Failures of the Education System

[BSD]

I have to agree with the comments on writing here. As a college prof., the most significant problems are a lack of crittical thinking skills and the inability to write. I would argue that the latter is more important because goof communication is the foundation for good thinking and expression of thought.
While I am clearly not in the "good old days" or "remember when" camp, I have seen a noticeable drop in writing skills in the last decade of teaching. One thing I desire is deemphasizing actvities (sports, clubs, ...) that are not central to the educational mission of public schools. Furthermore, get rid of the large number of teachers who are there just to coach; easily a dozen individuals in an average size suburban high-school. While there are exceptions, most are guilty of unethical educational methods and expectations.
BSD

 

[Ed A. Stevens]

***

goof communication is the foundation for good thinking and expression of thought.

***

While I am clearly not in the "good old days" or "remember when" camp, I have seen a noticeable drop in writing skills in the last decade of teaching. One thing I desire is deemphasizing actvities (sports, clubs, ...) that are not central to the educational mission of public schools. Furthermore, get rid of the large number of teachers who are there just to coach; easily a dozen individuals in an average size suburban high-school. While there are exceptions, most are guilty of unethical educational methods and expectations.
BSD

What if the teachers are as retarded as the kids they are teaching? Lower the standards so the profs understand?

Fergie

It's tragic in retrospect but I was kicked out of College Preparatory English in High School, because our new English Teacher did not agree with the views expressed in my compositions (the resulting conclusion agreed to between the Vice-Principal, the Teacher, and me). In a small school district with only one English Teacher it resulted in another hour of metal shop (for two years), but no formal education in grammar. What I learned from the experience was to write to the Teachers heart, rather than to their head, and it was good enough to pass me through College and University English basics.

The two times in this period that I followed the formal conventions of composition, and wrote more than fictional biased drivel, were my two failures to pass the University Graduation Writing Test (the GWT, an essay test). One essay was a composition that paralleled an A+ technical essay, and the other was almost plagiarism of an editorial printed in the local paper (plagiarism, except the printed article was mine as well). I failed both tests.

I attended GWT workshops my last senior year, and recognized that Professors grading the test had zero experience outside liberal arts and composition for pleasure or opinion. Critical review of my two previous essays, by Tutors and Professors in the workshops, revealed problems comprehending concepts and words common to hard Science, but not common when teaching English Composition. The advice was to not make the composition content complicated, because if the grading Professor needed to grab a dictionary to understand the essay, I would fail (again).

I ended up writing about my fictional houseplant gardener, Julio, and how this humble ignorant (and illegal alien) soul was redeemed by his prowess with plants. The essay structure was rough with poor transitions between paragraphs, passive sentences, and the final paragraph was nothing more than a word for word repeat of the body paragraph summations in two short sentences. If I had typed it into a word processor (this was the pre-MAC era) I believe the essay would have been graded at less than a sixth grade level. The message grade score was weighted more important than the style, grammar, or structure scores, and I passed with a superior GWT total score.

“Goof communication” is a quality summation of the English composition education I received, and encouraged to practice based on grades received. It reflects the axiom that you get what you ask for, and when teachers reward primary school writing skill over advanced content and style, the student will rise (or fall) to meet the expectation.

 

[BSD]

goof communication BSD

Gotta love the typos! Might as well laugh at yourself because often others are already laughing.
BSD

 

[d10shun]

What if the teachers are as retarded as the kids they are teaching? Lower the standards so the profs understand?

Fergie

I think I'll step in here. Fergie, I am a 7th grade science teacher in the valley. I have to say that the teachers ARE teaching proper grammar, punctuation, scientific theories (me), equations, reading skills, organizational skills etc. I see good teaching every day! The students, however, cannot be FORCED to learn. Some students simply refuse to learn or do JUST enough to get by because "A 'C' is good nuff"

The current outside influences (myspace.com, text messaging, AIM, blueberries) are stronger than all the pedagogy we can offer. Students are reinforced to use horrendous syntax and lazy abbreviations to be "cool" and "down"


Examples taken from the message center for my online book.
"hey Mr..bedell i was just wondering on the extra credit if i don't finish it because i don't really feel that well i wont get ninth hour right???? or a no stamp right?????? because OK i did the regular assignment but no the extra credit i did some of it but not all of it kk wb asap! thx"

"ok thx for tellong me thx bye!!!!!!!"

Do you really think that the English department taught them to write like this? "Okay children listen up. We are going to write a note to someone using the least amount of letters!"

