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The Decades-Long Travesty That Made Millions of Americans Mistrust Their Schools

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Re: The Decades-Long Travesty That Made Millions of Americans Mistrust Their Schools

#61

Post by jncfhnb »

giantg2 wrote: post #46
jncfhnb wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I wouldn't say that the teachers are necessarily bad or lazy, just as I wouldn't say devs are bad or lazy. However, I do agree with some of what the prior person was saying. If anyone is given the option to do something in an easier way, they're likely to do it. I think the teachers/schools would have selected the tablets/laptops because the education companies selling them marketed them as an improvement. In some wa…

Pursuing options that are faster and cheaper because you’re trying to be efficient is not the same thing as giving kids a laptop and checking out to browse social media.

Re: The Decades-Long Travesty That Made Millions of Americans Mistrust Their Schools

#62

Post by snapplebobapple »

wood_spirit wrote: post #4
snapplebobapple wrote: post #3

Well, that was anticlimactic... I was expecting an article on teachers unions being ruled illegal and the significant minority of totally incompetent teachers the union enabled for all these years being fired.....

At school my favourite and most effective teachers were those that my older sisters had disliked enough to warn me about. And, with my kids, it repeats; one will like and learn from a teacher that the other kid struggles with etc. So perhaps it’s about teachers being good and effective for one child but not for another, and few are objectively bad for everyone?

From my experience, I think it's a minority of teachers probably between 5-20% that are objectively bad for everyone, but that's just my highly guesstimated sample size of one experience upscaled because I think I was in a "good" school district and I assume there are double to triple the number of objectively bad teachers in "bad" school districts. If that assumption is wrong then the number would be closer to 5%. I also upscaled a bit from my experience 20ish years ago because the number of indoctrinated whack jobs pulling insane woke nonsense like getting white students to apologize to black students appears to have risen from zero during my time to some number that is way too high.

If I'm wrong, I don't think I'm that far from right here though. I didn't classify my teachers as bad because I didn't like them, I classified them as bad because they failed at teaching the whole class, or they did other criminal things like overbuy pop for student union fundraisers so they could drink the pop for free for the whole year (I should probably thank the teacher that did this since here being so terrible got me to read the teachers union contract and realize why she still had a job, which got me on the road to an economics degree and my current success). The failed to teach thing also seemed to happen disproportionately for the specific reason of seniority protected by the teachers union keeping old teachers, who have checked out, employed for the last decade or so until they could claim full pension.

The teachers union keeps all these people employed, harming our kids, by making the firing process byzantine and extremely time consuming and lengthy.

Re: The Decades-Long Travesty That Made Millions of Americans Mistrust Their Schools

#63

Post by tialaramex »

tatrajim wrote: post #54
mcpackieh wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the lesson that we should switch to Korean? English may not be ideally 'designed' but how would you change how English is written without causing havoc for the billions of people who already learned it?

No, far from it. My point is that the Korean alphabet (essentially 24 symbols, arranged into syllables) is easy enough to learn in a day or two, so that clueless foreigners, such as me, can begin to sound out road signs and menus quickly, without a clue usually to what it means. By contrast, the disconnect between the Roman alphabet and the English sounds it encodes is a mess. We need a more rational alphabet tailore…

The words to describe what you want are "Orthographic reform". There will be no further English orthographic reform. The last successful reform was Webster in the 19th century. Webster didn't make drastic changes, yet he's why Americans and British people spell words differently centuries later.

Changes to orthography are much harder once you have printing and then again once you have mass literacy, because now your Flag Day applies to literally all of the humans who use the affected language, and humans hate change. They'd probably lynch you, except that you can't succeed so they needn't bother.

Re: The Decades-Long Travesty That Made Millions of Americans Mistrust Their Schools

#64

Post by spacecadet »

pragmatic wrote: post #32
COGlory wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>A big chunk of their funding depends on getting their students certified, and they can not make a plan to achieve that. >I am literally the only teacher in the school who got kids certified (that I know of.) These two things (as explained by you) cannot be true at the same time, or the school could not exist. Could you explain the nature of the funding? Is it supplememtal? Who is supplying the funds?

