Middle school, and education generally

[LordBalmung18]

Just want to add a quick note here..

My mother is a teacher and has been one all my life here in arkansas. She is almost ready to retire.

She gets paid around..30 k a year i believe. She actually takes home half of that when all kinds of insurance and other bs expenses are totaled.

Now i understand insurance is neccesary. But i live in texarkana. The state line for texas/arkansas is in the middle of town. On the texas side, a special ed teacher with her experience would be making around 50 k a year TAKE HOME money.

Six times over the course of my life, we had teachers raises in the city council. It was voted, it was passed..yay right? No. They !$#@ them over anyway! You know how?

While everyone is celebrating teachers make "more"they raise the insurance costs. My mom had to pay MORE for insurance than the raise even added! So after teaching 25 years, she is making LESS after getting so called "raises".

And shes in special education. She gets paid signifigantly more. Ordinary teacher salaries are barely minimum wage here.

[Demetrius]

In the schools in my area (my Mother is a special Ed teacher and my Father coaches football, both are involved in many youth activities) students have a distinct lack of pride in themselves and their school. Discipline is a joke (students are openly rude to teachers, walk out on them and are coddled) and there is no reward for a resounding sucess that a passable performance is not given as well. In the 7 years since I have been in school the situation at my old school has become... stupid.

::EDIT::

The biggest cop out I have ever dealt with was in the final exam for my microeconomics class, the final essay question (mind you there were no clues that anything like this would be on the exam) was write your own question, the difficulty of the question and how well you answer it will determine the points you will recieve. Gah!! That made me mad, I hate open ended junk like that!

[Toast]

I definately agree about the testing issue. Yes it supposedly standardizes the level of knowledge (an A in Texas doesn't necessarily equal an A in New York) and supposedly eliminates grade inflation (teachers giving extra credit or scoring softly), but at the same time there's really no direct evidence that it works and the tests themselves are often poorly crafted. A lot of these standardized tests are normed on a thousand students or less. For the most part that doesn't include students with learning disablities, either.

A perfect example would be the SAT. It's been proven that a high score on the SAT does not predict college success. Other factors such as motivation, time spent, and (most importantly, not surprising) parental income are much better predictors. Also, until recently, the SAT was last normed in the 1950s on 4000 or so students who were most likely to be white urban kids. I think it was renormed in '97, if I recall correctly.

[Ippy]

I agree with pretty much all of what has been mentioned. Hats off to Krylo though, that was an awesome rant against the school system.

The one thing that I didn't read much about was a students right to fail a class. I talked to my old middle school principle when I ran into her while shopping and she admitted that no one holds kids back in middle school unless it is an extreme case. I don't believe anyone can learn a lesson if they are sheltered from failure their whole life.

I've seen kids go through school and screw it up terribly, and both the student and their parents yell and whine to a counselor about not getting to walk at their graduation.

Also, you get three chances to pass the exit exam. Even if you are bad a taking tests, there should have been something that could have been done to pass it. I always wondered how many people failed all three tests. To be fair though, I would probably fail the test if I took it a second time. I can only write so many essays about the city I live in, or a memorable experience of some sort.

-Leslie

[adamark]

I've been non-stop educated for the last 19 years of my life (I'm 20).

19 years, that's a lonnnnng time. I've come to the conclusion that humans are too unique to be treated like herd animals as we are in schools. Schools are to children what cubicles are to adults. Think Officespace.

Some people say that the very existence of the education system is to brainwash us into accepting our subordinate role in society... to accept 'our' cubicle as we grow into adulthood.... It's very Matrix-y (the first Matrix) if you think about it. We are slaves to the system.

Maybe it would be better if we entirely scrapped the education system and went back to the way things were in the 1800s. Universities existed, but most people could get by with about a 5th grade education. You learned how to read and do basic math and then you went out and lived your life... and only a few brilliant people would become scholars...

The rebuttal is that our economy and civilization is so far advanced that we would not be able to survive after 50 years of the destruction of today's education system. But... I don't know. Education is so institutionalized it's become a prison system. I think the world would be a much more interesting place if we cut loose and stopped the endless march toward economic goals. Just exist... meh. No one agrees with my point of view anyway :P

[Lord of Joshelplex]

I personally think they need to weed out the kids in middle school, so that people who are actually going to pass, and not repeat 10th grade science 6 times (45% of my class has failed that course more than once) should be allowed in, and then, teachers wont hate their jobs, vcause they wont have to teach retarded hoods and would-be whores everyday. I think in this way, we cna let people that want to not be educated, be that way, and people that do, get an education, as it is proven that kids in smaller classes with less distractions have a considerably easier time in school. I do think that Krylo has an excellent point, however, I personally feel that the school system shoulnt force everyone to be educated, only people that want to be.

[LordBalmung18]

The flaw with allowing children to choose whether or not they wanna be educated, is that they are in fact, children, and 99% of them dont give a shit about education. Teenagers rarely learn how their decision affect them until its too late.

Im a perfect example of this. I graduated high school yes, but only on a tecnicality. I only have an 8th grade education in reality. And im constantly playing catch up in my adult life, cause i missed alot of instruction and knowledge that would aid me now. Things like getting a car, learning to drive, getting a job, its all slowed down because i skipped out on school.

