I hasten to add that I actually finished high school with better diploma than most and I got special stipend to boot (mostly for excellent history class scores). But now, looking back, I should have done that bloody homework. Yeah, I hated it, but it would have helped me to retain some memory of what we were actually studying. I'm just blessed with above-average memory and intellect. Nothing spectacular, just enough to not fuck everything up. It still didn't remove my need for homework entirely and because I THOUGHT back then that I was too smart for that, I am now seriously contemplating about taking some community college/evening classes of advanced mathematics, physics and chemistry.

Homework can be downright stupid, needless and wasteful if the teacher assigning it is incompetent or doesn't really care. It still doesn't remove the general need and purpose of homework. The real question on the teachers' part should be how to make sure that assigned homework is actually meaningful and will further the students' studies and ability to learn and handle information; and the real question for parents and even students is how to make sure that the homework is done properly. Then again, having a string of bad teachers will ruin any and all desire to even contemplate doing homework. There will come a point when the piles of useless, BS homework is just too much and it will completely remove any desire or apparent need for any homework at all, even if the student has other, better teachers with actually useful and important homework assignments for them.

[TheFeniX]

Well, I wouldn't consider anecdotes completely useless in this situation considering not only do people learn differently, but there's some pretty clear cut examples of just piss-poor teaching. My Algebra I teacher had an extremely thick accent as he had immigrated to the US not long before starting teaching. Extremely intelligent and knowledgeable teacher, but he spent a substantial amount of time re-explaining his lessons and even trying to cut through our Texas accents to understand our questions. So, most of our actual work time had to be handled via homework when there was nothing but the textbook to work with.

My Algebra II teacher was the baseball coach. He literally read the section we would learn about during his off-period before class. He knew next to nothing about Algebra. I remember once when I asked him about some formula I couldn't work out. He said "FeniX, you make straight A's in this class. You know more about this shit than I do."

The reason for that? My dad has forgotten more math than I'll ever know. The man can recall pretty much all the math he's ever learned. So, any time I couldn't figure something out, I had someone waiting there to explain it to me. The big problem with American education is those kids who are the "brightest" get most of the attention when they really don't need it. They have motivations (or at least their parents do) to push themselves to learn because they've already been impressed upon the importance of education. Their work needs more attention because it should be more abstract, thus requiring more time to analyze and grade.

It's the ones that haven't learned that who are dumped off into remedial classes, loaded down with busy work, and beaten over the head with enough standard testing knowledge to get a diploma.

This is going to get a bit ranty, so feel free to stop reading: I saw both side of this growing up. When I was young, I was in special ed for a speech impediment. But schools don't care because that still meant I was an idiot when they saw that mark in my paperwork. So when I switched districts I was put in all remedial classes. I made straight 100s. Like literal hundreds, with a few high-A's in the mix. When you spent all of last year learning multiplication/division and you spend the next year doing the same thing, it's not exactly hard. I actually had years of school with insane amounts of Deja Vu. After that first year, they'd cram me into advanced classes and I'd round out to solids A's with some Bs. Since our district went K-5, 6, 7-8, then 9-12: I had this happen a few times.

The difference in the quality of the education is staggering. In remedial classes, it's basically "here's this info, do some busy work on it, spit it out a couple days later, forget it, GOTO 10."

Advanced and AP classes require actual conclusions to be made with that information. "Ok, I taught you about literary themes. Read this, now explain to me what themes you've found and why they are important to the material" or "come up with a situation that applies to trajectories, figure out the math involved, and show your work."

The problem is one is a lot more subjective to grade and takes more time to grade, thus requiring more time on part of the teacher to handle. Having kids just spit out information you've fed them works really well in an environment where funding is being gutted at any opportunity. Both groups of kids need about equal attention, just different kinds. But the way the system is setup, school are forced to put all their focus into the ones most likely to bolster their averages for funding and load the rest down with enough easy busy work to keep them from cratering the averages.

You know, because running schools like a for-profit business isn't insane......

[Elheru Aran]

It's easy to make straight A's in special education classes in most of the US because, frankly, they don't expect much. A bright kid with a minor disability can appear to excel when all he (or she) has to deal with are substandard material and expectations.

While schools aren't supposed to be daycare... special ed pretty much *is* day care, especially in the more severely handicapped cases (physical/mental/whatever). There is a minimal expectation of education, but honestly they don't really expect much. In the severe handicap cases, they tend to just quietly move them up the ladder as they age. In my sister's district (she's a SPED teacher), they allow the severe kids to stay in public school until they're 20.

As long as we're all sharing...

I grew up with homeschooling, but the two years I went to public school (4th and 8th grades) I was in a special-ed class (hearing impaired/deaf kids). 4th grade I stayed in there the whole time, it wasn't too bad from an educational perspective but I had an exceptional teacher. 8th grade, my first quarter I was mostly in the special ed class but the standards were far lower there. So my mom stepped in (I personally didn't care, it was easy work) and started campaigning for the school board to allow me to mainstream with the 'magnet' classes and hearing kids, with an interpreter. It took a little while but I started doing that and it was far better for my education as it was far more challenging and difficult than the material the kids in the SPED trailer were dealing with (basic math versus quadratic equations and trigonometry, for example).

That was the extent of my dealings with the public school system, but I can say with some confidence that as far as special ed in Georgia goes, the expectations are pretty low, mostly because they're generally assuming that these kids have no real future. The severely handicapped kids will probably live out the rest of their lives with parents or other family; the less handicapped kids are destined for either low-level jobs or the dole (probably drawing assistance even if they're working).

[TheFeniX]

It's easy to make straight A's in special education classes in most of the US because, frankly, they don't expect much. A bright kid with a minor disability can appear to excel when all he (or she) has to deal with are substandard material and expectations.

Let me clarify: I was in "special ed" my 2nd and 3rd grade year. It was a 30 minute class a day where the specialist helped me with my speech impediment. Aside from that, I was in all normal classes. In fact, none of my friends knew about it other than I would disappear during class every day for a short while. I never actually ran into any mentally disabled kids: our class was specifically for kids with speech issues. However, I would find out later: neither FBISD nor LCISD actually differentiated between the two merely labeling both "Special Education." Having that mark on my record meant any time an administrator was looking for where to put me, they defaulted to academic classes. Because it's obvious I somehow got over being mentally disabled. These weren't special education classes, just the lowest class normal kids could be put into.

