More Smutty Than You: TSR's Hall of Shame

[rum nate]

Agreed Soggy. I wouldn't send my kid to the mess they call public schools now days. And I majored in Early Childhood Education. Where I live all they are concerned about teaching the kids is how to pass the SOL's (Standards of Learning). That isn't teaching that's memorizing crap. I call them the Shit out of Luck. Poor children don't know what the world is really like.

Yes, that is a HUGE problem. It was budding when I was in elementary school, but now it's an epidemic! Kids are basically being taught to do well on standardized tests, and nothing more. I encourage any parent to either send their kid to private school ( if they can afford it) or have them home-schooled. Public schools HAVE TO give these standardized tests to make sure that the school is on par with the "standards" that have been set by the state. If your school comes back with lower overall reading and math scores, there's going some probing, and some people may lose their jobs. So, instead of having kids LEARN, they "teach for the test", which is creating a generation of good test takers, who can't do anything else. There's a 6th grade teacher's blog (need to find the link), in which he writes about an experiment he did. He gave his class an earth science test. When grading them, he recorded that most of the class received B's or above. The following week, he gave a pop quiz, which was on the exact same material they had taken on the prior test, only with different questions. All but 2 of the 30 kids in the class FAILED. The 2 students that did pass were B/C students, whereas all of the honor roll students failed with everyone else. So, what does that tell you about our current education system ?

Around here it doesn't matter if you are in Public school, Private school, or home schooled, you have to take standardized tests. You start in 3rd grade with them. And then when you get to 10th grade you start taking the graduation test. Reading, Writing, Math, Science, and Social Studies. And they are some the stupidest things ever. When I took my writing one, I lost points because I didn't write in a manor they liked. You have to write like a robot for them to like it, and not use huge words, creative writing styles (I was writing a fictional story for god's sake, and it was supposed to be written like a report). But you start taking it spring of 10th grade, and then retake any parts you don't pass in the fall, then spring, until you are a senior. If you don't pass something by spring of senior year(and we had people that didn't pass one test by less then 10 points) you have 2 choices. You either go to a month long class in June to prepare for it, and take it again in July. If you pass then you graduate in August. If you don't want to take it again, you don't graduate at all. Most of the teachers I had were some of the most opened mined people you could meet. They could see and understand why we did this, but they felt that it was done in the wrong way. The middle school I went to was know all over the city as an arts school, there would be about 150 incoming 6th graders a year, and a waiting list of about 1000. When you get to the school, you find out it was a great art school 5 years ago, when I was there and now, there is hardly any art integrated into normal classwork. Its because of all the damn tests. We have had people drop out of school because they can't handle the tests. To combat the drop out rate, the state raised the age to drop out to 18. So now people go to school, don't give a damn at all cause they know they can't graduate.

[PirateKingofWyrmSea]

The current topic of conversation reminds me of the time during my senior year of high school. The girl in front of me asked me what a noun and a pronoun was...

And this was three weeks before graduation (and she actually graduated!)...

 

[paperbeth]

Sarah Palin graduated high school, and she had to be told that Africa was a continent and not a country.

[Immortelle]

At school for me there was never as much as a focus on nouns and pronouns, just correct spelling, punctuation and basic grammar.  When I did my VCE each subject I did was assessed by a series of Common Assessment Tasks or CATs.  Some where known as Extended CATs, which were basically assignments.  In order to pass you have to sufficiently fulfill a set of criteria, ie show an understanding of specific topics, correct and sufficient referencing etc.  Test CATs were exams, or the like.  For Italian for example I had to pass an oral examination which consisted of a conversation in Italian with two assessors, as well as a presentation.  For English, there was a series of oral presentations, a written test and a writing portfolio. The workload could get extreme and I've got memories of some of the others in my year crying their heart out in the locker room because the pressure was just too much for them. 

[Ashbashtus]

The current topic of conversation reminds me of the time during my senior year of high school. The girl in front of me asked me what a noun and a pronoun was...

And this was three weeks before graduation (and she actually graduated!)...

 

I do Orientation (welcome in new students) at my college and had a freshman ask what an adjective is. We were playing one of those stupid icebreaker games where you put an adjective starting with the same letter in front of your name. I was accident-prone Ashley

[eternal_darkness]

Agreed Soggy. I wouldn't send my kid to the mess they call public schools now days. And I majored in Early Childhood Education. Where I live all they are concerned about teaching the kids is how to pass the SOL's (Standards of Learning). That isn't teaching that's memorizing crap. I call them the Shit out of Luck. Poor children don't know what the world is really like.

