dm@bbn.com (Dave Mankins) (08/03/88)
I believe that we err in blaming teachers for the poor performance of our children. Even the most enthusiastic, motivated teachers have an uphill battle to interest our children in things that we parents are not interested in. Children go home to houses where there are no books, and parents wonder why our children can't read (I read once that the average American buys TWO books a year). Children go home to houses where watching television news makes you ``informed'' and parents wonder why our children can't locate Central America on a map. Teachers try to teach science, or try to teach the principles of intellectual analysis, and parents burn them at the stake for teaching heresies like ``evolution'', ``secular humanism'', or ``cultural relativism'' --- As though teaching ethics is the role of schools and not parents, as though the parents' ethical choices cannot withstand exposure to the outside world. [The preceding paragraph is a little unfair. MOST parents are perfectly reasonable. Unfortunately, there's a vocal minority who ruin schools for the rest. Also, I'm being a bit unfair to those parents who do protest the teaching of cultural relativism --- they have a valid concern that, without an ethical framework, their children will be adrift in an ethical sea. Unfortunately, it remains the parents' duty to give their children that framework. If the framework they give their children cannot withstand exposure to other cultures and other ways of thinking, then it is the parents who have failed, and not the schools who fail by exposing their children to those other ways of thinking.] The answer? We all know what it is, I hope you'll forgive my belaboring the obvious. Teach your children to respect learning. When they come home from school, have them read to you for 15 minutes as you do the dishes, prepare dinner, or set the table. It doesn't matter what they read --- have them choose something and read to you. Talk about ideas over dinner. Give them a taste of intellectual life, and they won't need teachers to drag them to it. -- David Mankins |``Surrender your heart's conceit that it is you BBN something or other | alone who knows the truth, and no one else.'' dm@bbn.com | -- Sophocles
ok@quintus.uucp (Richard A. O'Keefe) (08/03/88)
In article <11380@quartz.BBN.COM> dm@bbn.com (Dave Mankins) writes: >I believe that we err in blaming teachers for the poor performance of >our children. Even the most enthusiastic, motivated teachers have an >uphill battle to interest our children in things that we parents are >not interested in. Teachers have children for ~5 hours per week-day. A couple of days ago I read a book called "Miseducation" (or something like that, I can produce a better reference if anyone cares) which quoted a study which reported in their sample that parents spent ~15 minutes per week-day talking to their children, ~30 minutes a day on week-ends. That gives the teachers about an 11-to-1 advantage. [Ok, teachers don't spend all their time talking. Call it 6-to-1.] I'm not saying this is good. Surely few of the people who care enough about education to read this newsgroup can be that apathetic about their children. My point is that schools *claim* to be able to teach the subjects they are teaching, and that if that study is at all typical, most children are getting "academic" input *only* from the schools. If education really does depend so critically on the parents' involvement, then (a) it is time that the schools confessed frankly that they can't educate children on their own (b) we have a big problem, because what kind of parents will ignorant children make? What do we do to break the cycle _now_? Blaming today's parents won't change them.