While schools aren't supposed to be daycare... special ed pretty much *is* day care, especially in the more severely handicapped cases (physical/mental/whatever).

Special education for the mentally handicapped not only requires specialists due to their case, but they also do not factor into rankings for education funding. There have actually been cases of normal intelligence, yet troubled kids, being put into special-ed classes to remove them without expelling them, which also puts more burden on that system since it isn't designed to deal with them and they need to be focusing on the kids with actual disabilities.

[Elheru Aran]

In my eighth grade class, the second classroom in the trailer was also SPED-- for the 'problem' children, as I understood at the time. Now that I'm older I realize those were probably the kids with emotional/mental issues. They tended to have a lot of fights over on that side.

Ultimately the real problem is that public schools, by and large, are not funded sufficiently to sustain a level of education much above the bare minimum effort for the great majority of students. Special ed gets the short end of the stick because, as I said, there aren't high expectations. Teachers do what they can, but they are hamstrung by the lack of funding, large class sizes (because they can't afford to build larger schools with more classrooms and hire more teachers to reduce class sizes), and stringent regulations that prevent them from applying common-sense disciplinary methods.

[TheFeniX]

Ultimately the real problem is that public schools, by and large, are not funded sufficiently to sustain a level of education much above the bare minimum effort for the great majority of students. Special ed gets the short end of the stick because, as I said, there aren't high expectations.

And as part of that, Special Education classes are exempt from "No Child Left Behind" testing standards. The point of it was to make sure schools weren't being penalized trying and failing to educate kids who may not have the intelligence to retain even enough information to spit out onto a Scantron for a state test. However, what this ends up doing is not only giving administrators a label to slap on kids to remove low-testers from their list, but gives them an incentive to pull funding out of special education programs to put into "more promising" areas that will bolster their grades so they can continue to receive funding or increase said funding.

There are cases of administrators talking to parents about getting their kids into special ed and helping them do so, even when interviewing the student after-the-fact shows he's not actually eligible for special education. He/she is just not testing well. A lot of reading like this is available. Just do some reading about "The Texas Miracle." I recommend reading a few actual books about the topic from educators and administrators in the know. I did and it doesn't take a rocket surgeon to figure out why American schools are so fucked up.

All in all, 463 kids left Sharpstown High School that year, for a variety of reasons. The school reported zero dropouts, but dozens of the students did just that. School officials hid that fact by classifying, or coding, them as leaving for acceptable reasons: transferring to another school, or returning to their native country.

And they blame the schools for this when the whole clusterfuck is the end result of some of the dumbest legislation written. It's like pointing a gun at someone's head and telling them "shoot this dog or I'll shoot your family" then asking "WHY WOULD YOU SHOOT THAT DOG!?"

Teachers do what they can, but they are hamstrung by the lack of funding, large class sizes (because they can't afford to build larger schools with more classrooms and hire more teachers to reduce class sizes), and stringent regulations that prevent them from applying common-sense disciplinary methods.

I honestly don't feel teachers should be involved in the disciplinary process at all aside from being required to report unacceptable behavior and that reporting having to be taken seriously by administration even when it doesn't involve "weapons" either real or imagined.

My wife, nor my good friend who is also a teacher should not be complaining to me about how they constantly have to discipline their 1-2 students verbally. It's the same small group of kids that get multiple complaints from numerous teachers and students. It should literally be as easy as "this kid copped a 'tude and I kicked his ass out of class because I am here to teach kids, not babysit." The problem is, without actual violence or the threat of, administration has nowhere to put little shits except maybe In-School suspension for a day or two.

If I knew one kid was eating up so much of my child's learning time with his stupid bullshit, I'd be fucking pissed. And if it was my kid, ho boy.....

[NoXion]

Let me be more precise. You won the "self-motivation" lottery. Other people have to learn self-motivation, or never acquire it at all.

There is a dearth of reliable mechanisms for taking a child who is not self-motivated to do the work necessary to master a concept, and teach them that motivation. It's not that the school doesn't care about teaching this, it's that we're genuinely having trouble figuring out how because classically that's supposed to be the parent's job, and classically we're supposed to just flunk the kids who never get the hang of it at all.

Thing is, that only works if you're prepared to accept, oh, a 70-80% high school graduation rate in your society. Most people aren't, today. So research is ongoing... and in all honesty, seriously expecting students to work long and hard at various projects and problem sets is the best we've come up with to date. At least to my knowledge.

Seems to me that there would be considerable value to investing in methods that teach self-motivation in an academic context, beyond, "do this or face detention".

The point is not that there is a single way that works for everyone; it doesn't. The point is that this is genuinely the best I know of.

If you know a way to custom-tailor schooling for every child so every child will take an interest in every thing and yet somehow when the smoke clears they all learned the stuff the state mandates that they learn... great! Hopefully it can be done on the same budget we now have, because otherwise it won't get approved. But I'd love to see it even if it does turn out to be four times as expensive as what we're doing now.

If there is an insistence from the political classes that high school graduation rates must be above 70-80%, and yet they also insist on providing funding only for the same cookie-cutter approach which leaves 20-30% behind... then there is a problem. You're not going to square that circle by handing out the same old homework assignments again and again.

I don't know about anyone else but I really never do assign homework as a power trip. I assign it because I genuinely think they need the practice.

Does that make me just another fuckwit?

No. But it might if you do the same thing over and over again while expecting different results. If you want to instil a love of learning, that's fantastic as far as it goes; but in my case the insistence on homework failed to do that. And before you bring up anecdotes again, is it so unreasonable for me to doubt that I'm the only one?

I was responding to Purple's claim that (in essence) students don't learn anything useful between the fourth and eighth grades. They do, or at least they're supposed to.

If you look at what schools actually explicitly state they are trying to accomplish, you will find that they are trying to teach these things both inside and outside of class, with the homework being viewed as a single component of a larger program of instruction.

