[BRussell]

Originally posted by Scott_H:
You're blaming the one thing we don't have control over. We have control over the schools, teachers, books, funding, admin, rules, .... The kids come to the school to learn. It's "our" job to teach them.

I think your attitude is one of "evade personal responsibility". Kids are kids. They'll play video games all day if we let them.

Weak. Your post is the rhetorical equivalent of "I know you are but what am I."

We don't have control over our kids' learning? It's the only thing we do have direct control over.

No, you're right, parents don't have any responsibility for their children's education. Just ship 'em off to school and let them worry about my kids. I've gotta go to work. Kids themselves have no responsibility. They should be able to play video games all day and still get educated at school. Education is something that just gets done to you, not something kids and parents are involved in. You shouldn't have to work for it. If you can't read or write, it's someone else's fault. If my kid gets bad grades, I'll go yell at the principal. I'll sue the school. My fault? How can it be my fault, I'm just the parent? I've got better things to worry about then educating my own child. That's the government's job.

[maxelson]

No, it is not a total cop out to blame the kids. EVERYTHING a teacher does depends upon support. Everything. I have said it before in this forum and I will say it again: The difference now, as opposed to past education, is not curriculum or administration or lousy teaching. The difference here is the drastically lessened involvement of parents. Their lack of interest or "hands off" method of dealing with their kid's education rubs directly off on the kids. A perceived lack of interest on the part of the parent lends directly to the callousness of the student. A teacher and school- not matter how well organized and enthusiastic and brilliant- will only be able to go so far without support. Yes, I blame the students- indirectly. The fault lies squarely with the parents. EVERY ONE of my students who did well did so with the benefit direct caregiver involvement. 90% of the students who did poorly (excluding those with learning issues) had parents with the "you fix my kid" attitude. "You are the teacher. It's your job". Yeah. These are the results of my own study- 6 years, just less than 500 students with whom I had direct contact.
Students MUST take responsibility for their own education. It is part of the process. They learn this responsibility best from their primary care giver.
Giving students the ultimate responsibility for their own education is NOT a cop out.

[maxelson]

And on THAT note, I say AMEN to everything BRUSSEL and YOYO say and, I'll assume, everything they will say in the future on this topic. They really know what it is that they are talking about.
The most disturbing trend over the last decade is the "us against them" stance concerning teachers. We've already addressed the motives of the vast majority of teachers. It is not some liberal "thing", it is not a political ploy to say so. It is education, pure and simple. It is truly disturbing that people are not getting this. We have all had exposure to this profession on one level or another. What the hell is causing people to put teachers into this box?
As for unions and their rules: I never served in a teacher's union. I know many who have. One of the most dedicated teachers I know was censured by the union for working after 3:15. She was helping a kid with her math homework. She did it too many times and was fined. She left the union to teach at a private school. The unions are a trap. If you want to teach and be able to afford to do so, you must teach at a public school (wages at private schools are almost 50% less). If you want to teach at a public school, you must join the union. These unions, from what I see, offer some good protections but also restrain teachers in a way that is counterproductive. I also think that if this country had it's way, teachers would earn babysitter wages. Oh. Hmm. Wait. $5.00 per hour per kid. Hmm. 20 kids in a classroom. That's $100 per hour... multiplied by 8 hours per day... that's $800 per day... we'll take and multiply that by, say, the conservative 180 day school year and that comes to... DAMN! 144k! WELL, SIGN ME UP!

[Quadzmodo]

Originally posted by Scott_H:
The union should have had a cost of living in there in the first place. If they didn't then they shouldn't have signed. You make your deal. You sign the contract. I'm not going to "fight" for teachers because they have a union to fight for them.

Ironically, it's in there contract, it's was signed, but the school system neglected to pay them. The teachers knew of this dilema over a year ago, but pressed on in hopes that an agreement would be worked out and henceforth the students wouldn't suffer. BUT the schoolboard never made mention of it,it was like a person who borrows money and when they see you acts as if they don't owe you. So, I believe (not sure) the teachers that are left in the system will either not renew their contracts and teach elsewhere or simply stop caring.