Welcome to public school education where nothing makes sense and teachers are fleeing in droves.

This. My 2 relatives, 2nd and 4th grade teachers just both "retired early", but should be considered lucky... Having conversations with them about teaching was horrifying at times.

Re: The Decades-Long Travesty That Made Millions of Americans Mistrust Their Schools

#65

Post by tatrajim »

mcpackieh wrote: post #59
tatrajim wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, far from it. My point is that the Korean alphabet (essentially 24 symbols, arranged into syllables) is easy enough to learn in a day or two, so that clueless foreigners, such as me, can begin to sound out road signs and menus quickly, without a clue usually to what it means. By contrast, the disconnect between the Roman alphabet and the English sounds it encodes is a mess. We need a more rational alphabet tailore…

> We need a more rational alphabet tailored directly to English phonemes. That would cause absolute havok for the billions of people who already know how to read English, but realistically you could never roll this out to the whole world... it would just become another teaching fad that cripples the kids subjected to it, by failing to teach them how to read English as the rest of the world writes it. You would be tea…

You have a solid point, grounded in realism, and one very reminiscent of the U.S. tax system, embracing many hundreds of forms and requiring countless hours for filers to spend poring over obscure rules ("so I can rent out my house two weeks a year tax free?"), vs. the Hong Kong one-page and done tax reporting system. "It's just the way we do things in America."

A parallel policy, for reference, would be the decision by China in the 1950s to adopt a simplified system of Chinese characters (the so-called 简体字), breaking with millennia of tradition. Now, most of the world learns (to my private despair) the simplified system when studying Chinese. Billions of hours cumulatively saved in learning and writing the complexities of the older 繁體字. Foolish China.

And, I presume that being a traditionalist you eschew the crippling changes to American spelling of the past and use only "colour", "centre", and "theatre"? The horror of it all.

And, one must also note, it's "havoc", not "havok", which is the rational, and hence forbidden, spelling

Re: The Decades-Long Travesty That Made Millions of Americans Mistrust Their Schools

#66

Post by jancsika »

tialaramex wrote: post #25

It makes no sense to me that they had the idea that reading will just naturally arise like speech. Like, how did they come up with that? We have ample evidence that human infants spontaneously generate language. If you're unlucky enough to be born profoundly deaf in a country without an existing programme of sign language for deaf infants, you'll sign anyway, just there isn't anybody to provide a vast menu of existin…

> I can imagine that functional literacy would be aided by school programmes which encourage it, but the core technology of converting between words you say (or sign) and symbols in the world makes no sense as something you just hope they'll absorb from their surroundings without teaching.

Apparently only a tiny fraction of humans will spontaneously follow links in the article to vet that same article:

> She memorized high-frequency “sight words” using a stack of laminated flash cards: “and,” “the,” “who,” et cetera.[1]

Even if a shitty math curriculum consisted solely of kids memorizing times tables, such a curriculum is obviously distinct from a school hoping the kids will absorb math "without teaching." I've heard many parents talk about "sight words" before, so I know that concept has been used in the U.S. for quite some time now.

Just to be clear-- I've cited a single sentence, from one minute of skimming a single link from the article we both read. I have no idea about the efficacy of phonics vs what's called "balanced literacy" in the article. And I don't know what, if any, other teaching techniques are included in either the theory or practice of balanced literacy. (Or phonics, for that matter.)

What I do know is that "you just hope they'll absorb from their surroundings without teaching" is divorced from reality.

What I'll speculate is that ad tech indirectly delivered a low-effort article to your eyeballs and tricked you into riffing on a faulty premise.

1: https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-education/the-rise-...

Re: The Decades-Long Travesty That Made Millions of Americans Mistrust Their Schools

#67

Post by failrate »

tialaramex wrote: post #42
failrate wrote: post #16

I find it ridiculous that the author had not already taught their children to read prior to kindergarten.