Would you agree that if a school insists on attempting to teach via a method to which a pupil is not receptive, that said school is wasting both their time and the pupil's? There has to be some initial motivation and if it's not there, is it not better to try and inspire it through a different approach?

This is kind of my point.

We've got a barrage of people here who are upset that their teachers required them to exercise their minds outside of the classroom, while simultaneously talking up how well and effectively they exercised their own minds on their own.

When I hear this, I find it a lot easier to believe "this guy had a hyperactive sense of I'm-being-cheated-out-of-my-free-time as a kid" than to believe "essentially every teacher this guy ever had was a drooling sub-moron who assigned homework just for the power trip."

Which is more likely, that dozens of adults were on average that incompetent? Or that one teenager had an exaggerated sense of grievance? You know, like the one virtually every teenager in the developed world seems to have?

Yeah OK, I'll grant that at as a teenager, I resented having my free time outside of school being taken up with what I saw as bullshit. Frankly I still don't see the point since I was already spending a significant portion of my waking hours at school, but there you go. If you really are interested in actually teaching, and not just working as a teacher by the numbers, then attitudes like the ones I had are a significant barrier to your goals. So what do you do? If you just insist that this boring shitwork has to be done regardless, then to my teenage ears you're just another Jobsworth who can be safely ignored while I play video games at home. That might sound terribly shortsighted to you, and as an adult I'd agree, but that's my my point; as a teenager, I quite simply lacked the perspective of a fully grown adult like you, and nothing short of actually growing up and living as an adult is going to change that perspective.

Simply insisting that I knuckle under because you said so is not going to work, and neither is the other rhetorical trick teachers used on me, where they "predicted" that if I didn't do homework I would end up spending the rest of my adult life scrubbing toilets or whatever, when in actual fact I have managed to land myself OK jobs in low-level administration. And that was after spending a good few years after school bumming around and partying, to boot.

[Alyeska]

Official Moderator Warning:

Terralthra, aerius. You are both guilty of violating DR 2. No Vendettas. Carrying on a grudge from another thread to use purely as an insult. Don't do it again.

Warning has been rescinded upon further research. My apologies for the hasty decision.

[Simon_Jester]

My Algebra II teacher was the baseball coach. He literally read the section we would learn about during his off-period before class. He knew next to nothing about Algebra. I remember once when I asked him about some formula I couldn't work out. He said "FeniX, you make straight A's in this class. You know more about this shit than I do."

It is actually almost possible to be a good teacher despite such a massively crippling handicap as "totally ignorant of the subject matter."

However, it is staggeringly difficult, and I would be amazed if Coach Algebra Teacher pulled it off...

The big problem with American education is those kids who are the "brightest" get most of the attention when they really don't need it. They have motivations (or at least their parents do) to push themselves to learn because they've already been impressed upon the importance of education. Their work needs more attention because it should be more abstract, thus requiring more time to analyze and grade.

Honestly, the brightest kids don't get that extra attention so much anymore- standardized testing's threats to kill our family has at least gotten us to shoot that dog, to borrow your metaphor.

In fact, the brightest kids get so much less attention at a mediocre-ish school nowadays that I worry it's going to cripple our ability to produce people with high degrees of technical literacy and intellectual ability, who we need for all sorts of roles.

The difference in the quality of the education is staggering. In remedial classes, it's basically "here's this info, do some busy work on it, spit it out a couple days later, forget it, GOTO 10."

Advanced and AP classes require actual conclusions to be made with that information. "Ok, I taught you about literary themes. Read this, now explain to me what themes you've found and why they are important to the material" or "come up with a situation that applies to trajectories, figure out the math involved, and show your work."

The problem is one is a lot more subjective to grade and takes more time to grade, thus requiring more time on part of the teacher to handle...

The big OTHER problem

I mean, they tell us to do this all the time all over the place, we know we're supposed to. The problem is that at the high school level, if I take my average gen-ed kids and assign them problems like you list from the advanced classes, questions that use what we call "higher order thinking..."

Those kids will stare blankly. They'll ALL stare blankly. They will feel empowered by their shared incomprehension and tell off the teacher for daring to ask them an 'impossible' question.

It's not that they're stupid, it's that they have basically no idea how to do this kind of advanced thinking in a disciplined manner. That's a skill in its own right and it has to be taught at the elementary and middle school level.

Having kids just spit out information you've fed them works really well in an environment where funding is being gutted at any opportunity. Both groups of kids need about equal attention, just different kinds. But the way the system is setup, school are forced to put all their focus into the ones most likely to bolster their averages for funding and load the rest down with enough easy busy work to keep them from cratering the averages.

You know, because running schools like a for-profit business isn't insane......

Honestly, a lot of the time the conclusion is "spend an assload of time with the students who are doing poorly while leaving the smart kids to figure it out themselves." I mean, I get water-cooler talk complaining about how more and more the teachers feel like they're being asked to teach to the lowest common denominator.

The net result is still bad, it's just a different bad.

Ultimately the real problem is that public schools, by and large, are not funded sufficiently to sustain a level of education much above the bare minimum effort for the great majority of students. Special ed gets the short end of the stick because, as I said, there aren't high expectations.

And as part of that, Special Education classes are exempt from "No Child Left Behind" testing standards. The point of it was to make sure schools weren't being penalized trying and failing to educate kids who may not have the intelligence to retain even enough information to spit out onto a Scantron for a state test. However, what this ends up doing is not only giving administrators a label to slap on kids to remove low-testers from their list, but gives them an incentive to pull funding out of special education programs to put into "more promising" areas that will bolster their grades so they can continue to receive funding or increase said funding.

Our district doesn't work that way, and if anything we tie ourselves into even bigger knots.

And they blame the schools for this when the whole clusterfuck is the end result of some of the dumbest legislation written. It's like pointing a gun at someone's head and telling them "shoot this dog or I'll shoot your family" then asking "WHY WOULD YOU SHOOT THAT DOG!?"

I KNOW RIGHT?

Again, the mechanic you describe isn't the only failure mechanism that results from NCLB, high-stakes testing, and the poisonous idea that we MUST produce measurable results on tests and graduation rates and other metrics like "low suspension rate." But there's a huge complex of such mechanisms all tied to the same root causes, so yeah.