Absolutely not! I occasionally confiscate letters passed between students. I read them aloud and find myself stumbling and scratching my head at "omg, idk, 143, kk, wb, bbbff, gurl cuz, thx, wut" and so on.

I personally spend many hours working on powerpoints to make them informational and fun at the same time. The kids really enjoy taking notes this way. During lecture I use real life examples, in-class demos, and have the students participate. Do you think they will remember anything I said? A few will absorb the lecture and be able to synthesize the info with a previous lecture. The rest will remember that Johnny got in a fight at lunch with Jimmy over Johnny's girlfriend's cousin's curly fries.
Ben

 

[Yucca-Man]

Luckily my high school comp. teacher was a professor from CSU, and had the same curriculum, and was able to test out of the entry level course at CSU

Meh. Maybe it’s just the cynical side of me, but in the last several years at CSU I have knocked "college professor" off my list of people who I should respect because of their position. While there may be some quality folks out there, I have sat through too many lectures from incompetent baboons. I can't stand listening to half of them talk; I had one Stats 'professor' who was so anal-retentive about the positioning and alignment of the overhead slides he used that it was impossible to learn anything. He looked as though he could have taken Dustin Hoffman's role in Rain Man" and earned an Oscar for it.

In one of my English Comp 3xx courses, we had to do a critical review of our fellow classmate's works in progress. I often handed a poorly constructed draft to my classmates and got responses like, "looks great" and "no problems" back from them. The most disturbing part about that is that I accidentally handed in a draft version for grading and got a B on it.

Do I think there has been an overall failure of the education system? No, but it is leaning that way. There are good kids and good schools out there, but the whole thing is getting dumbed-down to the lowest common denominator. Teachers in the elementary levels have to focus their time on communicating with non-English speaking students who may or may not even be here legally.

Standardized testing has taken over from the Three R's as the most-emphasized part of the system. Kids spend a week during the year to take standardized tests that they KNOW will have no effect on their grades, so why should they bother to test well? When she was still a teacher, my mom had that 'discussion' with one of her neighbors. He insisted that CSAP tests (Colorado Student Assessment Program) were a waste of time and that his son's results did not accurately reflect the boys’ skills. While I take his side that they are a waste of time, it helped that his son chose that moment to listen in and told his dad that all he and most of his friends do is "make patterns" with the fill-in-the-dot answer sheets. After all, whatever he scored was not going to be a part of his grades...

 

[djwright4341]

One thing I desire is deemphasizing actvities (sports, clubs, ...) that are not central to the educational mission of public schools. Furthermore, get rid of the large number of teachers who are there just to coach; easily a dozen individuals in an average size suburban high-school. While there are exceptions, most are guilty of unethical educational methods and expectations.
BSD

Yes! People go to school to learn stuff, not play games. It was nice to do research in college on computers that were out of date and sometimes didn't work, while the football team had nice new jerseys and equipment and played on a well manicured field. It was also nice to see football players able to blow off class and still pass because the professor didn't want to hurt an athletes GPA and make them lose a scholarship.

 

[cwuwildcat]

i am a sophomore at Central Washington Univ. and in my own personal expirience, i have to blame my High School english teachers for their lack of knowledge. They were always telling us what they thought we needed to know to be prepared for college, yet i didn't even know what MLA formatting was until last year. not only that, but they didnt make class worth going to. i believe that when you are teaching a high school course you need to make it interesting or get the kids involved. my best english grade in high school was a C+ but because i was forced to be involved in my university courses i have yet to get anything worse than a B+. i guess i just learn more when i'm intrigued to learn something that is interesting and when i know i could use it in the future, unlike the pity little projects i had to do in HS that i knew weren't worth doing.

 

[Darky]

i am a sophomore at Central Washington Univ. and in my own personal expirience, i have to blame my High School english teachers for their lack of knowledge. They were always telling us what they thought we needed to know to be prepared for college, yet i didn't even know what MLA formatting was until last year. not only that, but they didnt make class worth going to. i believe that when you are teaching a high school course you need to make it interesting or get the kids involved. my best english grade in high school was a C+ but because i was forced to be involved in my university courses i have yet to get anything worse than a B+. i guess i just learn more when i'm intrigued to learn something that is interesting and when i know i could use it in the future, unlike the pity little projects i had to do in HS that i knew weren't worth doing.