steve@oakhill.UUCP (steve) (08/04/88)
> Teachers have children for ~5 hours per week-day. > A couple of days ago I read a book called "Miseducation" (or something > like that, I can produce a better reference if anyone cares) which > quoted a study which reported in their sample that parents spent > ~15 minutes per week-day talking to their children, ~30 minutes a day > on week-ends. That gives the teachers about an 11-to-1 advantage. > [Ok, teachers don't spend all their time talking. Call it 6-to-1.] > > I'm not saying this is good. Surely few of the people who care enough > about education to read this newsgroup can be that apathetic about their > children. > > My point is that schools *claim* to be able to teach the subjects they > are teaching, and that if that study is at all typical, most children > are getting "academic" input *only* from the schools. If education > really does depend so critically on the parents' involvement, then > (a) it is time that the schools confessed frankly that they can't > educate children on their own > (b) we have a big problem, because what kind of parents will ignorant > children make? What do we do to break the cycle _now_? Blaming > today's parents won't change them. > First if this fact is true - it is sad (not that I'm really surprised). But to claim that the teachers must take up where the parents fail is renoucing the responsibilities of parenthood, is just plain shortsightness. By the way there is still a flaw in your statisics. The 11-1 advantage disappears when divided over 20 (conservative) children to 1-2 (with 30 children at 6-1 it goes to 1-5!!). But to continue - No teacher (or school administrator) will ever tell you that they can educated a child in a vacuum. The sad truth is that the ideals the child carries are largely based on the values the student gets from his whole environment. A school system has a child only about 10,000* hours before graduation. The child is out of school much more (about 150,000** hours). There is no way to tell the student that what 1 hour of what we give you is more important than the 15 hours of the outside world teaches you. Thus the only way to break this vicious cycle is to convince the outside world to tell the student that education is important. Tell the parents that even if you don't have an education it is important that your child gets one. Also the community needs to support education better. This means more support and better pay for teachers, less tolerence with just passing, more resources and better equiptment. Having school boards and administrators that work to improve education, and not just play politics. Its also means more than 20% voter turnout for school referendums. This stuff takes time and money, but I can't imagine that it won't pay off in the end. I'm sorry for raving, but I just want to make this point. Education will not improve until the community as a whole supports it. To blame teachers for it is wrong. There are bad teachers, but from my experience more of them are dedicated to educating our youth than any of the other groups (school administrators, parents, etc.). Better yet, let's stop pointing fingers and start working together to correct the problems, and change the communities attitude. Your mooncalf - Steve P.S. I know a cheated a little on the statisics, but I think I am more accurate with mine than you are with yours. * 5 hours times 180 days of school per year time 12 years = 10800 **24 hours times 365 days a year times 180 years (don't forget leap years ( plus 96) = 157776
ok@quintus.uucp (Richard A. O'Keefe) (08/04/88)
In article <1412@devsys.oakhill.UUCP> steve@oakhill.UUCP (steve) writes: >> Teachers have children for ~5 hours per week-day. >> A couple of days ago I read a book called "Miseducation" ( [ "Miseducation", by David Elkind ]) which >> quoted a study which reported in their sample that parents spent >> ~15 minutes per week-day talking to their children, ~30 minutes a day >> on week-ends. That gives the teachers about a ... 6-to-1 advantage. >First if this fact is true - it is sad (not that I'm really surprised). >But to claim that the teachers must take up where the parents fail is >renoucing the responsibilities of parenthood, is just plain shortsightness. *** I DID NOT CLAIM THAT! My claim was that if this figure is correct, then teachers _do_ have more influence on children's learning than parents. Nowhere in my posting will you find a claim that this is desirable! >By the way there is still a flaw in your statisics. >The 11-1 advantage disappears when divided over 20 (conservative) children >to 1-2 (with 30 children at 6-1 it goes to 1-5!!). Wrong. Or can children only listen one at a time in this country? I was concerned with the ratio (time the child is exposed to informative speech in home) --------------------------------------------------------- (time the child is exposed to informative speech in school) under the impression that this might be a (_very_ crude) measure of the importance of the two environments for acquiring formal knowledge. [To other potential misreaders: I do not claim that formal knowledge is the most important kind. Nor do I claim that this ratio is much more than suggestive.] >But to continue - No teacher (or school administrator) will ever tell you >that they can educated a child in a vacuum. The sad truth is that the ^^^^^^^ >ideals the child carries are largely based on the values the student gets >from his whole environment. A school system has a child only about >10,000* hours before graduation. The child is out of school much more (about >150,000** hours). (steve) includes the time the children are asleep and before