This is a busy time of year for me in terms of planting and site-prep as well as being near the end of Lent.
Many of the posts over the next two weeks will be "phoned in" and not as in-depth as I usually write. There will also be fewer of them.
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Talk about "phoning in a performance"
The average college student today
Average, middle-of-the-road state university.
Most of our students are functionally illiterate.
Students are not absolutely illiterate in the sense of being unable to sound out any words whatsoever. Reading bores them, though. They are impatient to get through whatever burden of reading they have to, and move their eyes over the words just to get it done. They’re like me clicking through a mandatory online HR training. Students get exam questions wrong simply because they didn't even take the time to read the question properly. Reading anything more than a menu is a chore and to be avoided
ERJ notes: Voracious readers demonstrate increasing IQ scores as they age according to a very large, longitudinal study started in 1970 in Britain. In inner-cities, 9th grade boys have higher reading ability than 12th graders...which suggests that their IQ scores dropped.
Their writing skills are at the 8th-grade level. Spelling is atrocious, grammar is random, and the correct use of apostrophes is cause for celebration. Worse is the resistance to original thought.
The average student has seen college as basically transactional for as long as I’ve been doing this. They go through the motions and maybe learn something along the way, but it is all in service to the only conception of the good life they can imagine: a job with middle-class wages.
Things have changed. Ted Gioia describes modern students as checked-out, phone-addicted zombies.
- What has changed exactly?
- Chronic absenteeism.
- Disappearing students.
- They can’t sit in a seat for 50 minutes.
- They want me to do their work for them.
- They want me to do their work for them.
- Indifference.
- It’s the phones, stupid.
I don’t blame K-12 teachers.
We’re told to meet the students where they are, flip the classroom, use multimedia, just be more entertaining, get better. As if rearranging the deck chairs just the right way will stop the Titanic from going down.
Hat-tips to Coyote Ken and Lucas Machias
The last paragraph is really telling. It's the same problem in so many places today? Look at the debate surrounding the dept. of education currently taking place, its just another fractal? Objectively you cannot argue against the fact that testing scores of dropped significantly since the inception of the department and federal involvement in education. You simply can't, facts are facts. Articles like the one referenced back up this statement. Anyone old enough knows as well. We're not stupid, we have eyes.
ReplyDeleteAnd yet... invariably, the same answer that's been given for low these 50-years we're talking about, is support the teachers with more money (we have), spend more on the schools and tools (we have), and don't tell us what to do - we're the experts, we know better than you, they're not your kids, get out of our way and lets us do our jobs! OK, we tried that last one too.
You had 50 years of this. Steadily increasing budgets and power (over the students and schooling). Unions all the way I might add....
Objectively, by every measure except sexual deviancy rates, it has been an utter and abject failure.
But nobody mentions that? Lost in the entire debate (that I can see) about this topic is results. We can write an article complaining about it, but not addressing the source of the problem? If you bring that up, the same people who can't measure up to the old ways, now tell you the problem is the measuring stick...
It's funny, and no doubt this will be unpopular, but I know how to fix the problem! What other big change has been running rampant through society for the last 50-or-so-years?
Repeal the 19th! It's the only way, and you know it! You've just been programed to deny that fact, by the very people it would impact most (without even a hint of irony!) I hear the same caterwauling coming from CONgress right now, as their fraud and graft get exposed. Women were given status, power, and rights, and the world's been headed off a cliff ever since, but Lord knows it's not their fault.
They're simply not rational animals. Sorry, but its a fact and you know it. Society has programmed you to think differently. That feeling in your head is cognitive dissonance.
We await your sources that demonstrate women in power are the direct cause of these woes.
DeleteI think people that hold ideologies and propose making decisions as large as repealing an amendment based on their feelings alone is the larger problem - though you're hardly alone there.
Given that the 19th amendment was passed in 1920 and the nation's literacy rates increased through the 1950's (at a minimum), your statement is obviously incorrect.
DeleteI understand & agree somewhat with Anonymous @6:32 is saying, but maybe it took 50 years or so before feelings started to replace analytical thinking.
DeleteIf it were up to me, women would be allowed to vote as soon as they have at least two children and written permission from their husbands.
DeleteWe obviously live in a hyper-feminized world - education is just a small part of that. Women's interests and women's rights are almost the sole concern of most governmental meddling into private life. Women->feminism->woke... do you notice the escalation towards crazy?
DeleteI think some of this probably starts in grade school. The kids must have fun. They all get participation recognition, without showing any achievement.
ReplyDeleteYes I’m old. Yes I was a reader, right from grade school. I asked for books for Christmas and birthdays. Some of my friends did too.
Starting in elementary school, we had to read books, write simple reports. We had to make some kind of project.
It continued through all grades. We were told ‘do the work’, for spelling, and math, and writing.
Not all kids did well, but that was normal also. But we could read, and write, and do math. We showed up every day, all of high school, did the assignments as best we could. Only some of us went to college.
I think the expectations are lowered now, and assignments are watered down, maybe. I have no direct knowledge, not having kids. I’ve only heard a little, from friends with kids in school.
Several friends are now home schooling, and the kids are doing better than going to public school.
Southern NH
100% of the Colleges of Education need to be razed, salted, and plowed under. EdDs should be banned from coming within 1,000 feet of any educational facility (especially school boards and county offices of education). Teaching at the K-3 level can be done by just about any intelligent adult, and from 4-12 by any Bachelor of Science grad. No need for educational psychology or ANY of the trendy (mis)education fads like Common Core, Whole Language, etc.
ReplyDeleteOver on our side of the pond, I had been involved in recruitment for many years prior to retirement. There had been a marked drop in standards of the completion of application forms over the years, and once switched to on-line really appalling, especially considering that the prospective applicants could use grammar and spell checks in completing the forms then. I recently came across some work comparing exam papers for 15 and 17 year old students over the years - most of the 17 year olds would have failed miserably on the 15 year old papers from a couple of generations earlier.
ReplyDeleteEducation has suffered since the advent of television. And that decline has only accelerated with each "improvement" in technology. Now almost everyone suffers from "microwave" mentality, they want it NOW and refuse to wait or put in the necessary effort. It doesn't bode well for the future of humanity, who,will almost certainly be replaced by AI and whatever that entity dreams up for us.
ReplyDeleteThat is on the money...sadly, it's OUR money. I confused one today when I offered exact change, she couldn't figure out that she owed me another dollar...sigh
ReplyDeleteMy wife and I had a better education coming out of the 8th grade, than our kids leaving high school. Our school was controlled by a school board that had mainly farmers and ranchers and their message to the school/teachers was that go ahead and teach reading, writing, science and arithmetic...but the kids also need to learn IRS 1040, writing and balancing checks, very basic bookkeeping, compound vs simple interest, the importance of hygiene, both personal and household, and even very basic 1st aid. I also remember the teachers complaining bitterly about all the extra stuff they had to teach.
ReplyDeleteI really think the phones and computers have a lot to do with it, as noted by others. Why read, or come up with your data, when it’s all done for you? Plus all that reading is boring. They want the instant gratification, the video, the chat group, whatever.
ReplyDeleteSouthern NH