Teachers do what they can, but they are hamstrung by the lack of funding, large class sizes (because they can't afford to build larger schools with more classrooms and hire more teachers to reduce class sizes), and stringent regulations that prevent them from applying common-sense disciplinary methods.

I honestly don't feel teachers should be involved in the disciplinary process at all aside from being required to report unacceptable behavior and that reporting having to be taken seriously by administration even when it doesn't involve "weapons" either real or imagined.

My wife, nor my good friend who is also a teacher should not be complaining to me about how they constantly have to discipline their 1-2 students verbally. It's the same small group of kids that get multiple complaints from numerous teachers and students. It should literally be as easy as "this kid copped a 'tude and I kicked his ass out of class because I am here to teach kids, not babysit." The problem is, without actual violence or the threat of, administration has nowhere to put little shits except maybe In-School suspension for a day or two.

If I knew one kid was eating up so much of my child's learning time with his stupid bullshit, I'd be fucking pissed. And if it was my kid, ho boy.....

Yes. This. It would be so stupidly easy to create a detention system that would hold these kids, hold the parents accountable if their kid keeps acting in a way that gets them thrown into detention, and actually treat students' willfully disruptive behavior as a serious problem that merits actual punishment.

Unfortunately for a lot of reasons I'm not going into this late at night, this... does not happen.

---

Seems to me that there would be considerable value to investing in methods that teach self-motivation in an academic context, beyond, "do this or face detention".

If I had any idea how to do this while simultaneously actually teaching the relevant content material, I'd be doing it. Some teachers seem to be good at it, but as far as I know their skills are not highly transferable- or, again, we'd ALL be doing it.

If there is an insistence from the political classes that high school graduation rates must be above 70-80%, and yet they also insist on providing funding only for the same cookie-cutter approach which leaves 20-30% behind... then there is a problem. You're not going to square that circle by handing out the same old homework assignments again and again.

Yeah, but the circle's unsquarable for a lot of other reasons and many of the issues are tied in with other political constraints, among them the ones Fenix mentioned and the ones I mentioned above.

It's like, we can raise our standards, we can raise our graduation rate, or we can raise hell. Pick one out of three... and yet the bureaucracy wants us to do both of the first two while letting the students do the third.

No. But it might if you do the same thing over and over again while expecting different results. If you want to instil a love of learning, that's fantastic as far as it goes; but in my case the insistence on homework failed to do that. And before you bring up anecdotes again, is it so unreasonable for me to doubt that I'm the only one?

Obviously you're not. The problem is that I'm stuck in the crack between actually teaching specific skills as a math teacher ("this is how you solve a quadratic"), and somehow teaching the love-of-learning stuff.

In my honest opinion, middle school is the IDEAL time to do this because the actual subject matter is relatively un-demanding and you can take time to set up lots of stuff that revolves around problem-solving for the love of problem-solving and so on.

High school is a harder time to do it.

Would you agree that if a school insists on attempting to teach via a method to which a pupil is not receptive, that said school is wasting both their time and the pupil's? There has to be some initial motivation and if it's not there, is it not better to try and inspire it through a different approach?

I know a lot of people who really are shuffling and cycling around in hopes of finding something that works. Meanwhile, there's that damnable problem of actually teaching the skills expected for the test...

[Channel72]

Obviously you're not. The problem is that I'm stuck in the crack between actually teaching specific skills as a math teacher ("this is how you solve a quadratic"), and somehow teaching the love-of-learning stuff.

It's funny you call solving a quadratic a "specific skill". I think the reason it's likely very hard to instill a "love of learning" into the average teenager is that they don't see any of this as being taught "skills". Skills like, um, applying the quadratic formula, seem totally abstract and useless. To a teenager, this literally appears like a comical example of Sisyphean torture - totally meaningless busywork.

Speaking of squares and shit, as a student, I was taught how to solve quadratic equations, and then I promptly forgot like two seconds later. Then, like a few years ago, I had to figure out how to calculate offsets into a memory buffer for a specialized memory allocator I was writing where the block sizes formed a quadratic sequence. I realized this could be reduced to simply solving an equation where the variable was squared. I Googled the quadratic formula and learned it in like a few minutes.

However, the reality is that most students aren't going to ever have that experience, and I'm not sure "love of learning" is something that can be taught - and so learning anything beyond basic arithmetic will remain a useless, Sisyphean task their math teachers forced upon them. Which is why I'm really starting to come around to the idea that vocational classes should be a serious option after learning how to do basic arithmetic, read, write, tie your shoes and not shit yourself.

[Elheru Aran]

Which is why I'm really starting to come around to the idea that vocational classes should be a serious option after learning how to do basic arithmetic, read, write, tie your shoes and not shit yourself.

This was basically how the great majority of education back in the late 19th-early 20th worked, in the US at least. Most people didn't go beyond middle school in the country, or high school in the urban areas, so along with the basics of education (reading, 'riting, and 'rithmetic) there were classes such as 'Manual Training' (woodworking, cabinet-making, and other mechanical training) and Sloyd (a division of woodwork that related to other classes by incorporating mechanical drawing, math, and design... with a knife). There may well have been agricultural extensions at rural schools; I'm not that familiar with the context. From my understanding, if students proved to be exceptional, teachers would single them out for individual assistance and extra work; from that point they would help those students in processes such as applying to go to college or whatever. The rest of the students were happy to just finish school and start work.

Of course, the times were very different. The biggest change is probably how prevalent technology has become. Your idea does still have some merit, but unfortunately society has gotten stuck on the whole 'everybody needs to go to college to get a job' brainbug...

[Simon_Jester]

Obviously you're not. The problem is that I'm stuck in the crack between actually teaching specific skills as a math teacher ("this is how you solve a quadratic"), and somehow teaching the love-of-learning stuff.

It's funny you call solving a quadratic a "specific skill". I think the reason it's likely very hard to instill a "love of learning" into the average teenager is that they don't see any of this as being taught "skills". Skills like, um, applying the quadratic formula, seem totally abstract and useless. To a teenager, this literally appears like a comical example of Sisyphean torture - totally meaningless busywork.