[finboy]

Originally posted by BRussell:


I see this blame-the-teacher, blame-the-school idea as a part of the general tendency to evade personal responsibility. "Oh, Johnny can't read or write. It must be the teacher's fault. They're supposed to be teaching them something!" How absurd. If you don't read the book you're supposed to read, you don't blame the book.

Sure, I agree that older kids need to be held accountable, and their parents need to be held accountable. We don't have a system that allows/requires anyone to do that, though.

On the other hand, for little kids, if they aren't learning it's not totally their faults. What do they know? Their parents are responsible for monitoring their progress, and the schools/teachers are responsible for the curriculum and for instruction. And if they don't get it at an early age, how far can we go in holding them accountable (the kids) two or five years later?

Let's focus here. The kids are, as always, basically good. In many cases, their parents haven't taught them respect, self-discipline, the value of productivity, and the consequences of inadequacy. That's the parents' fault, and as authority figures, it's the fault of the schools and the other social institutions. We're letting the kids down by not fixing this stuff, and it will FUNDAMENTALLY IMPACT THE REST OF THEIR LIVES. We've basically created a generation that is going to remain largely ignorant to the nuances of Western Civilization, because we haven't given them the curiosity and the tools, at an early age, that they need to penetrate the depths of human understanding. And we LOST THE CHANCE for most of them.

As for personal responsibility, I agree, as always. But it's the personal responsibility of teachers to get the f*ck over their low salaries (they KNEW it when they took the job) and hold up their end of the bargain. We accord teachers special respect in society, and they get a great deal of prestige and benefit from that. That almost makes up for their lack of monetary compensation. Plus, they have a great deal of influence on young minds, so they can pursue their own political agendas. That must be worth something.

All you flamers (he he) that will follow this, don't bother trying to tell me that it doesn't happen. Wake up! I know several middle-schoolers who have been indoctrinated (and rarely educated) for the past several years, in different schools in different states. Their teachers have been FAR MORE concerned with pushing some pseudoscience agenda for hugging trees than teaching the kids what they need to be healthy, productive, thinking citizens. There's some personal responsibility for yah.

So yeah, personal responsibility needs to be the focus here, and on getting help to the kids. But that INCLUDES teachers and administrators, who are supposed to be responsible for educating.

Parents need to be constantly involved (mine were, most folks I know are) or the school systems DON'T police themselves. But parental involvement alone won't fix it, since they can't be there 24/7. Parents need to develop kids at home, and start ASAP, and they SHOULDN'T depend upon public school to teach the kids ANYTHING, since it's a random occurance for some schools to actually be effective.

As for the REST of us, I think we need to speak out about stuff like this, whether or not we have kids or plan on having kids. That's where OUR personal responsibility comes in.

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Shop smart, shop S-Mart! You got that!!?!!

[finboy]

Originally posted by maxelson:
What the hell is causing people to put teachers into this box?

In the next breath, you answered your own question.

The unions are a trap.

You're right, they are. In fact, they're keeping colleges from hiring enough professors, resulting in lots of adjuncts (part-timers) and graduate students in the classroom, and overworked faculty as well. Last fall, I interviewed at several campuses with unions, and each of them offered me 25% below market wages, with NO cost of living consideration. Once that happened to a few of us, those guys couldn't find folks to interview. It was a waste of our time. In fact, I had MORE classroom hours than anyone else one of these schools interviewed, and they offered me substantially more than their other candidates because of that (the union counted my "seniority" in some fashion). It still was an INSULT to get an offer that low. According to the other faculty at these schools who I've talked to since then, they won't be able to hire anyone until the market for our discipline settles down (3-5 years, at the earliest), or until the union backs off.

That's got to be a good result for everyone, right?

On a related note, why is Microsoft a monopoly but a union isn't? Seems kinda contradictory to me. Unless you consider the political power that a union carries. Oh, wait, I've answered my own question.

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Shop smart, shop S-Mart! You got that!!?!!

[Quadzmodo]

Originally posted by finboy:
[BOn a related note, why is Microsoft a monopoly but a union isn't? Seems kinda contradictory to me. Unless you consider the political power that a union carries. Oh, wait, I've answered my own question.
[/B]

Well it's simple. When airline employees, teachers, laborers of all sort band together and form one mighty union then they will be considered a monopoly. Until then, they are seperated by profession henceforth each attending to their own affairs.

