.
75 percent of the seniors headed to Dallas community colleges can’t read above an 8th grade level, and others can’t add or subtract.
That’s 75% of the ones headed to college. Good lord. It would be funny if it weren’t a tragedy.
What is funny is that clearly, the reporter who wrote the article can relate to the subject matter. For example, here’s a paragraph in its entirety:
Showing over the last three years, an average of 75 percent of the DISD students enrolled in classes took at least one developmental education course.
And how about this:
…principals are given a $10,000 bonus based upon how they’re students do on TAKS scores.
Nice work there, reporter person. Maybe you could sit in on one of those remedial writing classes?
Well, you know, they don’t want any child left behind to make up classes they might have failed so instead they are just shuffled on to the next grade level and then soon enough – right out the door.
Congratulations, you have now graduated and are ready for the world. Good luck.
Seriously, I think the worst thing to happen to education is the Department of Education. Ever since they opened their doors for business we have watched the schools slowly slide down the tubes. Who created the Department of Education you ask?? Why Jimmy Carter of course – explains a lot right there.
Of course, it doesn’t help that any time the schools tried to kick someone out for – oh – bringing a weapon to school, starting fights, or disrupting classes they had to take the thing to court and rather than do that most schools just caved in and allowed the kid to come back so that now the inmates run the asylum.
Yep, if I have kids it’s going to be home schooling
Everyone can’t be a brain surgeon! Dallas county needs garbage men too, just probably not that many!! LOL
DISD is a pit of corruption, I’ve done construction projects for them. I’ve been interviewed by the FBI about their practices. The people in question, who stole 4.7 million dollars of tax payer money were in the end never prosecuted. They still live in a million dollar home next to the former CFO of DISD on a golf course. It makes my head reel. People who steal tax payers money, not to mention tax payers money meant to be spent on educating children should be more severely punished than your typical run of the mill thief.
That sucks. The colleges up in NH are starting freshmen off at 9th and 10th grade high-school math, so if those kids from TX come up here they’ll need to brush up at some summer sessions. Its funny and sad at the same time. 25 years ago we had pre-calc and calc in our senior year. Now it takes up to 2 years in college to get up to that level. What a fine job educators have done. But I guess it just gets to the point where these people ‘of change for the children’ are like piles of dog crap in the grass – you know they’re there and try to avoid them, and you hope someone else is working to clean them up. OTOH, if they’re big enough you can run over them with the lawn mower. Maybe perscribe for them a low-fiber diet. Dopes !
I taught in a community college and some students couldn’t add 24 + 3 without a calculator. When they got the answer 45 they wrote it down on the paper. When I pointed out they had entered the numbers incorrectly and the answer didn’t make sense, they didn’t recognize the problem. Since the calculator gave them the answer, it must be the correct one.
Math isn’t taught with any skills to look at the reasonableness of the answer, just whatever the calculator says. If I asked them to show their work on the page, most didn’t know what I meant.
As a 46 year old student in the Maryland Community College system…I have to say, it is very very easy to get great grades when I am compared to the much younger products of the public school system.
The only classes I ever have a problem with are the advanced math classes…I had to take some refresher courses.
The Department of Education is not the problem. The Teachers’ Unions and the University Teacher education programs are the problems. We have turned over the education process to the Teachers’ Unions. They fight any and all accountablity. Locally, we even had the teachers object when four of their number were identified as doing an outstanding job. And the Universities teach subject matter (poorly) to teachers and spend almost no time teaching teachers how to teach. Now we have the dumbest university students becoming teachers and then not being taught how to teach. It is a f*cking disaster.
Google “underground history of american education”. Free E-Book online. Our education system is a joke and giant waste of money.
Well, yeah. The ones that can spell their own names go to four-year colleges. Kids going direct to community colleges from high school? Heh.