Speaking of squares and shit, as a student, I was taught how to solve quadratic equations, and then I promptly forgot like two seconds later. Then, like a few years ago, I had to figure out how to calculate offsets into a memory buffer for a specialized memory allocator I was writing where the block sizes formed a quadratic sequence. I realized this could be reduced to simply solving an equation where the variable was squared. I Googled the quadratic formula and learned it in like a few minutes.

However, the reality is that most students aren't going to ever have that experience, and I'm not sure "love of learning" is something that can be taught - and so learning anything beyond basic arithmetic will remain a useless, Sisyphean task their math teachers forced upon them. Which is why I'm really starting to come around to the idea that vocational classes should be a serious option after learning how to do basic arithmetic, read, write, tie your shoes and not shit yourself.

Honestly, I don't disagree.

One thing I think SHOULD be part of the required curriculum is a course in basic logic; this might be offered as a required course after students have passed the arithmetic classes, taken either before or after Algebra I, with all math beyond Algebra I and Introductory Logic being an elective.

[Math seems the most appropriate subject to group a logic course with]

...

This was basically how the great majority of education back in the late 19th-early 20th worked, in the US at least. Most people didn't go beyond middle school in the country, or high school in the urban areas, so along with the basics of education (reading, 'riting, and 'rithmetic) there were classes such as 'Manual Training' (woodworking, cabinet-making, and other mechanical training) and Sloyd (a division of woodwork that related to other classes by incorporating mechanical drawing, math, and design... with a knife). There may well have been agricultural extensions at rural schools; I'm not that familiar with the context. From my understanding, if students proved to be exceptional, teachers would single them out for individual assistance and extra work; from that point they would help those students in processes such as applying to go to college or whatever. The rest of the students were happy to just finish school and start work.

Of course, the times were very different. The biggest change is probably how prevalent technology has become. Your idea does still have some merit, but unfortunately society has gotten stuck on the whole 'everybody needs to go to college to get a job' brainbug...

The problem is, yes, that effective, successful use of technology requires abstract thinking, as you say. So the standard of how much writing and math the students need has increased, and the high school curriculum is defined by the need to prepare students for college-level work.

Even if not everybody has to go to college, when realistically 30-50% of all workers do something that genuinely does require at least an associate's degree worth of skills, you can't afford to let the average public school graduate stop at the eighth grade.

[TheFeniX]

It is actually almost possible to be a good teacher despite such a massively crippling handicap as "totally ignorant of the subject matter."

However, it is staggeringly difficult, and I would be amazed if Coach Algebra Teacher pulled it off...

Considering what he had to work with and his students, I think he did ok. But Algebra II is what I would consider advanced math to a teenager. Saving the teacher with a Masters in computer science (a degree that came with years of advanced math) for the advanced kids and making a coach with a teaching certificate just get the kids their required credit is a huge diservice to those kids. Yea, most of them didn't give two shits, but there's likely a reason they didn't give those shits.

They shouldn't have to make that decision. There's enough people willing to teach, just probably not enough to deal with public school when there's better places to teach.

Honestly, the brightest kids don't get that extra attention so much anymore- standardized testing's threats to kill our family has at least gotten us to shoot that dog, to borrow your metaphor.

Then it's changed since I went to school and worked in schools in and around 2007. In my district, you could see where most of the teachers specific to a given discipline were going: they taught advanced classes. It makes sense, but schools shouldn't need to make that decision.

It's not that they're stupid, it's that they have basically no idea how to do this kind of advanced thinking in a disciplined manner. That's a skill in its own right and it has to be taught at the elementary and middle school level.

I saw this first hand, from the students point of view, multiple times growing up. You go from being in advanced classes one year, to remedial the next. I felt like a genius in those years because I could make basic inferences from limited information. Not even difficult stuff, but I was put into classes with kids that, even at an early age and likely due to economic reasons, couldn't perform some basic abstract thinking.

In 6th grade, the students in my class had a revolt. A fucking revolt, because the teacher gave an ungraded "pop quiz" where we had to write about our own feelings about a short-story we had just read. What was that one where the girl was from Earth, but they live on Venus? The sun only comes out once a blue moon and the kids locked her in a closet? Whatever, not important. They revolted over being asked to think because "We already did our assignment for the day."

I remember how hugely unpopular I was at the time and actually thought to myself "I wanted these people to like me?" Funny how one singular instance can shift your world-view.

Honestly, a lot of the time the conclusion is "spend an assload of time with the students who are doing poorly while leaving the smart kids to figure it out themselves." I mean, I get water-cooler talk complaining about how more and more the teachers feel like they're being asked to teach to the lowest common denominator.

So, all the shit I read about around 2005 basically happened. They can no longer dump all their time into the highest performers to bolster the averages because that shit was going to catch up to them. This was a key point noted by a few academics who wrote on the topic. Basically, by focusing on the "smart" kids who had money and parents who were involved (another issue was that those involved parents would make sure to push for where they want the time and money spent) would have a scaling effect. As kids at younger and younger ages were getting sub-par education, they would scale to a level that no one could support.

Makes sense we're at where we are now. The system was built to get there.

Of course, the times were very different. The biggest change is probably how prevalent technology has become. Your idea does still have some merit, but unfortunately society has gotten stuck on the whole 'everybody needs to go to college to get a job' brainbug...

No one grows up wanting to be a garbage man, even though it's an extremely important job and actually pays quite well. But training kids for "menial" labor is insulting because working with your hands doesn't have the ring to it anymore, but also due to instances of "undesirables" being funneled into vocational programs while the more fortunate (maybe white, but mostly just kids with money and influential parents who have the means to be involved with the school) get the advanced teaching.

There's other issues. Tools and all that junk cost money to keep and maintain. Books are books. They don't really break down from regular use and they also aren't dangerous. Reading a book about wiring an electrical socket is a lot safer than actually wiring one.

Our telecomm teacher begged, borrowed, and stole the parts for his department from outside donations. At the age of 16, we cabled, punched, and tested a Cat5 network. We built, configured, and setup 24 workstations and a server to run them. Mostly Windows, but a few early Linux builds. Printers, shared folders, all that jazz. Compatibility with some older network programs he had lying around. Extremely basic stuff, but that shit got me a job right out of high school. I had a resume at the age of 18 and got the first job I applied for.

