School or Scam

[glatt]

It's always very dangeous to generalize about things like this. However, I am going to try.

One thing that has changed in the last 30 years or so is that many women go to work now. Parents aren't home with the kids. They are paying other people to raise the kids. Few people are willing to come out and say the obvious truth that daycare is usually worse for children than having a parent care for them. It's worse in a couple of ways.

1) Daycare centers and nannys don't care about a kid as much as a good parent does. They are less likely to be concerned about raising the child to be a good grown-up. Instead, what they want to do is get through the day with as little conflict as possible. They do not try to teach values and morals. They have activities, and when there is conflict between kids, they use distraction as a way of dealing with it. If a parent was present during conflict, the parent could use that as an opportunity to teach the kids why certain behaviour is wrong and how certain things are expected of them. They can instill values in the kid by strikign while the iron is hot, right after an issue comes up.

2) When the parents come home, they don't know what to do with their kids. They are less experienced than they would be if they were home with the kids all day, and they are often unsure how to deal with problems as they come up.

3) In the "old days" moms would often talk with one another during the day to get ideas on how to deal with kids. There was a shared knowledge. Now, most parents don't have that support group to turn to. They have to turn to books, which help, but are often not so good at giving a person the self-confidence and sense of camraderie they need.

Study after study have shown that the first 2-3 years of a child's life are the most important ones for child development. That's when the child learns how the world works. That's when the behaviour and personality is basically set in stone. (At least those parts that aren't determined genetically before birth.) A child that get lots of love and attention will learn that the world is basically a good place. They will be more likely to grow up well adjusted and with a respect for fellow humans. You are really laying the foundation for the child's entire life in those first couple years. Parents usually do a better job of it than the constantly rotating staff of a daycare center.

BY the way, parents include both women and men. Men can stay home and raise the kids just as well as women can.

[wolf]

I think he needed to own the baseball team primarily to make up for the fact that he was not a real jock.

That's usually why rich guys buy sports teams, anyway.

Does anybody know if Rich Lurie played football in high school, or was he too busy being president of the Accounting Club and the Mathlete Squad?

[elSicomoro]

Do you mean Jeffrey Lurie?

[OnyxCougar]

Originally posted by Beestie
Its not about teacher's salaries, its about cirriculum, pitiful textbooks, sorry-ass parents, ill-conceived psychology, political correctness and a eggregious misstatetement of the goal of education.

It comes down to the parents. Period.

If the parents don't give a shit about their child's education, then neither will the child, and neither will the school.

If a parent cares, gets involved, the child does better. Puts forth more effort. Attends more regularly. Puts more value on what they learn, and retains it longer. If the parent gets involved with the school, they have a (small) say in curriculum. Zoning. Activities.

[mrnoodle]

I can see why spanking is outlawed in schools; there's too much opportunity for real abuse, and it doesn't really solve much if the kid isn't getting any discipline anywhere else. However, my dad had an interesting story from when he was teaching shop class in the 50s...

He was a new teacher at the school, and the class was called "Industrial Sciences" rather than "Shop", but the notion was the same. This particular class was made up solely of football players who, at this school, epitomized the movie cliche of "bad guy jock" - like Biff in Back to the Future. They had run the previous teacher off, and weren't interested in anyone's instruction, especially some glasses-wearing 20-something. They ran amok for about 2 days and dad gave them an ultimatum (something about cleaning up the scrap material after class was over). They decided to ignore him and all left when the bell rang.

The next day, when everyone showed up, he took attendance, then walked over to the door and locked it. He reminded them of his ultimatum of the day prior (my dad's very soft-spoken, I've only heard him yell a handful of times in my life) and told them he was taking charge as of that moment. They formed a line and got their 200-lb linebacker asses whipped with a belt wielded by a 5 ft. 9 in. teacher (albeit one who had just gotten out of the military and could have probably taken any of them one-on-one). No one complained, no parents sued, and the jocks were model students for the rest of the year because they respected the way dad stood up to them. That's just the way things worked in small Texas towns.

If that happened today, there would have been investigations by the FBI, calls for justice from the ACLU, public hangings, and million-dollar lawsuits for emotional distress. That is, if the teacher survived the asswhipping he got from students who knew they could get away with anything as long as they were on the football team. As spoiled as the jocks in my dad's day were, they knew their lives were essentially over if they laid a hand on an authority figure.

Like I said, in today's society spanking is a no-no. But teachers have to be given back the authority to discipline their kids. It's like Lord of the Flies out there.

edited for a missspellling

[wolf]

Originally posted by sycamore
Do you mean Jeffrey Lurie?

Yeah, that guy. I must have been thinking "Rich Asshole Lurie," which, IIRC, is his full name. Thanks. Fucking Eagles.

[warch]

I dont think allowing teachers to beat students into submission is the answer.

So, what makes a school good? What do successful students need?

Leadership starts with a mission and stated values. Learning and respect and responsibility are core values. Policy extends from there. Admin with teachers with parents with kids. Bad, failing schools, first and foremost, have bad, failing leadership. Teachers cant jsut blame parents. Parents cant just blame teachers. Kids cant blame everyone else.