[yoyo52]

Originally posted by Scott_H:
It's a total cop out to blame the kids!

You're right about that. I don't blame the kids. I do blame a couple of social phenomena.

I blame a historically anti-intellectual attitude in the US that expresses itself in almost everything that kids encounter. Part of it is evident in the contempt for teachers explicit in some posts here--the old canard that if you can, you do, if you can't, you teach. Puhleez!

Surely you all have exprerienced the phenomenon--the smart kid who's bullied because s/he is smart; the school that celebrates every athletic accomplishment of its students but ignores intellectual achievement; the popular illusion that to go to college as an athlete is a one way ticket to wealth and fame. Even in these fora you find people who excuse themselves for being "geeks"--and "geek" is another way of saying that the person is very smart, very bright. You know perfectly well that in the American imagination it is cool to be muscular, to be a jock, to be a slacker, to dance, sing, play. But it is not cool in the US to be smart.

Overcoming that cultural bias is the single most burdensome task of the teaching profession. I see it in the college-age student who suddenly realizes that s/he doesn't have to feel socially inferior when it becomes clear that s/he's smart. What a great moment that is, for student and for teacher! I've never taught in high school, but I imagine that it's infinitely more difficult for that perception to take place in high school than in college.

I also blame the industrial model of education. The idea that a student is like a lump of ore from which the teacher produces the pure metal of learning is all too often applied to the evaluation of educational institutions and teachers both. The model just does not apply, period. It ignores all the things that make human beings more complex and more interesting than lumps of iron ore.

Add that industrial model to the business model of "accountability" that is so god-awful popular nowadays, and you have a recipe for disaster. My 12-year-old kid understands how ridiculous it is to apportion funding on the basis of how "accountable" a school is in producing "good" scores on standardized tests. A school that has to deal with poverty, with parental ignorance, with kids raised in an environment where it's impossible to avoid lead poisoning, with crime, flying bullets on the street, intimidation by drug dealers and gangs--such a school cannot possibly produce the level of "achievement" that the nice suburban school can, not unless it receives enough funding to make the school a refuge from the world out there. To reduce the funding for such a school, as is the practice in Pennsylvania, because it's not "performing," simply condemns the kids to an ever worse educational establishment.

Nor will vouchers help. As others have pointed out, a US$1,500 voucher will do diddly squat to fund a private education. Regionalization of public education might help. The per student expenditure in my city's school district is something like US$3,000. The average per student expenditure in the suburban school districts in my county is something like US$5,000. That average disguises the extremes, but I'll let that go. Is it any surprise that in my son's school there is no instruction in computers, at all, whereas in his suburban friend's school writing programs, albeit elementary ones, in C++ is part of the curriculum?

If we could recruit the political will to erase school district boundaries when it comes to school funding, the result might be exactly what we are looking for. I don't mean mixing the school populations because, quite frankly, racism and/or intolerance will get in the way of education. My city's school district is some 78% African American and Latino, and the 95% white suburban kids want, on the whole, nothing to do with my child. So be it. I really wouldn't want my kid denigrated by his peers because he is Latino. But I really don't see why the intolerance of white suburban citizens should mean that my kid's school system is underfunded.

I don't mean all this as special pleading for my son. His mother and I are perfectly capable of supplementing the inadequacies of the school system. But that is not true for the bulk of students in this and other urban school districts. And I would wager that the problems in the educational system that we're all too familiar with really focus on the problems of economically marginalized communities in the inner city, like mine. Once the suburban kid discovers that it's ok to be smart, s/he'll do fine because s/he'll have the background. But the inner city kid does not have that luxury.

As far as I'm concerned, the US doesn't have the luxury to keep on making the inner city kid marginal.

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And that's true too.--Shakespeare, King Lear

[maxelson]

here endeth the lesson.
Well said, yoyo.

[mr. natural]

I've watched this thread develop, and just when it was getting past all the usual rancorous trip wires laid and stepped into aplenty, it is withering on the vine. And so, not that I can revive it, I have two reflections i'd like to add to this negleted discussion.