Even half a century ago, fully half the incoming classes at public universities had to take Bonehead English. When I was teaching undergrads as a grad student, I used to get major complaints from college seniors for correcting the grammar in their essays. “We’re business students, not English majors!” Well, if you ever want to be promoted, you’re going to need to read and write so as to be understood.
The real fun was teaching them some basic required math concepts that (back then) calculators simply could not do for them.
US D of Education: Just another reason to hate History’s Greatest Monster, aka Jimmy the Dhimmi Carter. What a dick.
Wow…just wow. And pathetic. That reporter needs to take some lessons. That is one of my biggest pet peeves… their, they’re, and there. It drives me nuts when I see people using them incorrectly. Grrr!
And the little rug rats may not be able to read or write but dang it they can save the planet!
/barf!
The problem is not restricted to the area in question. I’m here in Canada and even though we are supposed to be the “Higher Education Capitol of the World!!!” (at least according to our education department officials) I have a hard time hiring a clerk who can add.
I used to own a restaurant where one of my routine interview questions was “What are your Math scores like in school?” Invariably, the answer was, “I’m an Honours student in Math!”. The next thing I would do is ask how much change to give in a certain situation, whereby the candidate would start to look for the calculator.
I believe the maiin problem is all the “touchyy-feely” programs that have invaded the school systems. The idea that to force a student to write out “I will not throw books across the room” 100 times will cause a student to resent reading is ludicrous. Teachers need to get back to basics and teach how to do 3 things.
1 – How to read and write.
2 – Hot to add and subtract.
3 – How to learn.
If they teach the third thing properly, students will be successful.
Community college is where the bottom of people who graduate high school tend to go to. Confusing it with college in general isn’t valid.
I can see why the bee is sad. :-(
Sorry, total thred jack, but John Hawkins mentioned Rachel in Conservative Grapevine today and someone has totally upped the ante on dog humiliation.
Rachel,
The challenge is here:
I can hear Sunny weeping from here!
As much as I wish this surprised me, it doesn’t. In a writing class I took as a college freshman we had to write a paper, then trade with somebody in the class so we could do a peer review before we turned our final papers in. Mine was done the night before and that morning, didn’t follow much of a logical line, and needed a serious overhaul before I would even consider it good enough to actually turn in. And it was still better than most papers in the class, I’d guess. I know it was better than the one I was reviewing, which, if I’d actually made all the corrections it needed, would have ended up being written entirely by me.
People are always complaining about kids not wanting to read, playing too many video games, and watching too much TV, but I was actually scolded – scolded – for reading ahead in classes because everybody else was going too slow. When I was in kindergarten my dad started teaching me algebra and the teachers, in all their wisdom, sent a note home telling him he needed to stop (this was back in the 80s).
I’ve also had notes sent home for reading in class when the teacher was explaining a concept I already understood. I was not being disruptive and was actually hiding the book on my lap under my desk. Gotta love an education system that seems determined to discourage any actual education.
I wonder if the reporter was an affirmative-action hire at the newspaper?
I’m currently mentoring/tutoring a friend who dropped out of high school years ago, and is now going back for her GED. I’m very proud of her for doing this, and I’m very appalled at all the things she doesn’t know– like how to construct a standard paragraph, how to use ordered pairs such as (5,2), how to add and subtract with negative numbers, how to convert fractions to decimals, etc. I’m not mad at her, I’m mad at her supposed teachers. Even accounting for the fact that she’s been out of school more years than I’ve been in (and I’m a grad student now)– this is stuff they made my group learn by 6TH GRADE, let alone by the time we were a couple of years into high school. God help us all if I should ever meet any of her former teachers– I may need a lawyer.
And we won’t even talk about the whole industry that pitches low-grade no-potential job opportunities to people like her, or career counselors who can’t write or even goddamn proofread a resume, or people who push “work-accredited” classes that sound like real career makers but aren’t… I think about that too long, I may need a doctor too.
I’d say it’s a combination of all of them.
The Teacher’s Unions have done a lot to pull the American education system into the toilet, but the damage would not have been nearly as bad if they hadn’t had a federal agency to advance their agenda nation-wide.
