Thread: education rant!

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I have always been amazed at the profound stupidity of some people, but the last couple of weeks has really started me thinking on where, and at what point the education system in this country took a dive, or is it that the younger folks are just plain stupid and cannot be taught? Dont get me wrong i know there is some real intelligent kids around, like matt and gasser, they seem to have their heads on straight, but it seems to me that there is alot more uneducation these days.

I quit school in the 7th grade, i was supposed to be in the 9th, but a couple of holdbacks kept me in the lower grade. This was not due to stupidity, i just really hated school and caused a major ruckus when i was there. I will admit that i am highly uneducated, as im sure most of you can tell by my improper grammer, so by all rights any kid that graduated high school should be more educated than me, but im finding out this is not the case.


I had this helper working with me the last couple of weeks, nice enough kid but had the intelligence of a head of lettuce! I tried to explain basic concepts to him, like measuring, using a square, drilling, standard basic stuff, but he could not get it. He liked to shuck and jive on his cell all day with his homies about scoring some dope to sale, so it hit me, he understands weights and measures, he just needs to apply it differently, so i showed him that pounds and ounces are basicly the same as feet and inches, and fractions are always the same, but he still could not get it! For three days i had him installing carriage bolts, two or three times a day i had to retell him which way was tight and which way was loose, i think he could screw up a micky d`s burger. I fired him last week.


Now on to history.
I went to the club last night for a halloween contest, here in town is the big rivalry between florida and georgia this weekend, so downtown was swarming with drunken college kids and quite a good number of adults. So im all decked out in my fancy samurai costume, which made the law a little uneasy, but anyway, im walking around getting all kinds of comments on what i was dressed as, which i found out samurai was not top of the list. The common view was someone named shredder(i had to google it when i got home) which i found out is a teenage mutant ninja turtle slightly ressembling a samurai. The next biggest thing was gangus khan. Sorry folks, wrong continent, and wrong armor. I even had some retard yelling victory, which i assume was implying braveheart. Once again wrong race, and wrong continent! I had i guy ask me what it was , to which i responded the obvious. then he gives me a blank stare and asks what that is. My though, are you ****ing kidding me? The samurai ruled japan for 900 years and you retards have never heard of one. The guy announcing the contest called me the shogun guy, least he had the right time and island, but still did not know what it was.

Do they not teach history anymore? it seems to me they all missed that class.

Ok im done ranting, am i the only one who feels this way?

My son is taught history at his school. But it is not what i was taught. Everything is so politically correct. When he comes home we go over what he is learning. It is really amazing how different things have become. He is a really smart kid with a good head on his shoulders but I worry about what views he is being taught. Here we have a end of year called the SOl. Standards of learning. It is a joke. If you do not score a 400 then you fail that class for the year no matter what your final grade was. On his 8th grade science they asked the question what cause thunder. The correct answer was warm and hot air. I said what the F***. Charlie said that that was was he was taught. I then lit my lighter and asked him if he heard thunder. That is was a little more complex than that. There are alot of kids that do not care if they learn or not. and the ones that do care are being taught some crap. And Charlie's school is one of the best rated in the nation for its size. The schools are failing our children more ways than not.

When discipline was banished from the schools, learning left the same day. Unfortunately, the only discipline the schools seem to understand today is zero tolerance. Have an aspirin in your pocket . . . suspended. Draw a picture of a gun . . . suspended. Curse at a teacher . . . well, let's have a "dialogue."

The only thing the government runs well is the armed forces, and sometimes I wonder about that.

Also, it's not "cool" to get good grades. Those that can't or won't want to drag the others down to their level - at least in elementary and high schools. In college, all that bullbleep disappears. I was always at the top of my class, and I had to put up with endless crap and smartass remarks.

He liked to shuck and jive on his cell all day with his homies about scoring some dope to sale . . .

HRD,
I'm guessing that's the basic reason he can't tell up from down - or right from left. It's not education, it's chemicals.