Now one could argue this wasnt my fault, i have aspbergers, the school was fucking me over blah blah..but the point is that when i had the choice to suck it up and go back to school or get a free pass to play videogames and graduate anyway i chose the latter. Because i was a fucktard when i was 15.

Almost every other teenager would make the same choice, and they dont have the same help i did. I managed to scrape my life together through the effort of family and friends and it still took many years to make it the work in progress it is now. Other people...i mean sure yes the kids who wanted the school would be smarter but then you would have even DUMBER ghetto rats roaming the streets with firearms. Not pretty(Before anyone jumps up my ass, theres an obscenely high crime rate around here and we get targeted alot because my mom is a teacher. I fucking hate ghetto culture.)

I think the best solution would be the our new program here. They have three schools for each class of education, which is early education, middle school, and high school. 3 schools for each. One school is the excelent student school, with smaller class sizes and accelerated learning. My little sister attends one of these and is progressing far more rapidly than before. Then theres the average school, for people who dont really try to excel but arent dumb either. People like me in other words. And then theres the dumbass school, filled with future criminals and prostitutes. Dutifully seperated from the proper population just like in their adult life when they end up in prison .

And no. Thats nto a reference to black people. Given my area, its more white trash than anything x.x. God bless the deep south /sarcasm.

[Lord of Joshelplex]

I really think that schools need to be a lot harshwer and students who constantly disrupt or have low grades. Really, some people want a decent learning enviroment but dont want to be in an accelerated program (like me) We need that idea you came up with for a smart school, normal school, and fucktard trash shithole school. I think that is actuially a really good plan.

[Sanacra]

The flaw with allowing children to choose whether or not they wanna be educated, is that they are in fact, children, and 99% of them dont give a shit about education. Teenagers rarely learn how their decision affect them until its too late.

I would argue that - at least in some cases - part of the reason "99%" of kids don't give a shit is because they're given so little control over what they're supposed to be learning. Certainly, at very young ages, they have no context from which to form an opinion as to what subjects interest them, and there are some topics which need to be taught, but it seems to me that once a good groundwork has been established students would benefit from having more direct say in their own education.

To give this some context, I personally enjoyed math and science classes, but found english and history - while occasionally interesting - less engaging. However, in order to meet the school's requirements for graduation, I was forced to take english and history classes that I didn't particularly care for. Furthermore, I don't feel that I particularly got very much out of my high school english classes, because not only wasn't I personally invested in the course, but the "skills" they were attempting to teach - reading comprehension and to a lesser degree essay writing - were things I had already developed on my own or through previous classes. Mind you, these were regular-level classes, and I arguably would have found honors classes more rewarding, but as I said - I wasn't actually motivated to take those classes, and honors would have required a substantially greater investment in time and effort to pass.

From another angle, let's look at the classes I did want to take - maths and sciences. In my senior year, I was looking for a way to take more math or science courses, and decided to try taking a lab-based chemistry class, an alternative to a required course I had already taken. Besides myself, the class was full of sophomores, of which, as far as I could tell, not a single one had any actual interest in chemistry. As a result, I dropped the class after less than a semester, because attempting to conduct labs with a bunch of people who'd rather not be there in the first place was rather stifling. Of course, I wouldn't have attempted to take a sophomore chemistry class in first place if there had been an honors chemistry course - but there wasn't one because not enough people had signed up to take it.

Now, I'm probably not the norm, and perhaps most students wouldn't respond as well to a less firmly structured system of required schooling, but on the other hand, having a set of absolutely required courses means that the student a) hasn't spent any time deciding what he or she actually would like to learn and b) oftentimes ends up taking classes he or she has no personal investment in, which, besides making him/her miserable and resentful of the administration, lessens the effectiveness of the courses and of the school overall.

[Elminster_Amaur]

I think that the real solution would be privatizing all schools, so that there is no more insane government interference where they have no clue what they're doing.

If everything were privatized, the schools would have to actually compete with each other based on the level of the student's learning upon graduation, instead of based on silly tests like the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, or FCAT. The government could still fund certain schools, hopefully those not in rich neighborhoods, but it'd be preferrable if entrepreneurs would take over the schools and provide most of the funding, hoping that they could get all the smart and creative people from their privately owned school(s) working to make them more money.

Because that's what it's going to take, in the end. Money. A selfishness to corner markets that you don't even know exist yet is probably the only way you're going to get the schools back on track. For example: the arts are generally not as highly exploited in the poorer neighborhoods. An investor, would like to start a school in a poor neighborhood, preferrably starting only with the elementary school levels, and as your first class gets closer to graduating, you approach them with the teachers that have gotten close to them over the years and ask if they'd (the talented/smart ones) like to work for you, probably for more than they'd get if they just graduated from some run of the mill high school. You do this, because you know you can make lots of money off of truly talented people, and most people have talents, just that hardly any ever end up doing for a living what they're good at.

If someone starts off with this business plan, soon more and more investors will join in, until all the good schools are privately owned, and we'll start producing massive amounts of scientific discoveries/new inventions/new artwork in all fields, and that is a good thing, because true competition has always been the driving force behind major discoveries.