Sunday, April 30, 2006

AMERICAN EDUCATION FROM A to Z

Article by Tina Blue, who teaches English at a large Midwestern university. It sounds like I would be failing 100% of my students if I were teaching there

I have been teaching freshman and sophomore English at a state university since 1972. For part of that time (18 years), I also ran a home day care center; and, I also worked as a substitute teacher in the local elementary schools for a year while continuing to teach at the university.

One of the reasons I closed my day care center in 1999 was that the children who attended were so unsocialized that it became not just difficult but often unpleasant to deal with them for many hours each day. I quit working as a substitute after just one year for a similar reason. The students in the grade schools were so unsocialized that it was difficult to maintain enough control to get through the lessons that I was supposed to teach.

In addition to being poorly behaved and difficult to control, most of the children had also learned that no one was ever supposed to criticize them or to say anything to them other than how wonderful and special they were. Their self-esteem had been bolstered not by their having acquired any knowledge, not by learning to manage their own impulses or to develop any skills or accomplish anything, but rather by indiscriminate praise and a total absence of constructive criticism or honest evaluation of their performance at any task.

During those last few years of daycare, and during that one year as a substitute teacher, I often thought to myself (with more than a little dread) that these children were in the pipeline and we would be getting them in our college classes soon.

I met in my office yesterday with a student who has been coming for conferences a twice a week for the past two and a half weeks. He didn't start coming in for help with his writing until then, just three and a half weeks before the end of the semester. But he wants a good grade (i.e., better than a C, and preferably an A), and he finally realized that it just wasn't happening for him, so now he is coming to see me.

Or at least he was coming to see me. I doubt he will be in my office again this semester. Five minutes into our conference yesterday he snatched the draft of his paper out of my hand, stuffed it into his backpack, and stomped out of my office in disgust. He sent me an email last night saying that the reason he cut our conference short in such a rude way was that no matter how hard he tries I keep criticizing his writing.

I have to admit I have contributed to grade inflation, not willingly, but because of overwhelming pressure from all sides. I don't hand out As and Bs like candy, the way so many teachers do these days, but I do tend to pull my punches at the lower end of the grade scale. I don't give as many Ds and Fs as I used to. In fact, I often put a C- on a paper that would have earned a D from me twenty years ago. Giving a student less than a C- on any sort of writing that is not absolutely illiterate has become virtually impossible, no matter what the flaws in the writing are -- especially since even our best college students now make errors of the sort that would have earned a grade school student an F at one time.

This boy actually got a D+ on his first paper. Let me be honest here: twenty years ago I would have given that paper an F, without any hesitation at all, and I believe that most or all of my colleagues would have done the same. But even putting a D+ on it was difficult in the current atmosphere, and he was obviously upset by having gotten such a grade. (Not upset enough to come in for a conference, of course.)

His second paper was equally weak, but this time he had taken advantage of the opportunity I offer students to turn in a draft before the paper is due, in order to get feedback on it before turning it in for a grade. After seeing the corrections and comments on the draft, he finally decided to come in to see me for help.

During our first few conferences, I went over each sentence to explain in more detail his grammar and usage errors and his stylistic missteps. I also showed him where paragraphs were not developed or where coherence was not maintained within a paragraph or between paragraphs. You know, all the things we are supposed to be teaching students in a composition and literature class. Each time he came in, he would bring another draft of the paper, and each draft would show some improvement over the preceding draft. In other words, our conferences were helping. He was improving his writing.

By improvement I mean that he was writing papers that would get grades within the C range. Remember, his papers were originally bad enough that they would have gotten Fs 20 years ago, and his first paper had gotten a D+ even now, with grade inflation in full effect. But he wasn't happy to hear that he was working in the C range now. He doesn't want a C in the course.

Unfortunately, he also doesn't think he deserves Cs on his papers. He believes he deserves As, and since he has never gotten below an A in any English course or on any English paper, including those he wrote for English 101 and English 102 here at the university where I teach, it seems obvious to him that he is in fact an "A writer," and I am just an unreasonable, hypercritical harpy.

I know why this young man has always gotten As in his English classes. He is very cute and very charming -- that is, as long as you don't cross him. Cross him and he gets pretty nasty.

I have another attractive, charming student in the same class who is also getting Ds on papers, though he has now begun to come in for conferences, and we are making very good progress with his writing. It is late in the semester, so I don't know if he will manage to get better than a C in the course. Frankly, I doubt it, though there are still two essays and the final to write, so it is not outside the realm of possibility that he could pull through with a very low B, especially since I do give credit for obvious improvement, and I do count later work a bit more heavily than early work.

But this boy also tells me that he got an A in English 102 and a B in English 101. His writing did not suddenly become terrible between English 102 and English 210 (my class). It always was terrible. But he was still getting mostly As in English courses, with the occasional B.

How can we teach these kids if they believe, first of all, that we have no right to criticize them, and second of all, that they really deserve all those As they have been getting despite their decidedly substandard work?