they can talk in this. He also ignores kindergarten's and nursery schools. The thing to be compared is *actual* *information transfer time*. I would be much surprised if this amounted to as much as 1:1 (since we're talking about information transfer rather than acquisition of social skills, most of a child's conversation with age-mates can be discounted too). The topic I was considering was not ideals, but facts, such as arithmetic, reading, and geography, and while teachers don't claim to be able to teach those or any other subjects in a vacuum, they _do_ claim to be able to teach them in school. >Thus the only way to break this vicious cycle is to convince >the outside world to tell the student that education is important. Tell >the parents that even if you don't have an education it is important that >your child gets one. Also the community needs to support education better. >This means more support and better pay for teachers, less tolerence with >just passing, more resources and better equiptment. Having school boards >and administrators that work to improve education, and not just play politics. >Its also means more than 20% voter turnout for school referendums. This >stuff takes time and money, but I can't imagine that it won't pay off >in the end. And that whole paragraph assumes that education is something that happens in SCHOOLS and that the way to improve it is to improve the conditions in the SCHOOLS. If the home environment is so important and so bad, why not improve THAT? Let me offer an analogy. Old McDonald's Pie Factory are worried about the quality of their meat pies. Someone points out that the farmers are neglecting their cattle. So the answer is to build a bigger and shinier Pie Factory? That doesn't make sense. I agree that the community needs to support education better. But if, as someone recently claimed in this newsgroup, the problem is that children go home to homes with no books, and pick up the apathy about reading, and if that means that the methods schools are presently using to teach reading would work if only it weren't for those terrible terrible homes, why then, we don't _need_ to improve the schools, but we do need to have a library on every block, cheap high-quality comics, prestigious prizes for authors who write books children enjoy reading, children's drama groups, perhaps even a class of licenced baby-sitters who have been suitably indoctrinated in the importance of reading aloud to children, ... There are LOTS of things to try, that needn't involve schools at all. Why, we are constantly being told that there will be an increasing proportion of eldery and retired people in the community. Why not recruit "block librarians" from them? And so on. What, then, has been/can be/should be done to make "community involvement" more than a buzz-phrase for "more spending on schools"?
reggie@pdn.UUCP (George W. Leach) (08/04/88)
In article <11380@quartz.BBN.COM> dm@bbn.com (Dave Mankins) writes: >I believe that we err in blaming teachers for the poor performance of >our children. Even the most enthusiastic, motivated teachers have an >uphill battle to interest our children in things that we parents are >not interested in. I think that most will agree that the people involved with this newsgroup are probably for the most part the types of parents who care enough about their children that they don't totally depend upon the teacher for educating their children. I certainly never will, if for no other reason children need to be exposed to a broad range of ideas and ways of thinking. Not just the narrow views of the teacher or parents. >The answer? We all know what it is, I hope you'll forgive my >belaboring the obvious. Teach your children to respect learning. >When they come home from school, have them read to you for 15 minutes >as you do the dishes, prepare dinner, or set the table. It doesn't >matter what they read --- have them choose something and read to you. >Talk about ideas over dinner. Give them a taste of intellectual life, >and they won't need teachers to drag them to it. Only 15 minutes a day! I have been reading to my son before he goes to bed since he was about 2 years old. He is never satisfied with less than four or five books (he is 6 now). He is starting to read a little on his own and will come to *me* with a book and attempt to read it to me. I don't have to encourage him. Children are naturally inquisitive about the world around them. Unfortunately, society as a whole suppresses this rather than encourage children to pursue their interests. Parents are by far the most influential group. And many just are too ignorant or don't care. Teachers are ill equiped to correct this situation. That is one problem with the public school system and is a reason why people will pay the extra money to send their kids to private schools and why some teachers will take less of a salary to teach in one. Don't you think a teacher would love to teach a class where all of the students are motivated? The electronic baby sitter is too easy to turn to. It also seems to me that there are cartoons on every waking hour of the day (if you have cable). Often both parents work and a child spends much of their young life in a day care center. The early years are crucial to the development of a child and will help to set the tone for their interest, of lack of, in learnging. That is why the choice of such a service is most important, if both parents must work. That is why my wife and I had our son in a program that required us to stagger our hours and take two cars, even though we worked in the same building. We had our son in a center near our home, which was over an hour away