I think this is part of the problem, students decide what they think is worthwhile...I understand that if you're not interested, you'll pay less attention, but the way I always viewed it was that when the teacher was teaching, it was usually something I should know. In sophomore biology I had the highest score on the final, despite being one of the least interested students. It was mostly due to me not liking the teacher (My mom wrote in to let her know we were driving half an hour every morning and had a limited time frame so we couldn't just leave early and she still chewed me out repeatedly for being 2-3 minutes late. BTW my score was a 62%...the next highest was a 48%. Luckily she graded on a Bell curve and that grade turning into a 100% was high enough to keep me passing.

 

[Eagle]

In several CM classes, we are expected to be able to write formal lab reports, in APA style, and you can see people having aneurisms at the thought of correct writing. They switch tenses, write passively, all sorts of crap.

Engineers and scientists seem almost universally to write in the passive voice. They appear to be under the impression that it makes their verbal meanderings appear more authoritative. It's weak writing, but it can still be done with grammatical correctness.

Unfortunately ... it isn't.

The educational system has failed, and continues to fail. The problem is where to assess the blame. They ALL lay it on some other doorstep. College professors tell you they review for content rather than grammar, because by the time students reach college they should have learned grammar. (Cop-out by professors too lazy to review for grammar). High school teachers don't teach gramar because (a) they should have learned it in middle school, and (b) "we have to prepare them for college level thinking." (Cop-out by teachers too lazy to teach grammar, or -- more likely -- unqualified to do so.) Middle school teachers don't teach grammar because they are too busy breaking up fights, and because grammar belongs in high school.

I spent most of my high school English classes reading "great American novels" of questionable literary or social value, and I learned English from my grandparents.

 

[Timber]

Edit: double post

 

[Timber]

I taught seventh-grade English for five years, and tenth- and eleventh-grade English for two. Then I quit. I didn't think then, and still don't think, that teaching sentence diagramming to middle schoolers was a bad thing. At the high school, I was frustrated by the notion that we just had to get the kids to pass the Ohio Proficiency tests. No one else seemed to understand that these tests weren't achievement tests, but rather tests merely indicating that a kid knew enough to leave the eighth grade and to be able to read and understand a newspaper.
I ultimately quit in large part because of lack of interest by students, unconcerned parents, score-driven administrators, and colleagues who didn't even know their own subjects. A government teacher once interrupted a class of mine demanding to know why I told the students that capitalism and communism are not, contrary to popular (and apparently, his) belief, types of government. He could not comprehend that they were economic systems that simply became popularly referred to as gov. systems largely because schools and the media didn't differentiate between them. There was also the high school science teacher who took points off a student's final exam because the student was smarter than he was. The student knew about the fourth type of matter--Bose-Einstein condensation; however, the teacher, also a night-class associate professor, didn't. How sad. Possibly worst of all, this district where I taught was leagues beyond the larger local districts. We'd get kids from surrounding districts who'd gotten As and Bs, then would get Cs or worse in our system. More often than not, they didn't even know what we were talking about in class.

Sorry, done ranting. It's been six years since I quit, but I loved teaching so much that the state of public education today just kills me.

 

[Fergie]

Dont get me started on standardized testing. We have the AIMS fiasco here in AZ. I was in the first class of seniors to take it. Out of our entire district, 14 of us passed the test, and oddly enough, all of us were in the AP classes together.

We had to take the same test, dumbed down, three more times!! The patterns I made on the bubble sheets were polite suggestions of what they could do with the test.

As far as learing correct grammar, my parents taught me that.They reviewed all my papers from a young age, and made me correct the paper, but also made me understand why.

I do hold teachers to blame for incompetence most of the time too. I had a history teacher tell me that I was wrong when I said Congress had been attacked in Chambers. He told me it had never happened, and being the indignant person that I was, walked out of class, straight to the Library. I grabbed the closest encyclopaedia I could find, and brought it back to his class, and showed him that in 1954, Congress was attacked by Puertoricanos.

Fergie

 

[yardape]

Interesting reading on an XJ forum. As the owner and occasional operator of an 11 year old boy who is an "A" student in 6th grade, I have a few observations.

1. His vocabulary and understanding of the english language is far more advanced than mine was at his age.

2. His vocabulary and understanding of the english language is far more advanced than some of the posts I see on this and in particular the J.U. forum.

3. I attribute some of this to the fact that he is limited to 1 hour total of electronics per day. That includes computer, TV, PS-2 and anything else he can get his hands on.

4. He is deeply involved in sports and school activities which make him I believe a better student.

5. Even though divorced, both his parents are totally involved in his school work and extra-curricular school activities. We make it a priority so that he knows its a priority. the schools can't do everything and are not a one-stop-shop for education.

