DebateGate
General Category => 3DHS => Topic started by: kimba1 on May 27, 2010, 09:14:38 PM
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what do you think is the problems with the students today and how it might relate to thier future
I brought up short attention span which inturn would effect thier ability to do repeatative work.
I think thier losing their spelling and grammer which would greatly effect communication skills.
I would really like your input on this.
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repetitive
guilty
lol!
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what do you think is the problems with the students today and how it might relate to thier future
Lack of accountability as minors makes one think they suddenly won't become accountable as adults.
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There does not seem to be the attitude that learning for its own sake is both useful and fun.
About 95% of all office visits at my university were about grades in courses already completed or nearly completed, as in, "I wasn't really able to get the book or study much, and I know I missed some classes: could you give me some "extra credit" work so I can get a better grade?"
If you asked the student if they had now bought the book, they didn't, and sometimes said that they wouldn't.
If you said "I will give you a vocab exam and if you manage to get a 90%, I will raise your grade to a C", that was not good enough.
Students rarely asked me to explain an item that they did not understand, or how to learn something like vocab, verb conjugations or pronunciation.
The good students always seemed to understand and do well in the course. I would say that the worst single complaint was that students are lazy and unwilling to put in the required effort.
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that`s right , i forgot about that
several articles has poped up that students don`t have a problem cheating.they understand they need a good grade but don`t care about knowing the material.
a friend of mine is a civil engineer and he see this problem ALOT with his interns.
accountability, learning for it`s own sake
sounds scarey to me what installed in our future
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Is this what made NCLB so difficult?
As a student in public schools I always felt that I learned best when I could get away from the teachers.
I remember one guy in particular that I was quite cruel to , we were both trapped in the system , but I had a seriously bad attitude and his good attitude was wasted on me.
One quarter I had him as teacher for American History , I slid through the course as if it were kindergarden level , reading all of the required text the first week and sleeping through everything but the tests to get the easy A. Poor guy knew he was wasteing my time.
Next quarter he changed his grade structure to emphasize participation and homework , I should have felt flattered , I realise this now, but at the time I just felt bothered and perhaps smug. This time he was teaching anthropology (this sort of assignment seems to seek coaches like him) I knew anthropology so well already that I ran the class when ever I woke up , I only got a C that quarter but no argument from me that I deserved better ,I knew that I had turned just a few assignments. This teacher was again frustrated in his aim of beig a good teacher for me.
I was resentfull and unco-operative as a kid , I really learned most of what I would learn by simply reading the text and I would generally finish this in a week, the rest of the time I was coasting. I would have benefited so much from a self paced course that I very nearly created a self paced course for myself , ignoreing the teachers I read almost constantly . I appreacated best the teachers who would leave me alone and let me forget them. As an adult I look back on a wrecked high school career , a long string of missd oppurtunitys.
I participate a lot better in education now , my professors enjoy me , if only I could have skipped the institution then and have it now instead.Part of the problem I had was the institution and how poorly I fit in it , part of the problem was me and how unwilling I was to adapt myself to the situation.
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we know kids today are great at using computers, but can they make stuff out of it. we hear about the teenage hackers. but the the ones I`ve met are not really good.I`ve never met one with any impressive ability.I`ll even go as far to say not many teenager write programs or do webdesign.
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I'm in the middle of Mafiaboy right now. Mafiaboy is the memoir (and former on-line alias) of Michael Calce, an Italian-Canadian hacker who crashed the sites of CNN, Yahoo! and other internet giants at the ripe old age of 15. He could code and he wrote some hacking apps on his own, but generally worked in groups where some guys coded and others conducted the actual attacks.
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well
not all teenagers, but I`m betting it`s a fairly small percent that made it to that level.
come to think about it I wonder how good are the students today at MIT compared to student of the 90`s?
what i`m getting at is if we keep this downward spiral , would advancement of technology still be possible in U.S.
I heard last month silicon valley is losing ground in that front
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<<well
<<not all teenagers, but I`m betting it`s a fairly small percent that made it to that level.>>
Yeah but that's how it's been since the dawn of the Computer Age. Always will be. mafiaboy was fascinated with computers since the age of six. They became his obsession. How many kids are like that in any generation?