from the office. It made life hard on us, but it was well worth it because the quality of the program was so much better than the more convenient centers near work. Most day care centers are simply baby sitting services. Often, just like our schools they are overcrowded and children don't get the individual attention they need so much in their early years. Right away we are throwing them into an institution where they are one of many. How many day care centers are working with kids and employ people who understand early childhood education, etc.....? In an ideal world every parent would be concerned enough to want to work with their children at an early age, not only to encourage their natural curiosity, but also to expose them to the world. This does not mean trying to teach them how to read at age two, but to avoid stifling their growth. Every teacher would be committed to helping children grow as well. Let us face it, anyone who has gone to any kind of a school can tell you there are good and bad teachers. Some are in it for the wrong reasons and money may not really help as much as you would think. How many doctors are in their profession for the wrong reason? I also strongly feel that the methods used in schools to teach are tired, old and need to be reviewed. Can you sit still in a desk from 8 AM until 3PM every day and listen to someone talk or give you busy work? How many fantastic facilities exist outside of the classroom to help kids get interested in learning, such as museums, exhibits, etc......? Are they ever utilized? One school I saw had a unique approach to learning about history. Instead of just reading textbooks and memorizing facts, they would take a period of history and for the entire year study every aspect of it. For example, if the Pilgrims were being studied, they would look at how they lived, ate, dressed, etc... and would even take on such activities as try cooking a meal as they would have or creating tools they used or perhaps visit some exhibit on some aspect of their lives. This kind of an approach, while not applicable to all subjects that are studies, can make education exciting for kids. Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying to throw out reading, writing and arithmetic. We can not get away from getting a good grounding in those areas. Just try to augment them. -- George W. Leach Paradyne Corporation ..!uunet!pdn!reggie Mail stop LF-207 Phone: (813) 530-2376 P.O. Box 2826 NOTE: codas<--->pdn will be gone soon Largo, FL 34649-2826
bulko@cs.utexas.edu (Bill Bulko) (08/04/88)
In article <235@quintus.UUCP> ok@quintus.UUCP (Richard A. O'Keefe) writes: >In article <1412@devsys.oakhill.UUCP> steve@oakhill.UUCP (steve) writes: >>By the way there is still a flaw in your statisics. >>The 11-1 advantage disappears when divided over 20 (conservative) children >>to 1-2 (with 30 children at 6-1 it goes to 1-5!!). > >Wrong. Or can children only listen one at a time in this country? >I was concerned with the ratio > (time the child is exposed to informative speech in home) > --------------------------------------------------------- > (time the child is exposed to informative speech in school) >under the impression that this might be a (_very_ crude) measure of the >importance of the two environments for acquiring formal knowledge. I'm more in agreement with Steve. If being "exposed to informative speech" is all that it takes for children to learn, then we could sit them down in front of PBS and they'd all be geniuses by the time they reach high school. :-) Seriously, though: sometimes I think students of ANY age can only listen one at a time! Unless the student-to-teacher ratio is relatively small, students tend to drift off mentally, look out the window, talk or pass notes, doodle, do crossword puzzles, or what have you. If the students could motivate themselves to pay attention and work hard in school (by learning the value of education AT HOME), the teacher's job would be much easier, as it would be focused on passing along information. As it is, teachers have to spend a great deal of their time entertaining and motivating the students. Furthermore, somewhere along the line, someone decided that teachers are also expected to be actors, comedians, psychologists, paramedics, social workers, and babysitters. With all this work experience, I'm amazed that having "teacher" on your resume doesn't seem to mean much in our society anymore. Parents MUST take more responsibility for the education of their children. There is no other way. They have to stop trying to put the blame on corrupt school systems, poor teachers, worthless grading systems, or the economics involved in flunking students. This does NOT mean that these problems do not exist: what I'm saying is that I think these problems really become less significant when students go to school to LEARN. Bill _______________________________________________________________________________ Artificial Intelligence: the art of making computers that behave like the ones in movies Bill Bulko The University of Texas bulko@cs.utexas.edu Department of Computer Sciences _______________________________________________________________________________
elg@killer.DALLAS.TX.US (Eric Green) (08/07/88)