And then there is the expectation that we are never supposed to even say anything slightly negative to them about their work (e.g., "I'm sorry, but this paper has too many grammar and usage errors to deserve an above average grade"), but they feel they have the right to treat us rudely, snatching their papers from our hands, stomping out of our offices in a rage, if they are not delighted with the grades we give them or the fact that we actually require them to do their work.

Think about his complaint, "You criticize my writing no mater how hard I try."

How else am I supposed to show him what is wrong with a paper or what isn't working, so that he will be able to fix it or improve it in his next draft? Of course I criticize his work when it is not good enough. That's what teachers do.

Source






PUBLIC SCHOOLS VS. PARENTS' VALUES

Of the five candidates running to succeed Mitt Romney as governor of Massachusetts, all but one have chosen to send their children to private schools. Nothing wrong with that -- millions of parents would move their kids out of public schools tomorrow if they thought they could afford something better. For millions more, government schooling isn't an option in the first place: They would no sooner let the state decide what their children should learn than they would let it to decide whom they should marry.

Earlier this month, Lieutenant Governor Kerry Healey, the only Republican in the governor's race, explained in an interview why she and her husband picked a private school for their son and daughter. "I want my kids to be in an environment where they can talk about values," she said -- talk about values, that is, "in a way that you can't always do in a public school setting."

It's hard to see anything objectionable in Healey's words, but they triggered a broadside from Attorney General Thomas Reilly, a Democrat and the only gubernatorial candidate whose children all attended public schools. Healey is "completely out of touch with the lives of regular people," he snapped. "Somehow the perception is that the kids in public schools are not learning the values that they should be learning. . . . Public schools reinforced the values of our home. . . . It was a wonderful experience." Those quotes appeared in The Boston Globe on April 17. Now consider a story that appeared three days later.

On April 20, in a story headlined "Parents rip school over gay storybook," the Globe reported on the latest controversy in Lexington, where school officials committed to normalizing same-sex marriage have clashed with residents who don't want homosexual themes introduced in class without advance parental notice. Last year, a Lexington father named David Parker complained to officials at the Joseph Estabrook Elementary School about the "diversity" curriculum in his son's kindergarten class, which included pictures of families headed by gay and lesbian couples. When he refused to leave the school grounds without being assured that he would be alerted before similar lessons were taught in the future, Parker was arrested for trespassing.

The latest incident, also at the Estabrook School, was triggered when a second-grade teacher presented to her class a storybook celebration of homosexual romance and marriage.

There is nothing subtle about "King & King," the book that Heather Kramer read to her young students. It tells the story of Prince Bertie, whose mother the queen nags him to get married ("When I was your age, I'd been married twice already," she says), and parades before him a bevy of princesses to choose from. But Bertie, who says he's "never cared much for princesses," rejects them all. Then "Princess Madeleine and her brother, Prince Lee," show up, and Bertie falls in love at first sight -- with the brother. Soon, the princes are married. "The wedding was very special," reads the text. "The queen even shed a tear or two." Bertie and Lee are elevated from princes to kings, and the last page shows them exchanging a passionate kiss.

Dismayed by such blatant propagandizing, the parents of one student made an appointment to discuss their concerns with school officials. "This is a highly charged social issue," Robin and Robert Wirthlin told them. "Why are you introducing it in second grade?" Kramer said she had selected the book in order to teach a unit on weddings. When the Wirthlins checked the Lexington Public Library, they found 59 children's titles dealing with weddings, but "King & King" wasn't among them. The library's search engine listed it instead under "Homosexuality -- Juvenile fiction."

Massachusetts law requires schools to notify parents before "human sexuality issues" are taught in class and gives parents the right to exempt a child from that portion of the curriculum. But the Wirthlins' request to be given a heads-up before something as contentious and sensitive as same-sex marriage comes up in their child's class again was rejected out of hand. "We couldn't run a public school system if every parent who feels some topic is objectionable to them for moral or religious reasons decides their child should be removed," Lexington's superintendent of schools, Paul Ash, told the Globe. "Lexington is committed to teaching children about the world they live in, and in Massachusetts same-sex marriage is legal."

Reviewing "King & King" for the web site Lesbian Life, Kathy Belge -- who describes herself as a longtime lesbian activist and the director of a queer youth program -- writes that it is "sure to capture a child's imagination" and praises it in particular for its nonjudgmental embrace of homosexuality: "The same-sex attraction is normalized. There's no proselytizing, no big lesson. It just is."

But homosexuality and gay marriage are not like arithmetic or geography; they cannot be separated from questions of morality, justice, and decency. No matter how a school chooses to deal with sexual issues, it promotes certain values -- values that some parents will fervently welcome and that others will just as fervently reject. And what is true of human sexuality is true of other issues that touch on deeply felt religious, political, or ideological values.

When it comes to the education of children, there is always an agenda -- and those who don't share that agenda may find themselves belittled, marginalized, or ignored. Perhaps it was true, as Thomas Reilly says, that the public schools his children attended "reinforced the values of our home." But as the Parkers and Wirthlins in Lexington can testify, other families have a very different experience. When Kerry Healey says she wants her children "to be in an environment where they can talk about values . . . in a way that you can't always do in a public school setting," many public-school parents will understand exactly what she means.

(From Jeff Jacoby)

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"


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