Barb,
I guess the test writers think 60,000 degree air is just warm.

i have a diploma and it aint backed up by anything i have no math skills hardly any english skills. the only reason i did so well in history is because ive been studying it for a long time, schools try to teach but alot of these dumb ass kids want nothing to do with it. they jsut want to go get high or sloshed. im sorry, but my generation is completely worthless and i dont get along with anyone my age. only older people because they have their heads screwed on the right way not crossthreaded
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todays lesson jr PUT THE BONG DOWN AND LEARN SOMETHING!

After I graduated, all my friends from school turned into druggie's or drunks.. there is 1 left I'll still talk to, but that's it.. there are a few younger than me, that I work with, that I'm friends with.

Man, i did my fair share of dope and booze through the years, hell i still drink more often than i should, but i never got lazy or dumb from it! But i guess if you have no ambition for anything from the get go, then im sure you will not amount to much. I guess i just feel real dumb sometimes and it amazes me that collage grads seem more dumb than me halve the time.

Like so many social issues there are so many factors that enter into evaluating why we are where we are in education, and personal responsibility, today. If next week's election turns out as often predicted, and promised programs are enacted we'll be up to 48% of the population receiving a check of some kind "from the government". But that's a whole 'nother issue. It will be interesting to see if Jim Robinson has any feedback from within the belly of the beast as far as the education thing goes.

Given the complexity of evaluating failing education almost any opinion will have some relevance and will be arguably accurate. We arrive at these from personal experience and prejudice. Personally I think we send our kids of today way too many mixed messages. Political correctness was brought up earlier, and though I don't think many kids could verbalize their feelings I think most thoughtful kids feel in their gut that there's something wrong with most PC messages. Also we put way too much faith in distant institutions to "solve our problems". There's no way some detached bureaucrat sitting behind a desk in D.C., your state capital, or perhaps even in your local school district will have a feel for what each kid needs, much less what our economic structure requires. To his credit, Bill Gates foundation is working to try to fight some of this mismanagement, but even with his substantial financial resources and having some pretty savvy educators running his operation they've found it to be a very difficult task.

Just a couple examples of what I've run into when trying to have a very small impact on "the system". Almost 30 years ago when I was doing automotive service training, we joined in a gov/business program intending to give inner city kids a hand up on starting a worthwhile career. It was a program known as CETA (comprehensive employment and training act). It's intent was for business entities to bring young people into entry level jobs, continue on the job training, and both provide them with the start of a career path and help employers find good, qualified employees. The key word there is intent. At the first meeting I attended with the bureaucrats running the program I was "foolish" enough to ask how we were going to test the kids for their aptitude. In my mind I thought it would be most productive and would likely yield the most success if we took kids with a mechanical aptitude into the mechanical field I was representing. Foolish me................I didn't understand the politics of it. Obviously I was some sort of neanderthal because "everybody knows" those kinds of tests are racist. Absolutely no testing would be permitted, it's a one size fits all world afterall. (You didn't really think I came by my cynicism for government solutions to real problems by accident did you? ) Okay, so no testing, our job was to take a kid who might make a great graphic artist and force him to be a mechanic. Okay, I get it! So then the discussion moved on to goals. Again, foolishly I thought that we would want to make every effort to formulate realistic objectives for what was to be learned, in what period of time, and what the training formula would be. Again, I was sternly repremanded for being out of touch with the objectives. We were told that we needed to enroll X number of kids in the program, and within the arbitrary timeframe, "graduate" Y number of kids (a number very close to X). By this time the smart ass in me had been awakened (he's a light sleeper....). Much to the shock of the other "professionals" around the table, I said "so this is just a numbers game to make the program look good, not to really help the kids or the employers?" Must have hit a nerve as the guy running the program went into about a 5 minute denial rant...........................then proceeded to define the numbers game we were to play. A few short years, and millions of dollars later the program was terminated by Congress for not having been effective. Now, if you know how hard it is to kill any government program, that event alone should substantiate what a stinker this one was.