Children's early aptitudes for all these non-trivial skills vary enormously. There's also minimal later consequence. Basically the fact your five year old can multiply and mine can't count properly actually isn't strongly predictive for which of them is going to be a Fields Medal winner. Kids who exhibit interest in acquiring written language skills should be encouraged, but so should kids who are interested in danci…

Fine, I find it absurd that the author did not already TRY teaching their kids to read prior to kindergarten.

Re: The Decades-Long Travesty That Made Millions of Americans Mistrust Their Schools

#68

Post by jancsika »

tialaramex wrote: post #25

It makes no sense to me that they had the idea that reading will just naturally arise like speech. Like, how did they come up with that? We have ample evidence that human infants spontaneously generate language. If you're unlucky enough to be born profoundly deaf in a country without an existing programme of sign language for deaf infants, you'll sign anyway, just there isn't anybody to provide a vast menu of existin…

> I can imagine that functional literacy would be aided by school programmes which encourage it, but the core technology of converting between words you say (or sign) and symbols in the world makes no sense as something you just hope they'll absorb from their surroundings without teaching.

Apparently only a tiny fraction of humans will spontaneously follow links in the article to vet that same article:

> She memorized high-frequency “sight words” using a stack of laminated flash cards: “and,” “the,” “who,” et cetera.[1]

Even if a shitty math curriculum consisted solely of kids memorizing times tables, such a curriculum is obviously distinct from a school hoping the kids will absorb math "without teaching." I've heard many parents talk about "sight words" before, so I know that concept has been used in the U.S. for quite some time now.

Just to be clear-- I've cited a single sentence, from one minute of skimming a single link from the article we both read. I have no idea about the efficacy of phonics vs what's called "balanced literacy" in the article. And I don't know what, if any, other teaching techniques are included in either the theory or practice of balanced literacy. (Or phonics, for that matter.)

What I do know is that "you just hope they'll absorb from their surroundings without teaching" is divorced from reality.

What I'll speculate is that ad tech indirectly delivered a low-effort article to your eyeballs and tricked you into riffing on a faulty premise.

Edit: well, not exactly "tricked you." More like for every N eyeballs will be connected to a brain that takes the bait. Today, you were the lucky winner!

1: https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-education/the-rise-...

Re: The Decades-Long Travesty That Made Millions of Americans Mistrust Their Schools

#69

Post by lulu22ro »

tatrajim wrote: post #44

Just an observation from an educational outsider. In the 1970s I was a US peace corps volunteer in one of the more impoverished rural counties in South Korea. My job in a health center required learning and using the Korean language. The grammar (with complicated speech levels, etc.) is daunting, but the alphabet remarkably rational and easy to learn. Even in remote villages with a rudimentary standard of living, I n…

My son (7) is going to a bilingual school and he is currently learning how to read. Both German and Romanian had pretty standardised implementations of the Latin alphabet. He learned pretty fast that we sound out the S in German but not in Romanian, and that sometimes he needs 3 letters for a sound, while the other language only needs one. His two languages come with different rules, but there are very very few exceptions.

I am really curious how a child from an English-French speaking family fares in school, given that both languages take such a "historical" approach to spelling.

Re: The Decades-Long Travesty That Made Millions of Americans Mistrust Their Schools

#70

Post by [deleted] »

lulu22ro wrote: post #69
tatrajim wrote: post #44

Just an observation from an educational outsider. In the 1970s I was a US peace corps volunteer in one of the more impoverished rural counties in South Korea. My job in a health center required learning and using the Korean language. The grammar (with complicated speech levels, etc.) is daunting, but the alphabet remarkably rational and easy to learn. Even in remote villages with a rudimentary standard of living, I n…

My son (7) is going to a bilingual school and he is currently learning how to read. Both German and Romanian had pretty standardised implementations of the Latin alphabet. He learned pretty fast that we sound out the S in German but not in Romanian, and that sometimes he needs 3 letters for a sound, while the other language only needs one. His two languages come with different rules, but there are very very few excep…

[deleted]
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