You know how much of a head-up I had on guys out of college? Just knowing what files and buffers are when you work with medical and government programs (which are generally 10 years behind the time at a minimum) gets you half-way there. Our "Cisco guy" didn't even know what config.sys was.

But the program was too expensive and the teacher pissed off the wrong people fighting for the program. He also had Vietnam flashbacks in class, so he wasn't the most stable guy even though he's one of the teachers that influenced me (in a good way) the most in my life. I was actually called out of school (I went to another High School in the district, but we bussed over to Lamar for telecomm) to give details about all the computers and hardware since I knew everything about the network. Sad fucking day. They just ripped all that shit out of the walls and desks and just carted it off.

Anyways, that shit don't fly when you've got this stigma against any job where you have to lift something and you can't put a scantron to actually building something with you own fucking hands. You can't cut out the math, science, reading, etc. But that's not all school should be.

[Borgholio]

What was that one where the girl was from Earth, but they live on Venus? The sun only comes out once a blue moon and the kids locked her in a closet?

Yeah when I saw that movie, I didn't think about anything except how they should have been crushed, dissolved, and incinerated by the actual conditions on Venus. Totally broke the immersion for me. Yes, I was that much of a fucking nerd.

[Elheru Aran]

I'm certainly not going to advocate stopping education at 8th grade. However, I do think that high school should include elective courses that cover the possibility that students won't be (able or want to) going to college and getting higher education. A number of vocational courses would not be amiss. These could certainly be technical; building computer networks and such, like Fenix did. Regrettably the older skilled trades are dying out as a practical occupation. There could perhaps be some sort of liaison with local employers; say a construction company might be favorably inclined to hire on students that take Carpentry 101 through Framing and Basic Electrical Systems 302, for example, as long as they graduate.

The difficulty of course is financial, for the most part. Tools are no more susceptible to wear than books are; they'll last a long time if you buy (reasonable) quality and take care of them, which could be incorporated into the curriculum (table saw gets rusty because you left a wet rag on it? Clean it up pronto or you fail your weekly quiz). Some procedures which are potentially dangerous can be done with models; it's a few minutes' work to nail together a 24x24 sample frame wall with some drywall, and supply a few lengths of Romex, a socket box and all the bits you need. Hardware stores demonstrate stuff all the time, why not borrow those ideas.

'Menial' is a state of mind as much as it is job conditions. Working with one's hands gives one a fairly unique sense of pride in their achievement when it's recognized, and people need to get unfucked over that. Desk jobs are not the be-all-and-end-all of a career, and without manual labour, the economy would grind to a halt. Note that I'm not saying *unskilled* manual labour... quite a bit of it requires a lot of skill and training, actually. But you can't outsource everything to India and Mexico.

The fact of the matter is that given the skyrocketing costs of college and the 'everybody's got to have a degree' brainbug, secondary education is rapidly approaching a point where either it's going to completely fuck the pooch, or it'll become the last formal education that most people can afford before they enter the workforce. If there's some way for them to gain experience in the field that they show aptitude in, then by all means go for it as far as I'm concerned.

Alternatively, de-stigmatizing a two-year degree would be a big help. Those can be just as useful, if not more, than a bachelor's degree, as they tend to be a lot more focused upon specific careers rather than having to take a few years' worth of bollocks assorted knowledge before you actually get into the meat of whatever you're trying to study.

[TheFeniX]

I'm certainly not going to advocate stopping education at 8th grade. However, I do think that high school should include elective courses that cover the possibility that students won't be (able or want to) going to college and getting higher education.

There's no reason, considering the taxes I pay and that High School Diplomas (which actually used to mean something) are next to worthless that I shouldn't be able to walk into at least a state run community college and take courses needing only pay for books and other supplies without ending up in so much debt, my grandchildren will be getting bills. But "SOCIALISM" is bad. The stigma against a 2-year degree needs to go. Obviously for advanced fields: you need a 4-year+ degree, but there are multiple high-skill fields where a CC degree more than qualifies you for the work. Then again, I'm biased as I only have 2 associate degrees and still need to finish up my 4-year (I'm not that far away... if my credits are still even valid). But I've met more than enough tech guys with 4-year degrees that can't actually fix anything because they don't teach you how to troubleshoot.

If the state is gong to treat primary education as a pre-college prep system, they need to finish the job and send the graduates to college.

This is why I hate this state. Dick Perry would gloat about how educated the average Texan is. About how we're one of the most technological areas on the planet. He, of course, ignored the huge immigrant labor-force we brought in from the rest of the country and the world, while native Texans get the shit end of the stick because we're to busy arguing about teaching evolution theory as told by a bunch of dead 2000-year-old sheep herders. The only good thing that man did for Texas education was setup online degrees, which is a band-aid for a gushing head wound.

[Elheru Aran]

I do realize that you aren't likely to make as much book with a 2 year degree on your resume... but frankly, as long as you make enough money to keep a roof over your head, feed and clothe you and anybody else you're responsible for, pay your bills and put a little extra away at the end of the day, you're doing fine. You can get this with a lot of jobs that you can get with a 2 year degree. You won't be able to get this with some 4 year degrees (looking right at you, liberal arts).

People need to grow up and untwist their panties when it comes to education. Everybody needs some. Not everybody needs a lot. But if they're able and willing (and I've met a lot of students in college who didn't give a shit about where they were, just along for the ride), then there's no reason they shouldn't be able to take advantage of a system which would permit them to advance their education at a minimal cost. The student loan system is utter profiteering at its most banal, as are the costs of higher education.

[Simon_Jester]

Considering what he had to work with and his students, I think he did ok. But Algebra II is what I would consider advanced math to a teenager. Saving the teacher with a Masters in computer science (a degree that came with years of advanced math) for the advanced kids and making a coach with a teaching certificate just get the kids their required credit is a huge diservice to those kids. Yea, most of them didn't give two shits, but there's likely a reason they didn't give those shits.

Yeah, they should have given the guy Algebra I, or whatever else was as low as possible on the totem pole.

