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June 27, 2004
Public school graduates, what a fine crop we have.
Random crap:
Ignorant and unaware is how most of the people I have worked with go through life. Some places it has been 51% some 99%. The only exception is hospitals where I find the vast majority people are with the program.
I think we have become a society that values self-esteem more than competence. We seem to care how people, especially children feel about themselves rather than if they have the sense God gave a snail. As long as I hold myself in high regard I’m sure others will too…until they realize that I am a complete dolt.
A fantastic work by Kruger and Dunning, Unskilled and Unaware sums it up. People in the lower quarter think they are smarter than almost two thirds of us. They lack the skills to know why they don’t know.
If we keep up this feel good education in our schools then we are going to have more and more people who are less and less able to function in society. A great hue and cry from the teachers union locally is that teachers must teach students to pass a state mandated test, the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test. The teachers complain that they can’t teach students what they need to know because they are too busy teaching them to pass a test that evaluates basic skills in reading, comprehension, mathematics, spelling and grammar. This perplexes me, aren’t students being prepared for the real test? Life.
It is because of the failure to teach the basics needed to get through the day that the teen aged McDonald’s cashier asks if I “have the penny” when my total is $3.49. The penny for what? So you can give me $1.52 in change.
Teachers should be teaching the basics, and students should be allowed to fail. Failure is as much a part of life as success. It really does not matter how the students feel about it failure sucks. Get up, dust yourself off and move on.
It is all well and good to have a high school graduate who feels just dandy about himself, but if he is not literate and numerate then he will soon lose that wonderful feeling as he battles incompetence and unemployment. On a brighter note, service jobs can never be moved offshore. Someone local will always have to cook my hamburger and change my car’s oil. Unfortunately I must assume it is hard to raise a family on wages that those professions pay.
So teachers need to stop whining that they are ‘teaching to the test’ the test is life. If your students can’t pass these standardized tests they can’t survive in the workaday world.
Posted by Matthew at June 27, 2004 04:07 AM
Comments
I think the complaint that the teachers have is based more on the fact that the schools require them to teach test taking "strategies" rather than the content. In theory, if the teachers just taught their subjects, the ability to pass the FCAT would follow, but the schools won't rely on this and risk their standing. Instead they make the teachers devote a significant portion of their time to teaching wisdom filled tidbits like "If you don't know the answer, choose C."
Another complaint that I think has validity is that the teachers are required to teach the 5 paragraph essay structure (intro, point 1, point 2, point 3, conclusion). I think you'll agree that this is hardly the pinnacle of writing styles, but it's the only one to which the state graders seem to lend any credence. I suppose the argument could be made that this is a good foundation for writing, though.
Okay, I'm done.
Posted by: James at June 30, 2004 08:33 AM
The fact that the students could compose a paragraph would put them far ahead of their peers.
We covered the "Eliminate as many answers as possible and choose from the rest to increase your chances of guessing correctly," stuff in 8th grade. It took about an hour. We also discussed the penalty for wrong answers. Some tests (SAT most famously) take off 1/4 point for wrong answers. So not only do you not get a point for getting it correct, you lose 1/4 a point for getting it wrong. This levels the playing field for guessing. That is why it is better not to guess and leave an answer blank thus not gaining one point if you must guess from >= 4 choices. If it is 3 or fewer choices your are statistically better off guessing. This was obviously not public school.
I am convinced that public school teachers are by and large incompetent. A recent telephone survey by the Pinellas County Classroom Teachers Association members and other teachers (some are non-union members) to assess why they did not ratify the contract (both could vote) revealed the main reason was that they did not understand it. That worries me. If they can't understand their health insurance and rate of pay then how can they be expected to teach children?
When I began my undergraduate studies (before you could die from sex) the joke on campus was that if you did not know what you wanted to major in you chose Mass Comm because Mass Comm classes were easy and lacked rigor. It turns out we were wrong. Education majors scored remarkably poorly on the SAT according to the government.[2001 Digest of Educational Statistics Table 136] (Math majors score highest on the SAT 964 for Ed and 1174 for Math)
GRE scores are similar with Education majors scoring lower as a group (men & women of all ethnicities) than anyone else (Verbal 429, Quantitative 508, and Analytical 491 as mean scores. (read it here. [in case anyone cares mine were 610/630/640 on the test I took in 8/2002 (the GRE from 9 years prior was scored differently)]
So education majors are going into college as the low man on the totem pole and coming out the same way. It is not until we demand more from our colleges of education that we will see an improvement in the quality of teachers they crank out. Until such time we are lucky if we get barely competent people who shape our children's early lives.
Posted by: Matthew at June 30, 2004 11:00 PM