question to teachers and anybody interested

[kimba1]

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.

[kimba1]

repetitive

guilty

lol!

[BT]

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.

[Xavier_Onassis]

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.


 

[kimba1]

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

[Plane]

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.

[kimba1]

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.

[Michael Tee]

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.

[kimba1]

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

[Michael Tee]

<<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?

[kimba1]

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.

[Xavier_Onassis]

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?

 

[Plane]

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


I presume we want more than just our geniuses to be free.

[Xavier_Onassis]

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.

[kimba1]

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.