Honestly, the brightest kids don't get that extra attention so much anymore- standardized testing's threats to kill our family has at least gotten us to shoot that dog, to borrow your metaphor.

Then it's changed since I went to school and worked in schools in and around 2007. In my district, you could see where most of the teachers specific to a given discipline were going: they taught advanced classes. It makes sense, but schools shouldn't need to make that decision.

Maybe it depends on the extent to which a school, well... cheats. My school doesn't 'cheat' by methodically trying to hothouse-cultivate the kids who are likeliest to learn the material and ignoring everyone else.

Whether that's a nationwide trend, I can't say.

The trouble is, there's "don't just spend all your effort on the kids in the 70th percentile and up" and there's "waste everyone's time by taking kids who are from the 5th percentile because they actively get off on being disruptive in class and wander the halls all day, and keeping them around, when common sense says they need to be kicked out of the school."

It's not that they're stupid, it's that they have basically no idea how to do this kind of advanced thinking in a disciplined manner. That's a skill in its own right and it has to be taught at the elementary and middle school level.

I saw this first hand, from the students point of view, multiple times growing up. You go from being in advanced classes one year, to remedial the next. I felt like a genius in those years because I could make basic inferences from limited information. Not even difficult stuff, but I was put into classes with kids that, even at an early age and likely due to economic reasons, couldn't perform some basic abstract thinking.

In 6th grade, the students in my class had a revolt. A fucking revolt, because the teacher gave an ungraded "pop quiz" where we had to write about our own feelings about a short-story we had just read. What was that one where the girl was from Earth, but they live on Venus? The sun only comes out once a blue moon and the kids locked her in a closet? Whatever, not important. They revolted over being asked to think because "We already did our assignment for the day."

I remember how hugely unpopular I was at the time and actually thought to myself "I wanted these people to like me?" Funny how one singular instance can shift your world-view.

Yeah, that's about the size of it. And frankly, this isn't going to change until and unless we accept that the real purpose of school is not to teach kids a bucket list of unconnected concepts.

It is first, to teach the most basic things necessary for adult life (e.g. literacy).

THEN it is to teach as many as possible (realistically not 100%) the challenging art of how to think.

THEN it is to teach all those who can think how to do various other things that require the thinking.

So, all the shit I read about around 2005 basically happened. They can no longer dump all their time into the highest performers to bolster the averages because that shit was going to catch up to them. This was a key point noted by a few academics who wrote on the topic. Basically, by focusing on the "smart" kids who had money and parents who were involved (another issue was that those involved parents would make sure to push for where they want the time and money spent) would have a scaling effect. As kids at younger and younger ages were getting sub-par education, they would scale to a level that no one could support.

Makes sense we're at where we are now. The system was built to get there.

I'm not sure my district ever did this- but it might well explain the status quo, although there are plenty of alternative explanations.

Of course, the times were very different. The biggest change is probably how prevalent technology has become. Your idea does still have some merit, but unfortunately society has gotten stuck on the whole 'everybody needs to go to college to get a job' brainbug...

No one grows up wanting to be a garbage man, even though it's an extremely important job and actually pays quite well. But training kids for "menial" labor is insulting because working with your hands doesn't have the ring to it anymore, but also due to instances of "undesirables" being funneled into vocational programs while the more fortunate (maybe white, but mostly just kids with money and influential parents who have the means to be involved with the school) get the advanced teaching.

Frankly, the problem is the undesirables. These are mostly kids whose behavior is of the 'my god are you on drugs all the time?' level.

Once you take for granted that your school system HAS to educate the kids who are 'undesirable' for behavioral reasons, everything else goes to hell in a handbasket. You can't run a vocational program because the vocational classes are clogged up by these juvenile delinquents with delusions of grandeur. You can't mainstream the delinquents because they'll disrupt everyone else's education, on literally an every-day basis.

Forty years ago we'd just expel these kids and tell them "yeah, good luck with staying out of juvie given your raging personality issues that make you cuss out everyone who tries to tell you what to do including your teachers, principal, and probably your boss, while you get a GED on your own time." Nowadays that's not accepted.

[TheFeniX]

Maybe it depends on the extent to which a school, well... cheats. My school doesn't 'cheat' by methodically trying to hothouse-cultivate the kids who are likeliest to learn the material and ignoring everyone else.

Your school may have been "lucky" enough to be middle of the road (or bit better) testing wise and was already on an upward trend when it came to the improvement standards. In the early days, it was actually worse to be a well performing school because politicians don't understand averages. A 100 increases a 50 by a large margin, less an 80, MUCH less a 95. IIRC, there was no sliding scale, only a percentage improvement needed per year. You know, basic math shit.

So if your school was already performing very well, improving on the average was difficult. Even more difficult when other schools were underperforming and parents now had options to move their kids into better performing schools or the school was closed down: and more kids pour in and make those averages harder to keep up, even if those kids are good testers because they don't just hire on 1,000 more teachers and put up more buildings overnight.

It is first, to teach the most basic things necessary for adult life (e.g. literacy).

THEN it is to teach as many as possible (realistically not 100%) the challenging art of how to think.

THEN it is to teach all those who can think how to do various other things that require the thinking.

This is so hard because people don't understand how much money plays into getting that head start on everyone else. Education starts at home. Money means more leisure time for the parents, more toys, more vacations and/or exposure to different educational opportunities that may not seem like anything on the surface. A lot of my vocabulary comes from reading novels and games, like Magic: The Gathering and video games because writing was a huge deal with old-school RPGs. Having educated parents with time to spend with you makes life so much easier WRT to learning. Even the physical advantages of eating better can't be discounted.

Americans are working harder and longer for less money. This means less time for their kids. So we dumped the responsibility off on the school districts when it's just not deigned to handle that in any capacity. But who cares to fix it when those people with money can just ship their kids off to the thousands of private schools around the country? But they don't even really need that because those kids already have a huge leg-up.

Reports I've found find no real correlation between private and public schools increasing your chance at success. Aside from those "Ivy League" private schools designed to get you social connections at an early age. The amount of money you have and how active your parents are in your education are the two biggest factors. NOTE: that reading is years old and I couldn't find it again if I tried.