Heh. Reminds me of a story.
One day a physics professor was discussing a particularly complicated concept. A pre-med student rudely interrupted to ask, “Why do we have to learn this stuff?”
“To save lives.” the professor responded quickly and continued the lecture.
A few minutes later, the same student spoke up again. “So how does physics save lives?” he persisted.
“It keeps the ignoramuses out of medical school,” replied the professor.
Tom,
You shouldn’t generalize like that. People go to community college for lots of reasons.
Not surprised, not even close. I live in Michigan and the high school drop out rate is 75%. Yup, 3/4 of the students in the Detroit school system drop out, and of the remaining 1/4 that stay in, most need remedial work before they can attend college level classes.
On a purely anecdotal tangent, my sister teaches math at a small college in Michigan. Most of the people coming into her classes cannot do algebra. And at least 4-5 per class cannot do basic math.
True story: the schools are so bad where I live, and I couldn’t afford the $20k/yr that a private school costs so I “homeschooled” my kids for high school. By which I mean they sat around and played video games and web surfed and once in a while I made them read a book.
Now here’s the crazier part: in Cali you have to take an entrance exam on entering a community college. 48% of California high school graduates fail the test and have to take remedial math or english, but my unschooled kids passed.
Conclusion: a bad school actually makes you stupider than no school.
Brag: oldest kid about to graduate from college with 3.57 gpa.
Nothing makes me want to spit more than the whole “there” “their” “they’re” situation. Nothing could be EASIER to understand, yet nothing shows the complete undereducation of America more than the average person’s inability to distinguish between the three–and when to use one over the other.
While you’re at it, your other homework assignment is to correctly place “you’re” and “your” in a sentence, and punch the next shopkeeper you meet who uses the apostrophe inappropriately…or the next home sign that says something like “The Smith’s” or “The Potulny’s.” Last I checked, it was plural, not possessive when you’re more than one.
A couple of weeks ago I went to Baskin Robbins. I gave the counter worker $5.00. She punched the wrong button on the cash register. After spending maybe 5 minutes trying to undo the transaction so she could re-ring it, she gave up. She called someone, and they told her how much change I should get. If I’d known that was what she was struggling with I’d have stepped in, but it really didn’t occur to me that she was unable to do this without the register.
Bitchin’ about kids these days, guess I’ve officially reached old-fogeydom.
Mighty Sam
The Department of Education didn’t even begin work until 1980. By that time the unions and the teacher colleges had already royally screwed up the system. I taught and supervised teachers from 1972 to 1997. The effect of the USDeptEd was not worth noting outside of special education. Actually ‘no child left behind’ could have made a difference if our President had been more effective. But all the criticism of the NCLB comes down to avoiding accountability. If I had my way, every classroom in America would have pre and post standarized testing every year. And those results would be published, by classroom, so that everyone can see which teachers are worthy of the name.
So funny that stuffwhitepeoplelike also posted about grammar today:
My situation now is I am a grad school student and I have to take a creative writing class as part of my requirements. Each student is required to submit a story to their classmates for reading and comments.
The class has sixteen students and at least four of the papers I have been given by my fellow grad students have had no use of paragraphs or common punctuation.
This is GRADUATE SCHOOL and they still don’t know how to use paragraphs? WTF!
Allot of you are complaining about simple lapses. Mistrakes are just to easy too make when you writes in a hurry. We all make them. If you takes a moment and recieves sum help, buy getting someone too look over you’re writing most errors can be caught and corrected. The problem above is one of sloppy editing.
Haverwilde,
I am certain that you meant “slopy” editing.
Please spell check you’re work in the future.
/Bill
Here’s a scarier thing. DMN ran a story the other day about how kids are moving to other states to get a HS diploma because they can’t pass the TAKS test. The excuse one of them gave was, “if I don’t graduate, I’ll lose my scholarship to college.” And I thought, “who in the hell gives a scholarship to an idiot that can’t pass the HS exit exam?”