Example two was not quite 10 years ago. A high school near my shop was being rebuilt. The project took a couple years and bunches of money, but the goal was to build a modern facility to meet what the school board believed were the needs of the community. To my pleasant surprise I learned they were making an automotive training area part of the building stucture. Grand opening came around and to my surprise the building designed and built to be the automotive shops was being used for warehousing. I asked, "when were they going to clear out the temporary storage (oh, foolish me) and start the automotive classes?". I was summarily informed that they weren't EVER going to do automotive training because today's kids just didn't want that, that it was a job for losers, and that there wasn't enough earning potential in automotive repair in a high tech world. Not exactly those words, but that was the message. I looked at this "councellor" and asked if he'd ever been to an automotive repair shop and talked to the business owner/manager to learn what was involved in repairing a contemporary car. He talked in circles for a moment, but essentially the answer was no. I asked him if he had any clue as to the pay range of a highly qualified tech was. Again, he was clueless. When I told him my two top techs were making between $65k and 85k depending on productivity, bonuses, and profit sharing it looked to me like his lunch was about to exit.........one end or the other. This idiot probably wasn't making much more than that himself, if that much. And no, my guys didn't have a college degree, in fact neither did I, maybe that's why we didn't have the same ignorance he did. (yeah, mr. sarcasm got awoken again). When I let him know that at that time we had an annual need for around 35000 new techs each year I knew I was wasting my time, but couldn't help but keep piling on.

Okay, a third. There were two technical colleges near my shop that turned out body/paint repair techs. I worked as an advisor at one for awhile until I figured out that the reason I never hired anyone from that school was that the lead instructor was a pure blivit. The other school provided me with three excellent technicians over time. Not all schools/instructors are equal. In primary schools we have few tools to make those kinds of evaluations. Per union rules, all teachers are equal (maybe not technically accurate, but functionally). We rely on bloated school administrations to do that filtering for us, but they have little to no incentive to do so.

John, to get back to one of your first remarks. In today's world there's no excuse for anyone who values education not to be able to improve themselves, even without the aid of a college degree (not to say college isn't valuable, just that not all of us are cut out for it). To me, the single most important educational tool is the ability to read. With that skill, just about every other avenue of expanded education is accessible. One needs only pick up a book, or go on the internet, there's a world of knowledge out there just "waiting" to be discovered. It's encouraging folks (kids or adults) to want to seek out that knowledge that's the challenge. We are evolving our society to honor the failures and punish the successful..................we are fed that crap everyday during the last two years of campaigning..........well, actually everyday of our lives, it just intensifies at election time. You don't build success by tearing down from the top, you lift up from the bottom.

A big prblem is the 30 to 35 students per class room now. The teachers are not teaching anymore they are handing out assignments and giving a very brief description of the work, Then they are on thier own. Our son is failing math, algebra 8th gade. My wife and I do not understand it ourselves, My wife asked the teacher to give him a little help explaining what to do. She said very snobbishly, its not my problem he can stay over after school and get help from another student. Thats teaching in todays world, at least in Indiana. NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND, YA MY AZZ !!!!!!!

WOW!!!Interesting comments! Im glad to see that im not the only one who can see the failure in the system. And i gather we all agree that personal responsability makes us as smart or as "educated" as we want to be.

Been to a school board meeting lately???? I haven't since my kid got out of high school but when he was still there I did go quite often....The meetings were mostly about the business of running the school, appropriations, expenditures, how to get money or equipment from this or that agency then towards the end of the meeting sometimes there was an issue or two actually concerning educational issues..... Guess that's probably just a result of the government's hand in education........

Teach the test, no child left behind, and many other issues are school issues, right??? Wrong, IMO they should be parent/educator issues. How many parents just regard school as nothing more then a place to keep the kids busy while they're at work?????? Education is not just the goal of the school but it should also be an issue for the parents..... Is there even such a thing as PTA anymore???? Are the schools failing, or are we failing as parents????