Frankly, the problem is the undesirables. These are mostly kids whose behavior is of the 'my god are you on drugs all the time?' level.

Sorry, let me clarify: there was a propensity to put "undesirables" such as minorities or poor kids into more vocational style learning and leaving all the "book learnin'" to those with a "real future." Texas got called on this shit a few times over the years. So there's now a stigma attached to those types of classes as training kids in "menial" labor.

As you go into, this is one of the reasons now they dump the trouble-makers in there.

[Elheru Aran]

Undesirables are part of the problem, but you have to examine them in light of the greater social, cultural and economic reasons for why the American education system is suffering. Improving the disciplinary problem would be one way to *help* the situation, but it won't *solve* it. There's so many other things going on besides that.

[Simon_Jester]

Undesirables are part of the problem, but you have to examine them in light of the greater social, cultural and economic reasons for why the American education system is suffering. Improving the disciplinary problem would be one way to *help* the situation, but it won't *solve* it. There's so many other things going on besides that.

If I'm in an emergency room treating someone who just got stabbed in a mugging, I'm not going to waste time worrying about the socioeconomic forces that motivated the mugger before stopping the bleeding.

If we could just stop the bleeding in the public schools by whatever means are, in the short term, pragmatically necessary, we'd at least have a place to stand while trying to fix the larger problem. As it is, we can't get a grip on the problem at all... In large part, that's because we can't even provide a basic high school education to the kids growing up in the ghettoes. Which is in turn happening because we're locking those poor kids into buildings with the minority of sociopaths and part-time drug dealers who should never have been there in the first place, and then not taking the obvious step of protecting the educational prospects of ten or twenty children by expelling one.

Which is not to say that one expelled kid should have no place to go, that there is nothing that can be done for that kid. But ultimately, education cannot function except in the following sequence:
1) Basic behavioral norms required to function in a learning environment
2) Provide a learning environment for academic subjects.
3) Teach the basics (literacy, basic numeracy, the broadest outlines of science and history)
4) Teach higher-order thinking skills, as abstracted out from the actual disciplines
5) Teach complex subjects.

Once (1) goes out the window, the rest of the child's education is going to come to a screeching halt. And when you have enough kids that lack (1) in the building they knock out (2), with the result that the kids never learn (4) and therefore haven't a prayer of handling (5).

So whatever you do, if you actually want educated kids to come out of your schools, you simply cannot hesitate to preserve a functional learning environment. It's not something you do if you actually care what happens to your students, as opposed to caring about showing off your loyalty to an ideological shibboleth like "all children can learn."

Maybe it depends on the extent to which a school, well... cheats. My school doesn't 'cheat' by methodically trying to hothouse-cultivate the kids who are likeliest to learn the material and ignoring everyone else.

Your school may have been "lucky" enough to be middle of the road (or bit better) testing wise and was already on an upward trend when it came to the improvement standards. In the early days, it was actually worse to be a well performing school because politicians don't understand averages. A 100 increases a 50 by a large margin, less an 80, MUCH less a 95. IIRC, there was no sliding scale, only a percentage improvement needed per year. You know, basic math shit.

So if your school was already performing very well, improving on the average was difficult...

Yeah, and the impulse to take that bozo who bubbles in all the answers on the test randomly in the first five minutes and then goes to sleep and shoot him drive him out of the school is... it's not just tempting, it's practically the only thing you can do.

That said, my school hasn't been doing that well any time this century, though I think it was better fifteen years ago then it was ten years ago... and better five years ago than it was ten. Roughly.

On the other hand, the whole thing is rapidly hitting critical mass as the cell phone generation goes through the school system like a handful of coproliths through a steam turbine. A lot of these are kids who have spent basically their entire lives as sentient creatures with a shiny, glowing, eternally changing block of distraction sitting in their pocket, the size of a pack of cards and infinitely more tempting...

It's a miracle any of them can think at all, honestly. I really do think American teachers are, logically must be, improving their collective game, at least on average... or it wouldn't even be possible to educate modern children. Even if you were really trying, you'd have to be improving your methods or that would kill you.

It is first, to teach the most basic things necessary for adult life (e.g. literacy).

THEN it is to teach as many as possible (realistically not 100%) the challenging art of how to think.

THEN it is to teach all those who can think how to do various other things that require the thinking.

This is so hard because people don't understand how much money plays into getting that head start on everyone else. Education starts at home. Money means more leisure time for the parents, more toys, more vacations and/or exposure to different educational opportunities that may not seem like anything on the surface. A lot of my vocabulary comes from reading novels and games, like Magic: The Gathering and video games because writing was a huge deal with old-school RPGs. Having educated parents with time to spend with you makes life so much easier WRT to learning. Even the physical advantages of eating better can't be discounted.

Honestly you can do it with limited money- IF you have educated people who actually sit down in a cold-blooded way and think about how to do it.

But the people who have that kind of education and ability to think out a viable plan for solving a complex and very important problem... they might be poor but the odds are against it, so it doesn't really fix anything.

The problem, though, is that we rely on the home life to teach the child to think- and assume we can just teach everything else. When in fact it's the other way around.

Teach the disruptive kids to think before puberty and they're more likely to think through and comprehend the consequences of their own actions, at least occasionally. Teach the kid who thinks they're slow to think before puberty and they're less likely to think so. Et cetera.

So each year of school you end up doing less and less actual teaching because that foundation of "here is how to think like a sane person" is missing.

Frankly, the problem is the undesirables. These are mostly kids whose behavior is of the 'my god are you on drugs all the time?' level.

Sorry, let me clarify: there was a propensity to put "undesirables" such as minorities or poor kids into more vocational style learning and leaving all the "book learnin'" to those with a "real future." Texas got called on this shit a few times over the years. So there's now a stigma attached to those types of classes as training kids in "menial" labor.

As you go into, this is one of the reasons now they dump the trouble-makers in there.

Uh yes, that's my point and I think we're in full agreement.

The real undesirables get dumped into such programs. With the result that the pseudo-undesirables (who are perfectly fine but are 'undesired' in the eyes of bigoted jackasses) won't learn anything if put into such a program. Which in turn makes the program worthless to everyone, with the result that it gets canceled.