1) Picking up where yoyo52 laid his finger on the fault of social phenomena, I have this to add: Back in '98 Judith Rich Harris wrote a book, entitled "The Nuture Assumption," that the media had a field day with, in that Ms. Harris challenged the assumption that parents matter in our children's development. Time & The New Yorker did cover stories, both entitled "Do Parents Matter?" What follows are excerpts from a letter I wrote to my brother (not a parent) which probes deeper into this social phenomena faultline as I see it.

"In the New Yorker we are told that Ms. Harris begins her book, detailing her idea, by stating: "This book has two purposes: first, to dissuade you of the notion that a child's personality -- what used to be called 'character' -- is shaped or modified by the parents; and second, to give an alternative view of how the child's personality is shaped;" which has to do with the primacy of peer influence over parental influence." ...

"I don't deny that Ms. Harris has opened a can of worms (ceratinly as far as the debate enthralls the highly-educated and specialized practitioners within the field of child-development/psychology and their expert conventional wisdom goes), or that, from an outsider's point of view, her "idea" does not have its merits. Yet, in her own words "as to what really matters in human development (emphasis mine), I believe that her error is not in the accuracy of her belief, but that she and everyone else involved in this "insider" or expert debate (as to whose peanut shell explains all) are still off the mark when it comes to hitting the bull's eye.

"Tucked almost unnoticeably within the New Yorker article is the following remark I find more revealing, and potentially enlightening had anyone pursued this line of inquiry: "At least, Harris's theory calls for neighborhoods, peers and children themselves to share the blame -- and credit -- for how children turn out." This particular comment comes closer to the mark as I see it, than an either/or proposition of parents/peers, but it still falls short of nailing it on the head.

"My contention is that there are a whole array of influences (which we will never completely sort out) which eventually make not a good child or teenager, but more importantly a decent human adult! That Ms. Harris has focused our attention on the adolescent influence of "peers trump parents" as a critically valid factor in human development is significant, but it still is totally blind to questioning the context of our culture as it pervades upon and within the domains of childhood, adolescence, and adulthood.

"Yet our culture is now so heavily geared toward all things new, young and exciting, that we are essentially communicating to our young that just about anything associated with time worn maturity of adulthood is of no real consequence, and that they needn't bother taking adults and maturity seriously, or to even truly grow up.

"The flip side of this equally true, in that children and teen-adolescents feel unduly pressured and forced to assume responsibilities (i.e.; grow up) before they are fully ready! What little parental guidance there is nowadays, we are informed, is for all practical intent basically irrelevant.

"Given this schizophrenic cultural background, is it any wonder that young humans commit suicide and other senseless acts of violence at alarming rates of disbelief?

"I contend, based on my life's experience, reading, thinking, and any real wisdom gleaned therein, that most all of our ballyhooed cultural assumptions are patently insane. Our culture does not value life -- it suceeds fantastically at valuing vices overwhelmingly geared to destroying life.

"Overall, our contempoary and all-pervasive cultural reality (so heavily commercialized -- Buy, Buy, Buy; Sex, Sex, Sex; Violence, Violence, Violence -- and "Just Do It!"), are inherently destructive of family life; and ultimately any and all culturally significant time-honored values of human decency potentially fashioned therein." ...

"As is noted near the end of the New Yorker article, a child developmental psychologist is quoted as saying, in regard to children: "Whom do they want to please? Are they wearing the kind of clothing that other kids are wearing or the kind that their parents are wearing? If the other kids are speaking another way, whose language are they going to learn? And from an evolutionary perspective, whom should they be paying attention to?" To this last one, I say, Good Question!

"From an evolutionary perspective -- which is to say, for the sake of our survival as a civilized species -- of what relevance is it to homo sapiens that our youth, who are our future, are so caught up in paying attention to what stupid brand of clothes they wear? But this is the reality of our arrogance and culture of human vices made commercially profitable right on down to our children in order to enthrall them and pollute their spirit.

"Before we made such an evolutionary foolish cultural conceit, children used to pay attention to what adults did so as to enact through practice with their peers in play the culturally, and more importantly, evolutionary significant acts that would ensure their survival in the world at large. This also lent meaning to their lives and the lives of their elders -- something sorely lacking in our day and age.