<<come to think about it I wonder how good are the students today at MIT compared to student of the 90`s?>>
I'm betting that there is no real difference. They just apply their native intelligence to different problems. If hand calculators made mental arithmetic boring and unnecessary, they found something else to turn their brains to.
<<what i`m getting at is if we keep this downward spiral , would advancement of technology still be possible in U.S.>>
But what makes you think there IS a "downward spiral?"
<<I heard last month silicon valley is losing ground in that front>>
What specifically did you hear?
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about silicon valley it was something I heard on npr news . I can`t remember the specific
but also on NPR they had a topic about the drain brain going on with college students and I was able to confirm it with my friends who are college teachers. lets just say college teachers are abit more challenged nowadays.
mental math boring?
I`ve always enjoyed doing math in my head. that`s goona be a harder concept for me to handle.
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A notable thing about education is that teaching the uninspired and mediocre is far more difficult than teaching geniuses. A class full of geniuses, as one might meet at Cal Tech or MIT, can embarrass the professor if he does not stay ahead of him, especially now that so much innovation is available on the Internet.
The professor teaching a class of average students has to motivate them to come to class and buy the book as well as to study. Geniuses tend to be quite self-motivated, and teaching them is a matter of keeping up with technological advances in the target subject as well as the methods used to teach it.
Teaching geniuses can be fun, and generally pays very well. Teaching dullards is boring and pays far less well. What does one do in an English Lit class when students have such limited vocabulary skills that they must look up every tenth word just to get a basic understanding of the subject? How can anyone do a good job of teaching calculus when a majority of the students who have enrolled in one's class do not know the multiplication tables, understand trig functions, square roots and fractions?
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A notable thing about education is that teaching the uninspired and mediocre is far more difficult than teaching geniuses. A class full of geniuses, as one might meet at Cal Tech or MIT, can embarrass the professor if he does not stay ahead of him, especially now that so much innovation is available on the Internet.
The professor teaching a class of average students has to motivate them to come to class and buy the book as well as to study. Geniuses tend to be quite self-motivated, and teaching them is a matter of keeping up with technological advances in the target subject as well as the methods used to teach it.
Teaching geniuses can be fun, and generally pays very well. Teaching dullards is boring and pays far less well. What does one do in an English Lit class when students have such limited vocabulary skills that they must look up every tenth word just to get a basic understanding of the subject? How can anyone do a good job of teaching calculus when a majority of the students who have enrolled in one's class do not know the multiplication tables, understand trig functions, square roots and fractions?
Well said , .... does this represent a danger to our democracy?
If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.
Thomas Jefferson
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/t/thomas_jefferson_4.html (http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/t/thomas_jefferson_4.html)
I presume we want more than just our geniuses to be free.
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When this country was founded, I am not sure that even half of the free White males were even literate, so people in 2010 are certainly better educated than those of the 1780's. On the other hand, it was not really possible to get people as stirred up over various issues then as it is now. In 1780, the legislature could pass a law against abortion or not, but it would not only not be ignored, it would not even be known. There were a couple of doctors in my home town, a father and his son, that performed abortions every Friday night. I worked for a pharmacy that they owned a share in, and every Friday, I or someone from the pharmacy would walk up to the office half a block off the Courthouse Square and deliver ether and other supplies. It was illegal, but when the county built a hospital, it was named after Dr Hendren.
I am not so sure that this would be possible today: there would be rightwingers with posters of dead foetuses and articles on the TV news, more than likely.
The danger to the democracy is the proselytization of narrow views of a few. Clowns like Glenn Beck would not have been on the TV in the 1950's. I really think that the country would not have been improved had everyone known about JFK's and Ike's mistresses, or JFK's serious ailments. On the contrary, I think it would have been worse to have scandals about those and other non-issues.
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teaching the uninspired and mediocre is far more difficult .
but isn`t that what teaching really is.
its abit of a unrealistic concept for all teacher to have self teaching genius kids.
but to be fair I said it often our culture is a touch anti-education.
history, english lit. is a very hard sell and the people who teach it simply refuse make any great effort to promote it.
ex. alot of conflicts are caused by misunderstanding. eng.lit. would go along way in explaining things properly.
I know I dated a eng.lit major and we never had any communication problems.
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I did not say that I was for teaching only geniuses. Perhaps I have had maybe three such students in 32 years at the where I retired.