Another is a philosophy of employing a variety of teaching approaches- not just the classic verbal/writing classroom with rows of chairs. Creative teachers encouraged.

And you know I'm all arty, so I avocate for arts infused across the disciplines.

Small class sizes- 20 or less kids per teacher. 15 or less in grades preK-2.

A curriculum that teaches kids how to think not what to think. This kind of deep learning is harder to test for but much more valuable in real life.

Coursework that makes sense, is based in real live kid experience and makes kids curious, raises more questions than answers.
Ok I better stop my edubabble or Griff will call me on it.

[Tomas Rueda]

with this talk, I developed an idea.

I want to be a substitute teacher when I retire. Because that way (as far as I am concerned) you can dicipline the kids as hard as you can and if they blame me, I will have the secret alibi that My compensation doesn't depend on the school.

however, Schools should give back the desire to learn. I believe society turned from those old, happy days when failing students got scholarships for a certain sport.

A person has the natural desire to learn. our Scientific name (Homo sapiens) says so (learned-ing man)

in fact, I wanted to learn so much that I learned the planets when I was five. And now I study Greek by myself.

Yet, I also have a class that I did not put into my curriculum, (business ownership: how to become an entrepreneur) and I have a 52 in it:

the culprit: too much work applied over little time (Ok, you have to do Ch5, sections 1 and 2, questions, vocabulary, key concepts, and self-test by tomorrow.)

We, the students, in order to form a better society, declare that we are not computers. information does not flow through our minds through dicipline, it flows through logic (of course you need dicipline in order to have logic{d'uh})

[Tomas Rueda]

oh, any people who think otherwise?

[Troubleshooter]

Originally posted by warch
I dont think allowing teachers to beat students into submission is the answer.

It may not be the answer but it is an answer.

It should be the answer when all other options have failed.

The problem is that the other options aren't working and the answer short circuits to corporal punishment instead of following the chain of escalating severity.

Punishment should be rated on three factors:

certainty, celerity, and severity.

The first two are the most important I think, because if they think it might not happen then they will be more willing to risk punishment. If it waits until they get home, then it looses the instructional capacity of immediacy. If you know that you are going to get punished as soon as you break the rules it will reduce the window in which they are willing to break the rules. Nothing stings like getting tightened up in front of your friends.

Severity is the most fluid of the factors. It should adjust for both the capacity of a child to understand as well as the severity of the infraction. Ideally, corporal punishment should decrease the older a child gets as their cognitive skills increase and other punishment options are available. Unfortunately, it seems it is the other way around with many parents and administrators.

[warch]

The school should institute severe consequences other than beatings. If the school is a good place to be and the majority of the kids there want to be there, then suspension can work, isolation can work. If the place sucks, it wont, and no amount of beating will improve that. Smacking is for parents to decide.

Heres the other thing. There is a point when the biggest meanest baddest ass is not the teacher. Do we want teachers or bouncers? As a teacher I dont want to work there. (I have) Do we escalate to being armed? School cannot go back to 1955. I used to work with a music teacher that just happened to be a 6 ft 5 black man. He hated being the enforcer. The staff goon. Corporal punishment is not any answer for a school.

I was paddled by the principal of Monroe Elementary for getting into a fight at the bus stop. (self defense!) I thought that it was ironic, unjust, stupid and I was only 10. My ass hurt, but mostly I was just mad.

[Griff]

Grifftopian Education System

1) Parents who give a crap.
2) Teachers who know their subject area upside down and backwards.
3) Teachers who can differentiate instruction (deliver the material in ways meaningful to students of different learning levels and styles).
4) Professional teachers who love kids more than paychecks.
5) Clear-eyed administrators willing to be unpopular with parents and/or teachers.
6) Sports as an outlet or a reward not a reason for being.
7) Curriculum, teachers, and administrators that/who treat kids as individuals.
8) No agenda outside of teaching kids how to learn.

[OnyxCougar]

Originally posted by Griff
Grifftopian Education System

1) Parents who give a crap.
2) Teachers who know their subject area upside down and backwards.
3) Teachers who can differentiate instruction (deliver the material in ways meaningful to students of different learning levels and styles).
4) Professional teachers who love kids more than paychecks.
5) Clear-eyed administrators willing to be unpopular with parents and/or teachers.
6) Sports as an outlet or a reward not a reason for being.
7) Curriculum, teachers, and administrators that/who treat kids as individuals.
8) No agenda outside of teaching kids how to learn.

Definitely a *-topian System. Too bad it will never happen.

[nanner2u]

Forget what I said... According to Onyx

[OnyxCougar]

Originally posted by nanner2u
Forget what I said... According to Onyx

To clarify, Nanner's post was about how teachers can be effective and role models, even in the present system. I told her that I agreed, but expected her to go in a whole different direction, so she edited the post. **sigh** She's in school to be a teacher, so I wanted her viewpoint, but I guess that's not going to happen now. Sorry.