Yes, that is a HUGE problem. It was budding when I was in elementary school, but now it's an epidemic! Kids are basically being taught to do well on standardized tests, and nothing more. I encourage any parent to either send their kid to private school ( if they can afford it) or have them home-schooled. Public schools HAVE TO give these standardized tests to make sure that the school is on par with the "standards" that have been set by the state. If your school comes back with lower overall reading and math scores, there's going some probing, and some people may lose their jobs. So, instead of having kids LEARN, they "teach for the test", which is creating a generation of good test takers, who can't do anything else. There's a 6th grade teacher's blog (need to find the link), in which he writes about an experiment he did. He gave his class an earth science test. When grading them, he recorded that most of the class received B's or above. The following week, he gave a pop quiz, which was on the exact same material they had taken on the prior test, only with different questions. All but 2 of the 30 kids in the class FAILED. The 2 students that did pass were B/C students, whereas all of the honor roll students failed with everyone else. So, what does that tell you about our current education system ?

Around here it doesn't matter if you are in Public school, Private school, or home schooled, you have to take standardized tests. You start in 3rd grade with them. And then when you get to 10th grade you start taking the graduation test. Reading, Writing, Math, Science, and Social Studies. And they are some the stupidest things ever. When I took my writing one, I lost points because I didn't write in a manor they liked. You have to write like a robot for them to like it, and not use huge words, creative writing styles (I was writing a fictional story for god's sake, and it was supposed to be written like a report). But you start taking it spring of 10th grade, and then retake any parts you don't pass in the fall, then spring, until you are a senior. If you don't pass something by spring of senior year(and we had people that didn't pass one test by less then 10 points) you have 2 choices. You either go to a month long class in June to prepare for it, and take it again in July. If you pass then you graduate in August. If you don't want to take it again, you don't graduate at all. Most of the teachers I had were some of the most opened mined people you could meet. They could see and understand why we did this, but they felt that it was done in the wrong way. The middle school I went to was know all over the city as an arts school, there would be about 150 incoming 6th graders a year, and a waiting list of about 1000. When you get to the school, you find out it was a great art school 5 years ago, when I was there and now, there is hardly any art integrated into normal classwork. Its because of all the damn tests. We have had people drop out of school because they can't handle the tests. To combat the drop out rate, the state raised the age to drop out to 18. So now people go to school, don't give a damn at all cause they know they can't graduate.

Wow. Where do you live?! I'm sure that tax payers would not be pleased to find out that their money is going to schools that are more concerned about test scores, rather than helping their children to learn. The closest thing to a standardized test that I took in HS was the PSAT. We were told that, since it was a private institution, they were not required to give standardized tests. I think they compensate for the lack of test scores with the annual graduation rate which, for my class, was 98%. Of course, they made that possible by making you take an entrance exam before admission, and expelling you if your GPA was below a 2.0 for 2 semesters in a row. We saw A LOT of people vanish after summer break. I don't think public schools can legally do that. If they could, they probably would.

[rum nate]

Im in Ohio. And the tax payers hardly know anything about all this. The only ones that do know about it are the ones that their kids are smart enough to figure out how stupid the testing is set up, or the tax payers that are in the Education system. But they want to scrap the OGT (Ohio Graduation Test) and just make High School Seniors take the ACT and get into a certain percentile to graduate. 

[El Diablo]

I worked in the education arena for about four years (not teaching, a related service) and witnessed first-hand the behind-the-scenes goings on in regular meetings with principals, administrators and superintendents. Major complaint? Lack of parental involvement. I heard plenty about parents who raised a holy stink if their 'ittle preciousssss got a C or D or (God forbid) an F because they didn't know the material. I even remember a lawsuit being considered against the district because some parent claimed their child was being discriminated against because of his economic status and wasn't being given the high marks he "deserved" (even though, as it turned out, he almost never turned in homework, played pocket computer games in class, and the parents admitted they never even asked him about school or homework, let alone helped him with it). And the district backed down and upped his grades so he could pass to the next level, rather than go through the expense and publicity of a court battle.

Oh, and by the way, the teacher who took the brat's computer game away from him during class was reprimanded for it! The parents said she humiliated their little pumpkin in front of all his friends. She resigned at the end of the year. I had lunch with her and she told me she'd wanted to be a teacher all her life, and after three years of that kind of crap she was so fed up she never wanted to go near a school again.

Biggest complaint I heard from the teachers? As has been said here in many previous posts, they're reduced to drilling their students in how to pass state-mandated tests instead of teaching them how to learn, evaluate, create, explore, all the things education should be. Kids aren't being taught to think, they're being taught to memorize predigested information so they can puke it back up at test time and keep the state and federal funding flowing to the district.