Not meaning to sound like a dinosaur but when I was in school, I came home from school, did chores, ate dinner, did homework, and if there was anytime left then did other things..... Good grades were mandated around our house, if not then someone was going to have a conference with the teacher involved and find out why, Lord help you if it was your fault and you just flat weren't doing the work..... When someone failed a course or was held back a year, the school wasn't blamed, the kid was..... Dad had his own way of "encouraging" all of us to be involved in some sort of activity, sports, band, debate, chorus, or something..... Even when cars and racing became an obsession with me in school, if I wanted to have a part time job so I could afford to race karts or cars in the summer then there were certain things that HAD to be accomplished in the school year.... I was a troublemaker in school and paid the consequences with both the school administrators and Dad....guess who's punishment was the worse of the two??? Also, helping a younger brother or sister who was having problems with a particular subject was also mandatory around our house.

The curriculum has changed, as Uncle Bob said very few if any vocational ed type courses are even offered here anymore.... Waaaaaay too much emphasis on sports and not enough on the acedemic basics of reading, writing, and math.... It seems the one's who excel academically due so more from their own efforts then because it's what the school system does.... Pressure from parents for good grades still seems to be a motivating factor. The parents who regard the school system as a baby sitting service usually end up with a child who's education reflects it.....

We're fortunate around here in that the school systems for the most part are still small enough that the faculty takes a sincere interest in their job.... With what teachers are paid around here they certainly aren't in it for the money!!!!!!

I do agree that when discipline was taken away from the schools, it was the beginning of the decline in the quality of education recieved..... Kids need discipline, from home and from the schools. Eventually they will learn to discipline themselves, if they don't I doubt success any any endeavor will be easy to achieve...

I don't claim to have any of the answers, but the government running things sure as heck isn't it!!!!!! IMO the only way the schools systems can be returned to their former level of performance is if the parents become involved and demand it and through the government the heck out!!!!!

I don't see one thing causing problems in school, I see many.

Broken marriages result in kids not having as much supervision....no clear vision of the parents roles in raising kids....maybe no desire to repeat the life they see their parents leading...the availability of drugs to very young kids, causing personality problems and also early damage that will never be overcome....obscession with things such as video games,which detract from coming home and having an urgency to do assignments....kids support groups in school more concerned with social distractions than focusing on their reason for being there....and on and on.

To me there are a couple things that help. A stable and normal home life. Encouragement from parents to look ahead to the future. Sit down to dinner with the TV off! This will result in a lot of face time to talk about life..values...the future...the importance of some things in finding happiness... and so on. Encouraging the kids to pursue a field that includes an interest they are passionate about. Other activities such as sports, which will keep them too busy to get into mischief, out of boredom. And lastly...pray that your kids have some sort of motivation. If they are not driven to do anything, all of the schooling really doesn't mean much. On the other hand...a kid who is really motivated about something will find a way to succeed, even without the diploma!

Hey, hey hey! You ought to try to TEACH these kids! I taught mostly upper level college courses but was required to cycle through teaching Freshman every so often. Although I had to work very hard to get a B in Spanish in H.S. all the rest was very easy for me but I can recall playing basketball for an hour in Gym, another hour at lunchtime and then practice for close to three hours after school and then come home, eat and fall asleep at 7 PM! Our English Lit book was large enough to place a copy of the latest Hot Rod Magazine inside so as to keep up with the latest flathead roadster as well as pass English! I could go on an on about this problem but I will say that my academic career suffered because I insisted on giving Standardized Tests at the end of courses and I have heard every excuse in the universe why that was not needed. As far as the SOL tests are concerned they are at least better than the situation before where H.S. teachers would teach whatever they wanted and there was very little common material across different schools. I think the main problem is that H.S. teachers are the folks who cannot go further themselves than their education courses. In my experience I use jokes, stories, plenty of equations, plenty of old test examples, poems about the equations, chants and a lot of movement during class (moving target!); generally I get good ratings on the "Johnny Carson Entertainment Teaching Evaluations". Did you know that mostly teaching evaluations are used to measure student unhappiness with the course? I make sure I call on students and ask them "what did I just say?" I do it in a humorous polite way but I constantly pepper them again and again so they follow the discussion. Did you know that Math levels have been reduced in science majors? I have fun and I know from jobs students get that I am doing the right thing but boy it is work! I had one student who just would not write lab reports and I informed him I would just not pass him unless he wrote the reports. A year later he came back to visit and we laughed together because his paying job now is to WRITE up the procedures in his company for federal reports! The problems are:

