your opinion on what needs to be taught in school

[kimba1]

was gonna say don`t bother with the general courses both realized they get neglected too.


I`m asking what you think needs attention and what should be discarded and why.

I used to think the arts should be elective but realized all my engineering friends hasn`t done much in the creativity dept. remember apple has artistic folks in it`s staff.

 I think literature is very important due the lack of commucation skill that is growing. Commucation equal money . can`t exactly sell if you can`t explain stuff.Agian using apple the store has a trained staff to teach customers how to use there products.

[Xavier_Onassis]

There is no reason why anyone in an Apple store should need a college degree. What they do is to train people how to do specific tasks. That does not require any degree, though it does require literacy and a knowledge of math as it relates to computer usage.

There are many reasons why the arts should be included in a degree program for people who design home computers, since the customers often engage in creative activities both as a career and for their own personal enrichment.

[BT]

I would hope that we are graduating folks from the high school level who can count back change, do other simple arithmetic calculations, speak the language proficiently as well as write it, and have a working knowledge of living skills. 

[sirs]

From what I'm reading about the Los Angeles Unified School District, less than half are graduating with the ability to do math, at a college entry level

[Xavier_Onassis]

The situation used to be that students who could not pass math or English were flunked, often several times, until the dropped out. Now the tendency is to pass them and keep them in school.In one Miami Dade High School where I taught for about three months in 1987 as a permanent substitute, we were told that you should not fail over 6% of the class, so if you had 30 students, you could fail only two. To flunk more than that, you needed to submit an "override form", explaining in detail why they failed, what measures should be taken so that they could pass when the retook the class, and then you had to get a parent or guardian to sign off on it. It was said that if you had too many overrides, you would not be rehired. I never met anyone,and no one could name anyone, who had been non-renewed for excess overrides, though.

I imagine that something similar is used to hurry the students through the system elsewhere. I had at least a dozen students in my six classes that could not or would not read aloud. When they tried, they sounded like second graders, mumbling and stammering along.

I reported their difficulty to the remedial studies office, where some teachers were already familiar with most of them.

I decided that I did not want to teach HS, even though it paid about 25% more. This was one summer when my college decided to limit summer courses because of remodeling being done to the classrooms.

It is difficult trying to teach students who lack the basic skills in a high school. Miami has a lot of Haitians, Cubans, Central Americans who know no English and some of whom cannot read in their own language. They come here when they are HS age and there is no real place to put them after a crash course in ESL that is inadequate.