They call it "No Child Left Behind" here in the States. I call it "An Entire Generation Left Behind." Thank God I grew up in the 1960s. No computers, not even calculators, just our brains. And hey, look, we were able to come up with computers, calculators, and all the other bells and whistles that are so "essential" to modern education, not to mention modern life.

[Elsie]

Basically, schools in the south in the U.S. don't prepare kids for college one whit, and this is what happens.

I have to disagree with that. There are several public high schools in my area (in the south) that do prepare kids for college. I attended one of them. You can't generalize schools in the south since there are public schools that are good and some others that are improving. I'm pretty sure there are schools all over the U.S. that don't prepare kids for college. Also, it's not always the schools' fault students aren't prepared. There's a rampant case of laziness going around and the schools can only do so much.

My elementary school was targeted to test out new versions of standardized tests because the school had achieved high scores in previous years. It seemed like every other week we were taking one. I've heard several of my teachers during middle school and high school complain about standardized testing. It wastes so much time preparing for them. I remember whole weeks being blocked off to review before a standardized test.

[rum nate]

They call it "No Child Left Behind" here in the States. I call it "An Entire Generation Left Behind."

I have to agree with that. The teachers hate the damn program here. It really fucked up how people were taught. But you hardly ever hear a teacher talk bad about it, because apparently that can jeopardize funding and their job.

[Yaardarm Monkey II]

Kids aren't being taught to think, they're being taught to memorize predigested information so they can puke it back up at test time and keep the state and federal funding flowing to the district.

Ok, so what is the alternative?  Seriously.

What suggestion is there to that kids can 'learn' and not simply 'memorise'; although rote memorisation is considered passe, it does have its merits.  In what way can a school test the child to determine where they are at academically?  Because you have to have some standard testing to ensure that school X grades are essentially the same level as school Y grades.   This is true for business (a B+ in English should ensure a certain level of proficiency) and higher education (colleges need to know that a B+ from school X is the same as a B+ from school Y for academic purposes.

While I can understand the importance of learning as a good in itself, schools and society as a whole need to know where a student is in the understanding and retention and explaining what they know.

[rum nate]

My largest problem with standardized tests is that, for the most part, they assume all students learn the same way. And that is they can get a fact or figure, remember it, and then explain it in words. Not all people can do that. Some people would be better off drawing a picture to demonstrate something. Others can't convey their answers into words, they need to speak their answers. According to these tests, the students like that are more or less dumb. Also, schools get compared to each other. The elementary school I went to was in a very poor side of town. About 30% of the students were Somalian and were taking ESL. When test time came around, they had to take the test in English, a language that for the most part, they didn't understand. A few years after I was out of the school, it still was in academic emergency or what ever because of the students who were taking a test they couldn't under stand. Now, under the program, who was at fault here. The teachers. They were not teaching the content on the test the correct way. So the solution was to move almost the entire staff to different schools, and bring in a new staff. Some of the staff even lost their jobs because they couldn't teach the content right. You can't compare schools within the same city, let alone all over the nation. Different states and cities have different requirements and different ways of teaching. They are in different areas, and have different students and environments.

[SoggyFox]

There are some private schools scattered around the uS that try and do more experimental, and successful, educational programs.  I think there are even a few public schools like this.   Standardized tests aren't the answer though.  I am very good at taking tests - but for the most part, I'd get bored, so I'd figure out the pattern of answers on the first column of each section and repeat it.  [Oddly, I still did well enough, but it wasn't because I bothered answering the questions.]

And we need schoolhouse rock back - while for history it was kind of....skewed, the grammer and math ones are never going to stop being valid, nor are all of the history ones.  The Preamble isn't going to change anytime soon.

*goes off singing o/~Lollly, lolly, lolly, get your adverb here... o/~

[rum nate]

My high school and middle school both were like that, trying a different approach to education by using art with it. But now, the high school is more so into the program, but it still isn't enough to say it is all that different from the rest of the schools in this district.

I love schoolhouse rock. That was how I learn grammar and multiplication. The history and science ones were great also, though the one on the solar system is out of date now. Disney is sorta trying to bring it back. They released all the old ones, even some that most people never heard of (I think it was the ones on computers, from the 80s, bet that would be fun to show to a computer class today). They are also having their "stars" do new ones. I know they reworked "3 is a Magic Number." It has multiplication in it, but its about the 3 Rs. But bringing schoolhouse rock would really help.

[Darqstar]

My opinion on Schoolhouse Rock is the same as Rob Zombie's.  "It taught you things... without you knowing it, on Saturday morning.  And that was wrong."

Seriously?  I loved it.  And Schoolhouse Rock is the reason why no one of my generation can recite the preamble to the constitution.  But we can all sing it!