h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

sorry to have let this go for so long, been tied up elsewhere... you know, christmas season and all.

having refreshed my memory by re-reading the thread (well, i skimmed it anyway, thanks for the new input ), i have some thoughts.

education is such a complex topic, there is no one answer to it. i still don't think vouchers would improve anything, but would in fact make some situations equal or better, and many more much worse. educating is a teacher's job, but it must be enhanced by the parents. children must be prepared to receive an education by their parents in order for it to do any good. if a parent does not place a high value on education for their kids, the kids will figure it's just not that important. but teachers need to be prepared to provide a quality education.

the picture i see is this: most teachers graduate college and accept their first position with an abundance of enthusiasm. they want more than anything to make a difference in the life of a child. they want to be the elementary teacher that their student remembers on the day he graduates college. they want to impact, they want to change, they want to save the world. education is, of course, the key. and there is no greater feeling than knowing you've touched the heart of a child, that you've made a positive difference in their life.

after a few (several) years of dealing with beurocracy (atrocious spelling, i know), unruly students who don't want to learn, and a lack of funding and support to make a difference they experience burn-out. this is where the system starts to fail.

one answer is getting funding to the schools. giving teachers the resources they need to diversify and tailor their presentations to specific needs. children coming from different backgrounds, different environments, and posessing different abilities need different approaches and different methods. teachers need to be able to compensate for that.

taxes do not have to be raised to reach this goal. there are other means of raising funds. one idea that has been proposed (and possibly attempted at this point, i'm not sure) in the st. louis area is corporate sponsorship of public schools. a company would make a donation to a school, whether it is monetary, or in the form of equipment or programs, that takes pressure off the school boards to provide those things. the company would also encourage it's employees to volunteer at the school, for various functions, tutoring, crisis help, mentoring, or running programs. this takes pressure off the school board to provide people to fill those needs. this is only one suggestion, there would be many more similar or unconventional options.

the biggest answer is to get parents involved. parental involvement is critical to the success of education, regardless of where that education comes from. unfortunately, i don't know how to improve this aspect. i only know what methods i use with my own son, and advice i would give to friends having problems with their own children. i wouldn't know how to begin to make a difference on a large scale.

I whole-heartedly agree with broelan that lack of parental involvement is a major problem today. It is perhaps the one biggest problem facing kids growing up today. However, there are problems with the schools themselves. The school system I attended recently switched its 'junior high' to a 'middle school', with all of the politically correct changes that entails. They now no longer even claim to hold education as the number one priority--the 'middle school philosophy' finds it more important that every child feels good about him or herself at all times, in any situation. Noble sounding idea, but try to teach a kid, for example, a difficult math concept, when he knows that it doesn't matter whether he learns it or not because he can take the test as many times as he wants, until he gets an 'A'. A bad grade would hurt his self-esteem. What child will put in the necessary work to learn when they aren't held accountable for not learning?

And don't even get me started on the bureaucracy involved--kids aren't held accountable for learning, however, they *are* penalized for superfluous mistakes such as not putting a comma in 1,000 and not putting a period at the end of a dictionary definition which is not even a complete sentence... the schools find more value in the process than the results.

-a very recent product of the American public school system

Wow! I get busy for a few days and people hit on some major main points. As a former teacher who is back in school I was speaking with an education major and recognized the level of enthusiasm previous meentioned in this thread, I remembered feeling that way. I started to feel a little down because I gave up. Yes, I was burned out, made to feel small by the bureacracy, parents, as well as students. I also remember running full speed down a long corridor after a student with a gun in his hand. It turned out to be loaded and the safety off. Guns are another topic totally! The parent of this student were genuinely shocked to find that the student was having a hearing to be expelled. He thought action should be taken...none, not detention, not suspension, not writing lines, nothing!Because nobody got hurt. I thought that was last straw.
When I moved to back to my home state a few months later I had to take a pay cut. No big deal, I was not interested in gettin rich, I just wanted to make a difference. I finally realized that I was not cut out to take parenal responsibility, after all it was my choice to not bear children up to that point (and still is). A parent told me during that school year that it is totally shameful for me to not have children of my own and to be a teacher. Let it pass, because that parent obviously didn't realize taht in US educational history there was a long time when a married woman could not be a teacher because she was not chaste. The real final straw came when I was at a dinner at a local restaurant know for its great food and even better wine list celebrating my parents' 35th wedding anniversary. A parent from my school ws also dining there, sans children, the next day at school the parent complained that she had seen me out drinking. I had one glass of wine the entire night and that was poured specifically for a toast to my parents. When I got home I called my father, a retired teacher, principal, and superintendent, he helped me pen my resignation. I was truly fed up and burned out. Two days later I started as a cocktail waitress and made more than my yearly salary in a six month period.
I truly don't know what any of the answers are, the more I relive my experiences, the more confused and depressed I become, the more afraid I am to have my own children.
The bottom line is that at least two things need to change: parents and funding. The $62,000 question is how? I pesonally think that every school should have 'x' number of dollars to spend per year and let the individual school allocate it as a committee of parents, teachers and administrators see fit. They are in the middle of the community and if only a few parents have a vision of how their children should be taught and who should teach them. Let them decide if it is best to spend more money on this than that or whatever, but somebody somewhere has to care and pass that vision on to others.

I've been pretty busy as well. I have a final tonight, a school last week, a bunch of stuff to do around the house and for work, and to top it all off, I've installed Baldur's Gate II last night. That was big mistake.