Independence Day?
So I wonder what these people will be celebrating on Monday?
According to a new poll by Marist, more than a quarter of Americans couldn’t correctly identify the country from which the United States declared its independence. While 74 percent correctly named Great Britain, 20 percent said they weren’t sure and six percent named other countries. In the South, 32 percent of respondents either responded incorrectly or weren’t sure. The poll comes on the heels of test scores that showed few American students gaining proficiency in U.S. history, a problem presidential candidate Rick Santorum blamed on the “conscious effort” by “the left” to keep Americans uninformed.
Yeah, Santorum, lots of liberals down there in Dixie. Blame progressives for Rick Scott, Scott Walker, and Chris Christie cutting education budgets while giving fat cat millionaires tax breaks. I think not.
Tags: American History, Education
Why is it that the more money we feed into the educational system the less educated the country becomes.
Maybe if the GOP didn’t spend a significant amount of time bashing teachers, they could do their job better.
I don’t think it’s true that people are less educated than the past. After all, most kids can tell you about dinosaurs and DNA – we couldn’t as a kid.
It’s becoming a little bit more clear to me now.
Why is it that the more money we feed into the educational system the less educated the country becomes.
How much would YOU charge to educate several classes of 27 students each day?
What salary would you want to be paid? Would you expect administrative and managerial support to be there for you? Would you expect facilities, technology, and equipment to be in place? Would you want supplies? Would you want training? Would you want some kind of job protection and due process?
Would you want the school to hire more teachers so you didn’t have 27 kids in a class?
Let me guess – you’d kick kids out of school until your job became easy enough for you to handle. Unfortunately that option is not on the table in real life.
“What salary would you want to be paid? Would you expect administrative and managerial support to be there for you? Would you expect technology and equipment to be in place? Would you want supplies? Would you want training?”
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Maybe it’s time to shift your expectations? My teachers managed to teach me without internet in the classrooms…
those who control the past, control the future and all that jazz.
I’ll celebrate liberals caving in to southern conservatives. why? well, Southern conservatives refused to declare independence from GB until they were promised they could keep their slaves…. something those icky liberals in the north felt uncomfortable about… what given all men being created equal and all. After weeks of intense fighting and arguing, at last John Adams and Ben Franklin decided to let future generations deal with the issue. I wonder how THAT turned out.
“Maybe it’s time to shift your expectations? My teachers managed to teach me without internet in the classrooms…”
all the more argument to give them all the resources possible.
My teachers didn’t need Internet in the classroom because it didn’t exist yet. But it exists today and is crucial to daily life now. Kids should learn about it because they need it.
Should we be blaming teachers or methods and the ‘modern mind’?
There is a new study out that easily showed-up University professors’ ability to teach a difficult subject – I believe it was physics – by getting a better result than with having students sitting at the hour-long lectures.
There was an alternative method with grad students and small classes with interactive, instant-feedback handheld devices used creatively during topic discussion periods. The grasp and retention of the information was far superior in the classes led by this alternative method to the surprise and dismay of the professors.
Part of the success was because the teachers, reacting to each student’s input on the individual devices, could immediately assess who was missing what points and could get them on track in real time.
The point, I think, has also been made of the text book industry and how cumbersome, dry and outdated school books often are (while being lucrative macro-industries for the chosen few (State of Texas Educ. comes to mind).
The brain’s higher functions are mostly piggy-backed off of our coritcal sensory perception areas –the mechanisms of analysis for sight, smell, etc. and their storage and retrieval systems.
The sensory ‘recognition areas’ are tied by webs of synaptic connections to a myriad of emotive, purposeful and other sensory dimensions that make up how we perceive any given ‘thing’ in our environment.
It makes sense to me that learning (which is totally tied to the emotive dopamine “reward” system in the first place) would be more effective when approached wholistically and with a great deal of feedback loops.
– I got on this train of thought because I just saw a teevee commercial for a new method of teaching toddlers how to read – and it demonstrates this sort of wholistic technique while showing a diagram of the brain with the synaptic connections that are in constant play as we grow, develop and learn.
The method being touted on the product advertisment utilizes the concept that “your child can learn stuff so early because he/she gets the advantage of many different feedback loops”. When the image of a word on a card is shown to the child, the word is spoken, the image representation is exhibited (in real life eg. a cup, a cat or a picture) and an image of the child itself saying the word is played back to the child. [The whole package is going for $14.99 not including shipping…..who wouldn’t buy it – flash cards PLUSSSSSS]
It may seem a bit weird to want your kid to be able to read at age two and a half or whatever but the method certainly illustrated how useful it is to have different sensory information data feeding back to the brain for reinforcement of a concept and so strengthening the understanding and especially the storage and retrieval of that information.
So, a kid sees the written word cup. He sees a picture of a cup. He looks at his mom saying the word ‘cup’. He says the word ‘cup’ too. He sees a mini video of himself saying the word ‘cup’. Repeat.
One of the interesting things about this method to me (I only saw the commercial once late last night, btw) was that it seems to rely on some of the things I learned when I studied the ‘Origin of Language’ at the UD with Roberta Golinkoff.
To speak a word, you of course don’t have to understand what it means, necessarily, at first, but you have to have already acquired a huge assortment of muscle memory to make the sounds of speech. You have to know how to work the tongue against the roof of your mouth or against your teeth or curl it or flip it back and forth and there’s the particular amount of air flow or air restriction and none of this is ‘known’ per se –it is as instinctual and unthought as any movement you learn at that age.
The coolest part of learning and babies in general is that because learning is tied to the dopamine reward system, it is automatically a lot of fun. Babies aren’t just cute, they are darned fun to be around.
It would be nice if we could maintain an atmosphere of fun around all learning at all stages and ages of life, huh.
Wow, how did Einstein ever cope? The concept of hand held interactive device learning between student and professor may be useful but I can,t see a university or large high school being able to separate students into such a small class size.
hmm delaware spends more than $10,000 per student.
That means a class of 27 students has a $270,000 to spend on education.
but it’s never enough for the libs…
From the teajadi, simple mind, simple math. That $10,000 average per student does not all go into the classroom. There are so many things that go into the $10K that what actually goes into teaching kids is relatively small.
But I’m sure Avo wants to keep his women barefoot and pregnant, too.
That’s just about $30,000 a month. And from that you have to pay the teacher’s salary and benefits, classroom supplies, textbooks, plus the class’s share of the electric, water and sewer bills, computers, Internet access, the salaries and benefits of of support staff (secretaries, security, janitorial), the salaries and benefits of the athletic staff (AD, coaches, trainers), athletic equipment, and salaries and benefits of administrative staffers (principals, assistant principals, curriculum coordinators).
Those who think the entire $10,000 goes straight into the classroom are delusional at best, intentionally obtuse at worst.