In message <1412@devsys.oakhill.UUCP>, steve@oakhill.UUCP (steve) says: >I'm sorry for raving, but I just want to make this point. Education will >not improve until the community as a whole supports it. To blame teachers >for it is wrong. There are bad teachers, but from my experience more of them >are dedicated to educating our youth than any of the other groups (school >administrators, parents, etc.). Better yet, let's stop pointing fingers >and start working together to correct the problems, and change the communities >attitude. You certainly have a point. In the early days of the U.S., reading was highly encouraged by both parents and church/community leaders, due to the Protestant tradition of Bible-reading (in fact, that was a major cause of the split of many Protestant denominations from the Catholic Church... the Church said, "The Bible stays in Latin, we don't want the peasants and slum scum getting their hands on it", and others disagreed). In any event, the desire for education was much greater in years past, when success obviously depended upon being well-educated and good with words. Now, today's models for success are illiterate jocks and empty-headed fashion-plates... is that progress? To a major degree, television is responsible for recent attitudes towards reading. But even before television, education in the U.S. was on a long downwards trend. Perhaps one factor is that universal public education became universal lowest-common-denominator education, with a curriculum suited for low-budget operation in an agrarian society (the prototypical "little red schoolhouse") being made virtually global in the U.S. In rural areas of the time, children worked long hours on the farm, and often could spare only 3 or 4 months in the winter for full-time school studies. So the curriculum had to concentrate on the basics, how to read, how to add, and the curriculum had to repeat much material from last year in the next year, because over the long layover the students had forgotten much of it (not to mention that they may have missed much of the end of the school year for spring planting duties). This is why we teach our students how to multiply two numbers together in the second grade. And in the third grade. And in the fourth grade. And in the... Teacher training may have something to do with it, too, especially in the field of mathematics. Most elementary school teachers still believe that mathematics consists of adding long columns of numbers together*. This was no problem in an agrarian society, where the ability to do arithmetic was as far as most people got. But this approach is woefully inadequate for people who will go into advanced mathematics, or even not-so-advanced mathematics such as algebra and trigonometry. And compared to "classical" education, where students recieved instruction in the "classical" languages and higher mathematics (Calculus in the 7th/8th year... Finally, back to the question of teacher pay. Catholic schools generally have lower pay than the surrounding public schools. Yet Catholic schools today score much above the national average on standardized tests. For example, at the Catholic high school I attended in Shreveport, Louisiana, teacher pay was quite low. Tuition was reasonable, and there was financial aid available for needy students. Yet over 90% of the students were college-bound, and most students scored over the 80th percentile on standardized college entrance exams. Now, this is an atypical situation, in that the parents of these students were obviously interested in their children having an education (although I got the impression that many of the students were there simply for "status" reasons within the local Catholic community, not because of interest in education). Perhaps these students learned all this stuff on their own. But I doubt it. There were many talented and dedicated teachers there. Said one teacher(paraphrased), "I could get more pay at a public school. But here I have students willing to listen, and I don't have to put up with bureaucracy." No 1-year waits for Civil Service to put out bids on new textbooks, no filing daily progress reports to 15 levels of oversight and assessment committees, nothing of the sort... the principal hired teachers, fired teachers (if they were incompetent), bought school supplies, etc., no hassle, no bureacracy, as long as the money was there. That principal would have been fired for gross insubordination, for bypassing the Civil Service system and violating tenure laws, if he'd been in public education. A note on pay: Higher teacher pay is a common "educational reform" goal. Teacher organizations note that there's really no teacher shortage -- there's lots of teachers, only, many of them are no longer in the education business, because of low pay, family issues, etc. But will higher pay really improve education? Or will it just give us "more of the same"? Paying a teacher $5,000 more per year will not make him/her any better of a teacher than from before the payraise. Taxpayers around the country have made it known that they do not support raising taxes for "more of the same", by voting down tax proposals left and right when they are not tied to some sort of "merit pay" plan. Where raising teacher pay may come in handy is for the next generation, 10 years down the road, where, one hopes, a better quality of student will enter education programs because of the competitive pay, resulting in better teachers. So while raising teacher salaries will solve local shortages, it is no magic panacea for immediately improving the quality of education. To do that, we will have to improve both the teachers, and the attitudes of our students. In an era of habitual child neglect by two-parent-worker households, that's going to be a tough row to hoe... Eric *Reference -- "Increasing Teachers' Understanding of Mathematical Ideas Through Inservice Training", _Phi Delta Kappan_, June 1987 -- Eric Lee Green ..!{ames,decwrl,mit-eddie,osu-cis}!killer!elg Snail Mail P.O. Box 92191 Lafayette, LA 70509 MISFORTUNE, n. The kind of fortune that never misses.