I had similar experiences in my freshman English class. I remember one paper in particular that I peer-reviewed. By the time I was done, it had more red ink on it than original writing.
Along with two/to/too/2 and they’re/their/there, a pet peeve of mine is . I even see this in newspapers and books, where you would expect halfway-competent editing.
Homeschool.
Haverwilde, lol! I had to read it twice, though, to see all the errors — the brain will tend to gloss over things!
Spell check can be a trap of its own. I’ve made some pretty funny typos that passed spell check with flying colors. I’ve also read pieces that, judging from the number of correctly spelled inappropriate words, had almost certainly been ‘auto-corrected.’
I/me/myself. Pathetic the way people mangle those these days. “Will you give the dog to Frank and I?” No, because you’re too dumb to have a dog.
sarahk: ROFLMAO!
You think this is scary, try reading the resumes of these people after they graduate from college. Four years and $75,000 doesn’t fix the problem, I assure you.
I think that the problem is with most homonyms. I’ve seen many more than the ones listed here misused.
Felicity:
My favoite spell check error was when our prim and proper secretary to the Superintendent sent out a “Pubic Notice.” And we all took notice.
Um, sports ?
This is just… sad. Tragic, even.
On the other hand, my two kids are clearly going to RULE THE WORLD! Bwhahahaha!!
(Don’t worry, Rachl – They know how to share. And they like dogs.)
LOL, mighty. The two toughest “gateway” classes for med students are calculus and organic chem.
Actually ‘no child left behind’ could have made a difference if our President had been more effective. But all the criticism of the NCLB comes down to avoiding accountability.
NCLB actually works–where local school boards let it work. Of course, those are the same districts that are already leading the pack and doing a fairly decent job. The ones that didn’t really need NCLB all that bad in the first place.
Four years and $75,000 doesn’t fix the problem, I assure you.
I’ve noticed.
Yes but most mistakes of this variety aren’t published as a news article with an editor to review it.
Any way you slice it, it is a failure of education either by the author or the editor, because they both should have reread the article and spotted the mistakes.
I got my last job two days after submitting my resume. I was somewhat astonished by the speed, and after I had worked there for a while, I asked my boss. He confirmed that well over 90% of the resumes he received were misspelled or otherwise grammatically incorrect, so any that weren’t got an automatic look.
Incidentally, I had NO direct experience for the job in question. That’s how important good grammar can be.
Homonyms get by because they pass the spellcheck.
My journalist friends tell me there are fewer and fewer “real” editors and copyeditors these days, and that the workload of same has gone way up. Getting it out in five minutes has become considered more important than getting it grammatically correct.
Couple of questions? Where are the parents? Shouldn’t they have some of the responsibility to ensure their children get an education?
There are many school districts where this occurs, just as there are many where it does not. Good leadership and safe schools will go along way to providing an education. However some of the blame needs to go to the students in question, why are we not blaming them for asking questions or not paying attention. Surely they are responsible for their own education are they not? While I understand that there are some poor teachers out there, it should also be noted that many students dont want to be in school to learn, they just want someone to do it for them. Ultimatly the responsibility is on the individual, if the system is poor have they complained about it? It seems to me that we in this country no longer value an education.
It’s easier to blame the big bad teacher unions and those damn irresponsible teachers.
It’s not just undergrad. I was managing editor of my law school newspaper (NOT the Law Review, just the newspaper, but still…). I think I spent more time editing submissions than the authors spent writing them. Sometimes it was impossible to fix the idiocy without altering the writer’s style. On those occasions, when I knew the author would object, it was nice to be able to fall back on the old “space limitations” standby and just cut the entire article.
Private school.
My wife and I sacrifice mightily to do this, but look at the alternative.
Yeah, because the Teacher’s Unions are one of the primary causes of irresponsible teachers. Every time someone tries to write a law making teachers more accountable in some way, the Teacher’s Union shows up to protest it.