1. lack of support by parents.
2. TV
3. H.S. teachers who may not know the facts themselves!
4. An unbalance toward sports, hey I love sports but you need to read too!
5. Lack of appreciation for good teachers by institutions.
6. Did I forget Drugs?

However the bottom line is that folks with exceptional aptitudes will still make good; it is the next teir down that could be improved with good teaching that is being lost. The problem of educating Johnny/Jane Average or Below Average takes a LOT of work and talented teachers but it can be done if teachers were trained to be enthusiasctically competent, but then there is another problem. One Professor of Education said that H.S. students are mostly surging hormones so how do you keep that under control? I was very lucky to have a wise Science Teacher because I was constantly in trouble for some mischief and he sent me into the equipment closet with orders to clean it up and organize it. But I learned more from all the gadgets in the closet than from the book AND I was in the closet out of trouble; I owe him a lot!

I agree with Bob, why don't we see more emphasis on the TRADES, a lot of students who could make good in the trades and actually earn more are seduced into spending time trying to get a B.S. that they may not use and which will prevent them from fulfilling their true aptitude in a trade.

This is a very complex problem but believe me teaching to the standard tests as in SOLs is still better than some teacher wasting a whole year on some special pet topic so that in the end the students are not really prepared to go on. I recently brought a H.S. student from a D to a B in Senior Math in a two hours session by just showing him to leaf ahead in the book and not to get bogged down in nomenclature, just learn "how to do it". Sadly many math courses get bogged down in nomenclature and fail to develop the inner activity of the brain in the procedures, perhaps because the teachers are underpaid, undertalented and wrongly trained not to recognize how to get the gears turning in students heads, etc. etc. Hey teaching is hard work but I enjoy it!

My conscience is clear because I have really tried to emphasise good teaching but I have a number of career scars because I insisted on testing. You would not believe all the reasons I have heard why testing is not necessary. Fortunately I visited my old department four years after retirement and was pleased that they are still using the style of testing that I insisted on and in fact I overheard one of the new teachers bitching about these "standards" but hey, in education the graduates are the product you turn out!

Don Shillady
Retired Scientist/teen rodder

on a side note todays punishment in my school consisted of send you home, most of the kids wanted to go home so they could play x-box or hit the pipe. i screwed off my freshamn year i admit it i fell into the who care deal mainly because i was getting picke don constantl about my size that stuff cuts deep. anyway 10th and 11th grade i did ok ig uess senior year pulled my head out of my ss stayed after school till 430-5 o clock and had a PT job i wanted to graduate. we never had any homework though that was kind of nice.

I think one of the biggest problems with schools today, is that it's run by the government. I don't know why anybody thought that would be a good idea, seeing how ineffecient they are at everything they do. I'm just glad I was home schooled. Oh, Scooter, I agree with you about our generation, most of 'em are pathetic.
Can you imagine what it'll be like in another 20 years when these potato-heads are actually running everything!

how many of you would like to pony up for 4 years college only to be paid less than a janitor ? my bride has taught 1st grade for 25+ years. at 20 the state stops any increases in pay. they get squat for benefits . 0 help from useless parents . morons at state level trying to reinvent education with more useless test. teachers , cops , and firemen get paid so little it's easy to see why none want the job anymore.

she's there to teach them.......... not raise them .