6. Despite that, some of the lesson sheets he brings home for homework that are presumably written by educators are so poorly written that they take a dozen rereads to understand what is being asked.

Oops,.... gotta go.

 

[dmillion]

I wouldn't get that bent out of shape about it.
There is a difference between formal correspondence and an online forum.
What bugs me is when things look obviously wrong because of a lack of effort...

This is the key to me. Communication is a two-way street. If you're so lazy that your spelling and grammar ends up so bad that I have to put in extra effort reading it (in order to make up for the complete LACK of effort you put into writing it) then I won't bother. I'll just skip it.

I figure, if what you had to say wasn't important enough for you to put a little effort into it then why the heck should I put any effort into it either?

 

[dmillion]

Do you really think that the English department taught them to write like this?

No, of course not. The failure of the English deptartment, as well as of the school system in general, is in not impressing on the students the importance of effective communication.

 

[XJ Dreamin']

Dont get me started on standardized testing.
Fergie

This is exactly why I have resisted posting in this thread. If I get started on standardized testing...I don't even know where to start...my blood's boiling already. I gotta stop

 

[XJ Dreamin']

Interesting reading on an XJ forum. As the owner and occasional operator of an 11 year old boy who is an "A" student in 6th grade, I have a few observations.

1. His vocabulary and understanding of the English language is far more advanced than mine was at his age.

2. His vocabulary and understanding of the English language is far more advanced than some of the posts I see on this and in particular the J.U. forum.

3. I attribute some of this to the fact that he is limited to 1 hour total of electronics per day. That includes computer, TV, PS-2 and anything else he can get his hands on.

4. He is deeply involved in sports and school activities which make him I believe a better student.

5. Even though divorced, both his parents are totally involved in his school work and extra-curricular school activities. We make it a priority so that he knows its a priority. the schools can't do everything and are not a one-stop-shop for education.

6. Despite that, some of the lesson sheets he brings home for homework that are presumably written by educators are so poorly written that they take a dozen rereads to understand what is being asked.

Oops,.... gotta go.

The parents' involvement in their child's studies is absolutely critical. I talk to our boys' teachers around once a month or so. They are so delighted to have a student who's parents give a flying flip what goes on in their kids' school. At the last open house, our 4th grader's teacher got four visitors, out of 18 students. That just simply sucks, and that is not the school system's fault. Don't get me wrong. Texas schools have been seriously screwed up by the devil spawned TAKS tests. But a parent not showing up for open house is the fault of only one person.

Our 4th grader has no doubt as to the priority of his school work vs. anything else. Nothing rates higher than getting the work done. We pulled him out of his fall little league at half season because he brought home a couple of 60's on some class work.

My brothers and sisters and I came out of a crappy little farmland school that cared nothing beyond meeting minimum standards. And yet, between us there is a pediatrician, a veteranarian, a successful engineer, and -
well - me :wave: .

The drive to accomplish what we have accomplished came not from our school (which is shameful) but from out parents. In a very real sense, we overcame a mediocre school because of the parents that we had.

 

[dandecicco]

As I sit here and review several papers for a 300 level class, I wonder where these people learned how to write, and if they have ever heard of a style guide.

I honestly think that an epileptic chimpanzee could put together more coherent thoughts thann some of these people.

No wonder the companies that scout here are always complaining about the horrible writing skills the new graduates have.

They need a beat down with a Baby Jesus.

Fergie

Well, I am a college instructor and a high school English teacher and I can tell you, it started downhill way before the 12th grade. It all has to do with self esteem. Somewhere, someplace, some jack as# decided that we as educators could not hurt a students feelings. Instead of giving them a bad grade and telling them that they need to improve or fail, they are now told that since they tried, they get a cookie and get to move ahead. Liberalism has killed education and it is an intrepid disease spreading through the educational system like a malignant tumor.

 

[WTF]

Some of the emails at work from co-workers and managers are just as bad though, and outlook has spell check..

I always consider it a small victory when subject/verb agreement is correct. Misspellings and incoherent flow of thought are just par for the course around here.

 

[yardape]

The parents' involvement in their child's studies is absolutely critical.

Absolutely. Having come from a background with a decent roof over my head but not much else, I do everything opposite of what my parents did. That's the twisted way I consider my father a mentor. Nonetheless, having witnessed both sides of the fence, I am confident that I am raising a child that will be prepared to thrive when he leaves the nest. I've always felt that if I can teach him to make life a continual learning journey and to have the courage and discipline to overcome life's obstacles and challenges, than I will have been a success as a father. As far as I can tell I am on my way.