What’s up:
Frankly, this quote irritates me. Where else but in education do we hold a five year responsible for important actions. Isn’t it the role of parents and teachers to train the child? When you see an unruly child misbehaving in public, don’t you wonder about the parents?
Too often in schools I have heard the refrain “the child must take responsibility…” It is just another way of avoiding accountability. Highly skilled teachers get results. Poorly skilled teachers give excuses.
I started at community college immediately after graduating from high school (as in summer quarter – started a week after graduation). I had my Associate’s degree in two years and then could spend my hard-saved college money getting two BA’s at the university NOT taking prerequisites that cost the same as my “advanced” classes. And thanks to hard work, careful planning, and my grandparents’ foresight in starting a college fund for me at an early age, I finished college completely debt-free.
Right now, I have a preschooler in private school, and a son about to embark in special ed classes via our local school district next fall. I’m holding my breath on how much I will have to pay to ensure that they get a GOOD education.
Bad grammar is rampant. It’s everywhere. I want to send the K-Mart corporation a big box of apostrophes so they can correct all theire “mens” and “womens” and “juniors” signs in their stores.
One of my pet peeves is using “everyday” when you mean to use “every day.” “Everyday people eat dinner every day.”
Alright vs all right is a lost cause, but it still annoys me.
And Microsoft Word’s spell-check considers “irregardless” to be a perfectly cromulent word. Yes, cromulent. I like that fake word much more than irregardless.
My dad used to say “Ain’t ain’t a word ’cause it ain’t in the dictionary.”
Then they put it in the dictionary and he had to stop saying it.
As a magazine editor trying to hire an employee, I’m not surprised by the reporter’s and editor’s mistakes above. Some of the resumes in my inbox astound me; why wouldn’t an applicant send an immaculate resume for an editing position??
PaleoMedic: Yes! And how about correcting all those “x items or less” signs in every express check-out line everywhere? I’ve never seen one that said “fewer” — have we given up on the concept of ‘count’ vs ‘mass’ nouns?
Don’t even get me started on dangling modifiers!
Oh, Cheese! Case in point?
just quoted this from :
And just how else did you expect them to walk around town — on their little hind legs, perhaps?
Sorry about the length.
From a public high school science/math teacher:
The building of an “irresponsible teacher”,
pt.1 – Run the prospective teacher through a teacher education course that emphasizes protecting a student’s self-image over developing sound decision-making skills based on factual knowledge.
pt. 2 – Place that new teacher into a school system that is rewarded for getting a diploma into a student’s hands in 12 years starting in first grade, NO EXCEPTIONS, and graded down if it takes longer, regardless of how long that student has been in your system.
pt. 3 – Have official encouragement for a grading system that rewards students (and teachers) for just going through the motions, instead of being able to show that one knows what to do in response to varying stimuli/prompts. This divorces the grades received from actual learning accomplished.
pt. 4 – Be given a curriculum that supposedly pushes the development of critical thinking in areas that research has shown can’t be handled well by the majority of the students in the age range (quantum mechanics for 9th and 10th graders, anyone?). They might be able to parrot words back to you, but understanding just won’t happen.
pt. 5 – Add in parents who just can’t understand why their little genius/prodigy isn’t doing well in your class. Well, maybe mostly yours and having a little trouble in others… O.K. they can have trouble in most of the others, too. By the way, you know, you as a teacher are just not giving my kid a chance, because my kid just doesn’t test well, and you won’t listen to them.