"We are so damn certain of our exalted place on this earth that we are blind to considering the relevance of evolutionary/species significant connections in little of anything we do. Instead, the underlying cultural message is, anything goes, especially if there is money to be made, and to hell with the consequences.

"Meanwhile, the complexity and dysfunction of our culture, both social and technological, increase exponentially, and about which we are more often than not utterly baffled by and equally anxious to fix but don't have a clue to guide us by.

"It is my contention that we start by looking at the unquestioned cultural assumptions vis-a-vis our our species and evolutionary mandate to survive. Yet this broad and profoundly relevant question as it could be brought to bear upon our culture is the last place anyone thinks to look. After all, our culture is the pinnacle of life -- what's to question?

"What I can't help wondering is, especially from an evolutionary perspective, who is fooling whom?"

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So ends part 1 of my soliloquy: Pissing in the wind...

Part 2, for anyone who's gotten this far, will be posted immediately following. And it will be a much shorter summation of my above detailed line of thinking as it pertains to education.



[This message has been edited by mr. natural (edited 05-27-2001).]

[mr. natural]

My wife and I intend to educate our two boys (ages 5+ & 2+) out of school. In fact, as any parent knows, their education is already well underway. (My registration from, god's stray animal farm, should in no way be construed to suggest I am a religious fundamentalist. I adhere to no formal faith.) In any event, to conclude this post and its relevance to the education topic, what follows is another excerpt I wrote to my mother who was distraught that her grandchildren would be "home schooled."

"I wish that my word of assurance, as to how well aware H. & i are to the need for peer interactions, and that we will insure that our children continue to have such intteractions even though they will not be in school, would be enough to convince you.

"You apparently believe, and in accordance with the child development experts, our children need to be in grade school in order to benefit from peer interactions. In support of your position you ask me to consider the following passage from a child development expert: "Children now define themselves... more by how they fit in with their class-mates. Their self-image begins to be defined by the group -- by the pecking order that prevails on the playground... In everything from athletic ability to popularity, appearance, brains and clothes, children rank themselves against others in defining who they are."

"Well, I tend to agree with all this, but alarm bells go off in my head! Yet, nothing more is asked of this social arrangement assumption -- that's just the way it is -- except to next be told: "Children get big benefits out of moving into the group and defining themselves as group members." Here again, I tend to agree with this statement, except as it refers to the proceeding "pecking order."

"My point being: What decent human interaction are we hoping for out of the unquestioned "pecking order" list of school peer group social interactions? Yet this is indeed the social and educational experience of our schools today -- as shallow as the culture from which it emenates. Hip Hip Hooray!

"And what of our schools today. What are they about? They are many things -- too many I contend. They are supposed to be places of learning, of education. The three R's, of course. What else? They are institutional buraucracies, they run on schedules, they process hundreds of kids a day in supposed learning, and they are peer/group interaction social centers (so are our shopping malls). What else? I could go on but the list of things our schools have become is endless.

"It is so much nowadays that we are totally confused. Forgive me for asking, but of what decent human benefit is all this schooling and social interaction if all it results in is individual and cultural chaos? Where is the critical thinking in all this that our educational system is supposed to nurture? I would suggest that it is hard to think well at all after such thoughtlessly aimless and confused indoctrination which our system of schooling/culture operates by.

"All this without adequately thinking to answer this simple question: What is the purpose of education for and about?

"Yet, without presuming to know of any easy way out of our predicament in regard to our childrens real world education, we nonetheless believe we can arrange enough beneficial peer interaction outside of school; we don't believe they'll be short-changed or stunted.

"Life is a long journey, as is education, of which childhood is only the begining. ... If anything, one might consider it a blessing that they'll less likely be distracted mulling over some petty complexity of peer interaction (How popular am I?), when they are expected to be concentrating on a math quiz (whose grades will rank them as well)."

----------------------------------------------------------------

I've posted my thoughts on this matter only to stimulate thought for anyone who cares. I certainly do not mean to imply that this sort of answer to the question of our schools and education in general, which suits me & my family, is the one and only answer.

But, I do think we could do a lot better if we stopped heckling one another over each and every tree in this forest and stood back to look at the forest as a whole.

A good start would be to ask oneself: What is education for? And what constitutes a well-educated person?

