November 26, 2003
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Topic: HOW BAD ARE SOME PUBLIC SCHOOLS?
“the kids are good, but the city is wacky and ask the teachers to do ridiculous things. They want every teacher to strictly follow these guidelines in reading and math, and totally change overnight how they have been teaching for a long time.
Our bulletin boards have to be a certain way, they constantly ask us to do something with less then a days notice, and it cannot be done in that time.” – NYC school teacher
My mom is a highschool math teacher. She now has to read a story for 5min. of every class, to in some way promote literacy, since most kids who enter her high school can’t read. Half her kids cut her classes. They’re not bad kids, she says, they’re just dumb. They’ve been pushed through, and don’t know how to do basic arithmatic that’s required for her class. Now, they have changed the curriculums, but that isn’t changing anything. They’re making kids do more group work, but we all know kids goof off in groups, or one kid does all the work.
Sooner or later, 5 years, 10 years, we’ll hit a critical point. We’ll need a “paradigm shift,” a term I picked up in some college class. We’ll have to look at the problem as a larger problem that will require larger solutions than making a high school classroom, “look like a 5th grade classroom.”
Comments (3)
Seems more and more like state education isn’t actually concerned with education, but with production. It’s a sad situation.
Oh, that’s 100% what it is in many cases. Produce a student who can get just enough grades by doing just enough work, do get a diploma. So many evaluations of schools is based on grad rates, test scores, etc. There’s never any evaluations done about what who these kids are, what they think about, what work they’re doing, etc.
Passion is being sucked out of public education. If these kids had something that they were passionate about, I believe that they would have a reason to learn. Here in Utah the legislature is trying to take art, and anything else they don’t consider scholastic out of the schools, this is as ridiculous as reading a story in a math class. Art is just as much a part of education as anything else. Isn’t it bad enough that it is widely ignored in history classes. This obviously upsets me, and I should probably rant about it on my own site, but anyroads. . . I agree with what you are saying about public school. I love your blogging idea, and I agree that it is ridiculous that your mother has to read a book at the beginning of each class.