(con’t)
Building an irresponsible teacher – continued
pt. 6 – Establish an expectation that students should have no more than 30 minutes of homework per night in any subject, regardless of the difficulty of the coursework, or the fact that they have missed eight days in the last three weeks, or they transferred in from a district where geometry is a 10th grade course, not a 9th grade one.
pt. 7 – When the children are in class, be expected to entertain them at all times to be able to teach them, because many of these kids came from parents high on weed and/or booze, or harder stuff, and grew up tended by Nintendo, X-Box, and cartoon videos. Have a variety of 10-12 minute activities for your lessons, even if you are teaching a college prep course, so that the students won’t get bored. Be expected to halt class to call mommy or daddy at home or work when their kid acts out/won’t work/threatens another student’s life, etc.
pt. 8 – Keep feeding the public crap about the teachers being held more responsible for student outcomes. At this point, teachers are about the only ones in the responsibility spotlight, even though most in the public (or the profession), can’t define what it is a teacher should do in 1500 words or less. This constantly moving yardstick is the most stressful for teachers who care about their students, AND care about how much they learn.
Should have mentioned this first, but I love your site, Rachel!
Stuff like this gives me an upset stomach. I was just having a similar conversation yesterday with my brother and SIL (we all attended the same college) and they got mad at me for saying I didn’t understand why I was one of only a handful of people in my class who weren’t required to take the “grammar workshop.” They were indignant and insisted that the test was rigged!
Instinct–I recently endured the same torture as you in one of my grad school courses. Now I understand why many of my graded assignments come back with instructor comments like, “You write really well!” If my classmates turn in assignments that look anywhere nearly as bad as the posts I’d had to read that one week, I feel tremendously sorry for my instructors. Some of them deserve hazard pay.
Spellcheck doesn’t work, and people are too hurried for proofreading. Case in point: I know for a fact that my co-worker sent out a document today with the word “Dollares” in it. I’ve brought it up with our boss repeatedly that this co-worker rushes and refuses to proofread, even when there’s plenty of time to do so. I think our boss has given up, and it pisses me off that this kind of shoddy work reflects on our department and our company. And nobody cares. (Oh, do I need to mention that the race card is involved?)
I think all the problems with education result from a combination of the teachers’ unions, Department of Education, and feel-good, no failure parenting.
I still keep in contact with some of my teachers and I hear horror stories about how parents are refusing to let teachers fail their kids even if the kid clearly deserves to fail. Thankfully my parents aren’t caught up in this insanity. My brother may not graduate and my parents are well aware that it is very much his own fault.
And don’t even get me started on how schools aren’t allowed to hold kids back anymore.
One of my pet peeves is using “everyday” when you mean to use “every day.” “Everyday people eat dinner every day.”
By coincidence, that’s the very example my newspaper-editor friend used the other day. After 35 years in the business he’s now counting the days to full retirement.
This statistic doesn’t surprise me.
I did a creative writing course many years ago and found that the school had recently introduced a compulsory subject called “Construction of English” which was basically a grammar class.
Several teachers admitted that the reasoning behind it was that so many people were coming out of high school lacking basic grammar skills that it was necessary to teach them those skills if they wanted a career in the writing field.
These students wanted to be writers and journalists, but they couldn’t put a decent sentence together.
The sad thing was, the grammar class made no impact on the writing standard of most of the students. I would read their work in other class workshops and want to red line every second word for spelling and grammatical errors, especially for (my pet peeve) using “your” instead of “you’re”.
It was often so bad that I would start to think that the student in question didn’t realise that there was a word spelled “you’re” and then, suddenly, there it would be. Of course, this would be the one instance when the “your” they used everywhere else would actually have been correct.
The worst thing was the complete indifference they showed when mistakes were pointed out to them.
It scares me to think that this was 15 years ago, well before the truncated language of email and text messaging reared it’s ugly head. I strongly suspect the next generation are going to be functionally illiterate.
My wife is a high school teacher (and damn good at her job) and my company provides tech support to the school district. I am constantly amazed at the morons that the school system graduates. Of the 169 seniors scheduled to graduate Friday, 26 are failing one or more courses with all the grades in. Some are failing classes that don’t affect their graduation status. Of the ones failing required courses, most of them will pass whether they do or not. Subtle pressure will be placed on the teachers to give them a passing grade so that their families won’t be disappointed. This happens because the principal of the high school hates confrontation and would rather graduate a moron than tell a parent that his child didn’t achieve a minimum passing grade.