I'm still open to figuring these questions out in my own mind, but it is worth noting that much of the destructiveness going on in the world is occuring at the hands of people who've been educated at our finest colleges and universities. Unless I'm mistaken, something is terribly amiss here and turning out more college graduates of like mind is not the answer.

I do believe the answers lie elsewhere within us, and no college degree can confer such wisdom.

"Ours is about the most ignorant age that can be imagined" Erwin Chargaff



[This message has been edited by mr. natural (edited 05-27-2001).]

[yoyo52]

A very interesting series of comments. I think you're absolutely right about the peers-are-everything issue, both in the sense that there's a complex interrelationship among the various elements you mention, and in the sense that the phenomenon of peer-group centrality is itself a culturally constructed idea. If the culture tells you that only your peers are important, then of course only the peers will be important. In that regard, did you see the PBS show on how "cool" is disseminated in popular culture? A very scary show because it demonstrated so very clearly that business drives the whole thing.


Home schooling is, of course, an option. I've seen it work for some kids very well indeed, but I've also seen it fail for other kids. In this regard, at least, be pragmatic rather than doctrinaire!

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And that's true too.--Shakespeare, King Lear

[olePigeon]

If you want education to improve, raise the teachers' salaries to at least $60k a year

[gyc]

Originally posted by olePigeon:

If you want education to improve, raise the teachers' salaries to at least $60k a year

How would that help? We'd still have the same teachers that we have now. Perhaps if we raised the salary of *new* teachers to $60k. Plus we'd probably have to double everyone's property taxes also.

[mr. natural]

yoyo52: I appreciate your reply. It was in fact due to your own thoughtful comments that I dared post mine.

Your suggestion about state wide/level field apportionment of school funding is a good one. But that such a sensible idea can't muster enough political will to enact speaks volumes about how little we as a society truly care about ensuring equality of educational opportunity.

Also, your comment about the US not being able to afford the luxury of marginlizing inner city kids is right on the mark. Apart from being shameful it is also, I think, tragically ironic, in that the well-off school districts which have all the luxury of means is not -- in this day & age -- a guarantee of quality education. Especially if the standard is one which somehow accounts for human decency, respect, caring & responsibility and not just high test scores or grades.

My best friend teaches high school science at a well-off suburban school, and although the kids aren't dodging bullets in the streets or otherwise burdened with real impoverishment, they are assailed by all sorts of other disturbing social ills which are so ubiquitously shot-through our culture. Just two weeks ago a kid was arrested for plotting a columbine affair -- they found guns, plans, etc. in his home.

As for cultural/peer pressures, here's another example. A friend of mine who is a carpenter had the pleasure of seeing his oldest son off to the school bus to start kindergarten. For awhile, early on, snickering used to issue forth from the bus against the father: "There's the scary man." All because he's got a good sized beard, scraggly hair, and wears work clothes that give him the look of a human shop rag. To top it all off, the boy is informed by others at school that he is "poor," and upon returning home laments that his sneakers are not good enough -- he has to have the $100 Nike's.

While I certainly believe that children are resilient, and with caring parental support, the boy will survive, but one has to wonder at what cost? There is a letter to the editor in today's NYTimes op-ed section which describes well the hurt from school taunting. Indeed, I've experienced such treatment and hurt feelings, as well as participated in such actions against others. As bad as it was when I went to high school I don't think the pressures then were as intense overall as they seem to be now.

In any event, in regard to your closing remark, I do not presume to know of any easy way out of the predicament we will undertake with home schooling our two boys. I am, however, a lot more pragmatic in my real life than my writings might suggest, but if a little of my vision rubs off on them I will consider it an educational plus.

[yoyo52]

I understand absolutely about the troubles of the richer districts. A friend of mine, who lives in what's possibly the most affluent school district in this area, has two sons. One of them, the younger one, is very bright, but has the social skills of a slug on a cold day in May. The way that his classmates treat him is just beyond belief. My son, going to the inner city school, has incredibly accepting, adaptable classmates. The problem my kid faces is the lack of funding.