English Lit and History professors that I know are every bit as enthusiastic about their subjects as accounting or physics professors. The lack of enthusiasm comes from the lack of jobs in each of these fields: a person with a PhD in English Lit or History normally has one choice in his/her field, that of teaching English Lit or History in higher education. Undergrads in English can teach HS and might do professional writing, like grants or advertising.But one is much less limited in business and even science.
With a PhD in Spanish, I worked part time as a translator, I helped write and edit a couple of magazines, and I did some tutoring, but there was certainly not enough money in doing that to support myself.
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John Paul Jones thought that Navy officers should be required to have fluency in three languages and competancy in engineering , navigation, etc... he was for diseminateing usefull knoledge amoung the enlisted too.
If our sailors and soldiers are ignorant are we going to be weaker?
If our voters are ignorant are we more prone to elect charlatans ?
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<<If our voters are ignorant are we more prone to elect charlatans ?>>
LOL.
NOW he's asking.
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<<If our voters are ignorant are we more prone to elect charlatans ?>>
LOL.
NOW he's asking.
Would organizations that facilitate this dumbing down of the electorate be guilty of domestic sabotage or partners in achieving a national goal?
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<<Would organizations that facilitate this dumbing down of the electorate be guilty of domestic sabotage or partners in achieving a national goal?>>
I think you're probably lumping a lot of organizations together in <<organizations that facilitate this dumbing down>> and you're also assuming the the dumbing down is due to some organized effort. As far as I can see, there isn't any "Coalition for a Dumber America" tirelessly working to produce a generation of morons, although I guess at times the Kansas legislature or the Texas Schoolbook Commission seem to come pretty close.
Also, your terms are pretty subjective - - is it "domestic sabotage" to demand that public schools run on fundamentalist Christian principles? The fundies would see it as improving education, the liberals as the highway to hell.
My own view is that it's just a question of priorities. The people who really run your country through the clownish fakes whose "election" and "re-election" they engineer know which way the country has to go and don't brook any opposition. I don't think they're for a dumber America per se, but they understand that "the people" are a hell of a lot easier to bend to their will the less truly educated they are, and so they set priorities that obviously favour the military-industrial complex and aren't bothered by the fact that such priorities will necessarily impact negatively on the spread of higher education to the masses.
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We do have all those stupid teabaggers who complain because they have to "Press One for English", like the possibility that if they forgot their numbers they MIGHT have to hear something in Spanish, and that would be such a huge hardship that perhaps their cerebelli would combust and their pointy heads would explode.
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I think you're probably lumping a lot of organizations together in <<organizations that facilitate this dumbing down>> and you're also assuming the the dumbing down is due to some organized effort. As far as I can see, there isn't any "Coalition for a Dumber America" tirelessly working to produce a generation of morons, although I guess at times the Kansas legislature or the Texas Schoolbook Commission seem to come pretty close.
Then let me clarify. If one group tries to set standards for quality education measured by some sort of proving mechanism and the other organization says that you can't set standards because teaching is an art and therefore subjective and that any proving mechanism would be unfair and insulting to credentialed instructors which group would you say is engaging in domestic sabotage and which is partnering in achieving a national goal.
And as a corollary in your opinion is an educated citizenry a worthy national goal?
By the way, i disagree with your theory that there is but one oligarchy that controls the country. If one were to subscribe to such a theory, my guess is that there would be competing oligarchies that hope to control the spoils if their candidates are victorious. So in that sense it would make a difference who wins.
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We do have all those stupid teabaggers who complain because they have to "Press One for English", like the possibility that if they forgot their numbers they MIGHT have to hear something in Spanish, and that would be such a huge hardship that perhaps their cerebelli would combust and their pointy heads would explode.
English as the national language has been an issue long before the advent of the Tea Party Movement.
Immigration and assimilation was an issue long before the Tea Party Movement.
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Nonetheless, the Tea Partiers have mentioned this as a major irritant. The Tea Party has elements of the Know-Nothings, the Populists, George Wallace's American Independent Party and Ross Perot's Reform Party.
Spanish language roadsigns and telephone messages are both inexpensive and useful. I fail to see how they could be irritating to anyone but a true bigot. The fact that we have had such bigotry in past years does not change the validity of what I said. I did not say that the Teabaggers invented this. They do not seem to have invented anything: they are mostly against any sort of change, but that is hardly original.
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The Tea Party movement is about deficit spending and fiscal conservatism. Any other issue is auxiliary.