The kids know this. A few years back, 80% of the seniors failed to do an assignment in their Senior English class. As a result, they all had very low, failing grades. Some of the students actually said that they didn’t do the assignment because they knew that the school would never fail all of them. Eventually, all but 5 of them passed, but you see the point.
Our sstate also brags that 67% of the graduating high school seniors go on to two- or four-year college. Two thirds? I look around this school and I don’t see on third of them that should be in college. Of course, this had led to the state pondering gving higher ed more money to boost retention rates. That’s brilliant. Allow morons into college, then ask for more money because they can’t hack it.
I am a burned out ex teacher retraining for another career after 15 years. I loved to teach. I Spent thousands of my own dollars in my classroom every year. I arrived early and stayed late every day. I spent spent a great deal of time, effort and money attending professional development programs. I no problem doing any of these things.
I quit the profession because I came to hate my job. I got worn down by the constant disrespect and hostility from unteachable students, piss poor excuses for parents and worse than worthless administrators. I was cursed at, spat upon, threatened and told that I was the problem.
As for “teachers being unaccountable” I will tell you teachers are the only ones who are held accountable. It is much easier to pin it on a teacher than it is to look at the reality of the situation.
Sorry, Sarahk, but I think it’s just pitiable that so many people write “pathetic” when they ought to write “pitiable.”
I live a couple of hours from big D and it isn’t just the students who can’t read. On the bright side, according to stephen king, they can look forward to brilliant careers in the military.
This is what has made it impossible for me to spend much time on message boards. Even when I had a cheap cell phone I still didn’t use text message language because it annoyed me – and continues to do so – so much. I love it when a moderator or other person on the board tells the people who insist on using language developed for a phone keypad that they will be ignored if they keep it up.
It shouldn’t be that hard to write full sentences on a computer; I thought typing classes are mandatory coursework now (not that that matters much, now that I think of it, given what passes as an English paper nowadays.)
hM: I send text messages but I insist on spelling everything correctly (with predictive text in most phones now, it’s really not that hard) and I punctuate. People waiting for text replies from me hate it because I take so long to answer them, but at least when I do they don’t have to puzzle over what I’m saying to them.
Speaking of dodgy grammar the last line of my comment should have read: the next generation is going to be functionally illiterate – with the next generation being singular and all. Ah well…at least I try.
Tresco,
Although it would appear as if we are at odds in our comments, I do understand what you are saying. But if the educational system was required to educate students, and teachers were accountable for the progress of students, then good teachers would prosper, and poor teachers would quit. But the system is not set up that way. Now the only requirement is that teachers and administrators must ‘fit in’ and survive.
At one point in my teaching career, I opted to change my reading instruction, and implemented a ‘direct instruction’ program. My principal was extremely derogatory about my choice. I persisted and at the end the year my students had made excellent progress in their reading and their standardized test scores reflected that. We were in a small town so the principal couldn’t do much. But I got the message. I moved on. Dogma over substance, and being ‘educationally correct’ is more important than have a sound educational program.
I will never forget the day I drove up to the window at McDonald’s where what appeared to be either a high school senior or a college girl was working.
She tallied up my order which came to $1.83. Just as she hit the total key on her register, I said: “I have 8 cents”. As I handed her the money ($2.08) she distinctly said: “Shit!”.
Then she looked at the money in her hands like it was Indian Rupees or something. Then the tears welled up in her eyes and she said: “I need to get my manager”. So she calls the manager over and he says: “Just give him back a quarter” (which I guess is why he’s the manager).
I just could not believe that someone who made it through high school could not figure out how to make change.
Tony, you really should have declared your intention, there, instead of just implying that you expected the gal to do some unexpected mental arithmetic.
M’self, I learned how to make standard change at a young age, but in a situation like that, I might have begged pardon, and asked leave to work the problem with pencil and paper.
I think you were being mean to her.