In respopnse to gyc, just as an indication of why salary is important: my city's school district pays a starting salary of US$25,000. One step into the nearest suburb and the starting salary goes up US$12,000 per year. It's incredibly hard for my city to keep teachers. The ones that do stay are, for the most part, really committed to an urban educational system. But the temptation of the suburbs is very great. In fact, suburban administrators have told me that they deliberately don't hire new teachers out of college, let them go into the city, and then after a couple of years go fishing for the good teachers who've done well in the city.

One more thing: as I recall, when Jim Florio was governor of NJ, teh State Superior Court (or whatever it's called in Jersey) found unconstitutional the way that NJ funded its schools--by property tax, as is standard in the whole US. Florio then had to rethink the funding and begin, at least, to equalize expenditures in the various school districts. The result? He was voted out of office. I'm not from Jersey myself, so if I have this wrong, someone please set me straight.

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And that's true too.--Shakespeare, King Lear

[BRussell]

mr. natural: wow, your letters are more interesting than most of my term papers were!

I read Harris' book. Great the way she questions the basic assumption that we our character comes from how our parents raised us. Research in the last 20 years or so shows that most of the things we assumed were based on one's upbringing - personality, intelligence, even morality - are inherited to a much larger extent than previously thought.

And the culture you have to compete with is frightening - I understand anyone who would want to home school.

[Scott_H]

Originally posted by BRussell:
Weak. Your post is the rhetorical equivalent of "I know you are but what am I."

It only seems that way because I am taking the oposite view from you.

[finboy]

I'm sorry, but the folks that are blaming kids' lack of self-esteem and performance on "taunting" and class-baiting and other stuff, grow up. It's ALWAYS been that way, it's just that kids today have NO COPING SKILLS. I was razzed in school about my clothes, my parents, my lifestyle, you name it. It resulted in me learning how to break bones with my bare hands (n the elementary school playground, when provoked) and staying at the top of my class academically, where I could look back at the losers at the 5-year reunion and LAUGH. It happens in one way, at some time, to EVERYONE.

So I guess kids need to be taught COPING SKILLS from their parents. And they need to have a strong enough sense of purpose and personal worth that the opinions of other kids DOESN'T MAKE ANY DIFFERENCE TO THEM. Among adults, as well as kids, the healthiest of us don't care what others think. Perhaps that should be a life skill that parents can help with.

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Shop smart, shop S-Mart! You got that!!?!!

[BRussell]

Question for finboy and yoyo - have you had to go through this "Outcomes Assessment" that's so fashionable in colleges right now? It's all the rage where I am, but it seems pretty brain-dead to me.

And finboy - did you land a good job this Spring?

[finboy]

Originally posted by BRussell:


And finboy - did you land a good job this Spring?

We have student evals every semester, to make sure that we're not throwing stuff at the students. I get pretty good evals from most, but not from the ones I challenge. Seems pretty dumb to ask the least qualified to assess a course for which they have no background and no relevant knowledge with which to judge it, other than whether or not it was easy.

As for getting a job, I thankfully had my job in December, after a whirlwind recruiting season in the fall. I was tired of interviewing and travelling and I got a heckuva offer from a great school who really wants me to work there. So, I was "lucky."

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[yoyo52]

Originally posted by BRussell:
Question for finboy and yoyo - have you had to go through this "Outcomes Assessment" that's so fashionable in colleges right now? It's all the rage where I am, but it seems pretty brain-dead to me.

And finboy - did you land a good job this Spring?

We've had student evaluations forever. I sort of agree with finboy, but I also think that i learn a lot from them, or rather I learn a lot from the discursive ones, not the Scantron-scanned ones that give you a number of some sort on questions like "were there papers in the course?" It's a literature class--what would you expect My experience with those evaluations is that students will tell you what worked and what did not in a very straight kind of way.


But I think BRussel is talking about the outcomes assessment crap that accrediting agencies, motivated in large part by the idiocies of Washington and state-capital politics, are demanding. Now I do think that it is possible to design a meaningful measure of how well a student's education has gone. But to do so would entail a very labor-intensive kind of "instrument." A lot of schools just don't have the money to do that kind of study on a yearly basis. So what happens is that easily graded, multiple choice tests are given instead. We end up with an "objective" evaluation, then, which means very little about what actually happens in college. We did that this year for the first time--mostly because the Middle States accrediting agency requires some quantifiable assessment from the institutions they certify. My sense is that it was pretty pointless.

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