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lack of jobs in eng. lit/history?
eng. lit and philosophy minor is quite useful in law.
history is quite useful in research.
am I making the wrong connections?
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<<Then let me clarify. If one group tries to set standards for quality education measured by some sort of proving mechanism and the other organization says that you can't set standards because teaching is an art and therefore subjective and that any proving mechanism would be unfair and insulting to credentialed instructors which group would you say is engaging in domestic sabotage and which is partnering in achieving a national goal.>>
Thanks for the clarification. I don't think either group is engaging in domestic sabotage because they are both well-intentioned. This is a complex issue and I don't think you can lay down standards because this is not an engineering problem like making tires. Even if it can be called "social engineering," that's only a metaphor which serves to mask the underlying complexity. Teaching is an art just like medicine is an art. The problem seems to be that while the trial lawyers have ensured a reasonably high standard of medical and hospital practice, there doesn't seem to be any way for trial lawyers to make headway in reforming the educational system. The same complexities that stand in the way of the imposition of engineering-style standards also stand in the way of convincing any jury that School Board A is the reason why Student B is a moron, whereas there is enough of science mixed into the art of medicine that some issues are capable of a scientific analysis that will satisfy a jury. I believe teaching reform has to come mainly from within the profession.
If standards are not the answer, the solution has to be the production of better teachers through a combination of increasing salaries to attract better candidates, longer and more rigorous teacher training, including lifetime learning requirements, minimum hours of yearly seminars and conferences, more intensive research in pedagogy, etc. The whole thing is a function of money - - the more money you put into a well-planned system, the better the results to be obtained. But of course there are other priorities claiming on the same public funds, chiefly of course those of the military-industrial complex. It's a lot easier to scare the moronic American electorate of a bunch of Communists or crazy Arabs or whatever the Next Big Threat is gonna be than it is of another generation of morons just like themselves.
Where are the current obstacles? There's no question in my mind but that it's a combination of short-sighted unionized resistance to the disciplining or firing of unfit teachers, cheap-ass school boards, reactionary and/or religious interference in school curricula and right-wing political interference are combining to retard progress in American education.
<<And as a corollary in your opinion is an educated citizenry a worthy national goal?>>
Yeah, at least then you wouldn't have to deal with candidates like Bush and Palin. The oligarchy would have to produce more intelligent figureheads and front-men.
<<By the way, i disagree with your theory that there is but one oligarchy that controls the country. If one were to subscribe to such a theory, my guess is that there would be competing oligarchies that hope to control the spoils if their candidates are victorious. So in that sense it would make a difference who wins. >>
You're right, there are competing oligarchies. Exporters and importers. Finance and commerce. Commerce and industry. Highways (including auto manufacturers and the oil industry) versus railways and airlines. Sorry if I oversimplified. At the same time, there seems to be some kind of consolidation going on, within each competing group and between groups. The wealth of the nation is being concentrated into fewer and fewer hands. The share of the top 5% or 10% keeps growing.
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lack of jobs in eng. lit/history?
eng. lit and philosophy minor is quite useful in law.
history is quite useful in research.
am I making the wrong connections?
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You are on target here, but you won't get a job as a lawyer without a law degree.
History is also useful in law, but the usefulness of a history degree depends on the subject of the research. I do not know that pharmacology research would be greatly enhanced by a degree in Medieval History.
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the subject itself may not but the methedology would.
I used to work in a library and at the law firm I seem to be able to find missing files really fast.
the filing system is totally different but the fact I used to do this kind of work at a greater level was very helpful.
I think medieval history is helpful as a reference base for information of terms for lawyers maybe.
in pharmacology I draw a blank.
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<<If our voters are ignorant are we more prone to elect charlatans ?>>
LOL.
NOW he's asking.
Would organizations that facilitate this dumbing down of the electorate be guilty of domestic sabotage or partners in achieving a national goal?
Ouch!
Did you have an organisation in particular in mind?
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<<Did you have an organisation in particular in mind?>>
I think he meant teachers' unions.
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<<Did you have an organisation in particular in mind?>>
I think he meant teachers' unions.
I was guessing he ment the Democratic party.
The Democrat demographic includes the overly educated and the underly educated.
This would include the Acedemic croud that theinks the hoi poli need looking after , and the poli who are willing to think so too.