Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for May 05, 2013

Good Morning, Happy Campers!

This is probably part of what led to Zip leaving school to head for Colorado with Zonker.

It’s a rerun, I believe. But so VERY worth rerunning!

While I do not believe in crushing anyone’s spirit, especially children, I feel that we have gone too far in eliminating competition and the desire to succeed in the schools of our nation. I am not suggesting that it should be cutthroat but progressively more realistic. Children should be encouraged to do mor, to run farther and faster and to succeed academically. Passing everyone just puts a lot more unprepared adults on the street later on. When that happens it is too late to teach them to succeed in life.

Now if we can eliminate tenure for educators as well and have teachers actually teach throughout their careers we will get somewhere.

Yes, best to give accurate marks for actual learning.

I don’t remember this one, and I think it should be current because of Walden’s getting privatized. Did we miss the rest of the pot farm episode?

Calvin and Hobbes and Dilbert reruns are better. Garry, you’re slipping. Make it tri-weekly.

This is one issue Trudeau and the conservatives agree on. The difference being the role of teachers. Conservatives see teachers as the problem. At least at the college level, GT sees the teachers as the victims; pressured by administrators to lower standards and pass undeserving students.

Millennials….

Thank God! The era of Liberal Teaching/Parenting is over! Now back to the real world.

See Mallard Fillmore today

Not lead, Clark. Lead is valuable. Probably aluminum. Or more likely plastic. The spoiling of some children has gone on forever. It is too easy to demonize the whole self-esteem thing, but like anything else, the devil is in the details. Encouraging the “losers” does not necessarily involve eliminating competition, or lowering standards, or spoiling and entitling students. And saying that more could be done to raise the quality of teaching and teachers, at every level, is hardly an attack on the teaching profession. Quite the opposite. And we’re not going to do that by binding and gagging teachers with NCLB teach-to-the-test-or-perish laws and the silencing of their union. Good teaching has to be encouraged, but there is the problem of doing that when the method used is something like NCLB, which does nothing of the kind.

Teaching is one of the toughest, most demanding and yet most important professions we have. They should be paid what we perversely pay pro athletes, actors and bankers. And if you want to keep them fresh and not burned out, then don’t throw them out with the garbage the minute they quit producing the high grades – institute mandatory sabbaticals so they can rest, regroup and learn new tricks. Once every 5-10 years would reap tremendous gains in the long run.

Garry is not slipping. This is most timely. This is final exam week. We “old school” teachers applaud this Walden prof. Our stance sometimes leads to negative student evals, (career breakers in Texas) but so what? Those that shape up make it all worthwhile.

Self efficacy and growth mindset…..

It’s about time…..Again!

There was a fad in the world of psychology that we could stop bullies, if we raised their self-esteem. It turns out we have reared a generation of bullies with high self-esteem.

“Once we have only teachers in charge of education”— amen to that. Diane Ravitch has written extensively about education in Finland, she is a great source of info about this. Most of the coddling of students has to do with parents, not teachers. We have too many students in the inner cities who are struggling to keep food in their bellies and to make it to and from school safely, let alone to get all A’s in school. Then, everyone looks around and says what is the problem with our inner city schools? As to our suburban schools, most of them are actually competitive with Finland, however.

It seems EVERYONE wants to have the responsibility of a politician.

The last time this topic came up and I stated my disgust with this self esteem crap, I got blasted by some lady suggesting that I must not have children and if I did how terrible for them and blah, blah, blah and blah. GOD! I just can’t believe how any adult can be so naive! Of course this blight on our society is probably just one of many of the reasons we are so quickly devolving into a second rate country.

It would be nice if our bureaucracy were held to this standard.

I have a different slant here. I was a great student, worked hard, and made good grades (math was hard, but I really worked at it and made A’s and the occasional B). When I got out into real life, I thought I’d do really well, and did get by, but didn’t set the world on fire. What I didn’t know was that to make piles of $$ or rise through the ranks, you need entrepreneurial ability, or the cojones to boss people around, sell things and PRODUCE! No one cares much whether or not you can spell or parse “lie” and “lay.” I don’t know the answer to this – maybe it’s a first-world worry.

It is a blessing and bless you for recognising it.

Those of you who are interested in education and haven’t seen/read these materials might be very interested in Charlotte Iserbyt’s interview re global education/government/economy. Iserbyt was Reagan’s staffer on education, fired for taking her job too seriously.

The video interview: http://tinyurl.com/bvs42h2

Transcript, if you’d rather read: http://tinyurl.com/c74djn3

Something she didn’t mention was used on us in the mid-nineties, to ram ‘school reform’ down our throats. It was originally invented (discovered?) for ‘think tanks’ to reach more accurate consensus. But, hey, why stop there? Info here:

http://tinyurl.com/bvs42h2

Enjoy. Or not …

The hearings are on Wednesday.

Yes. There were a lot of us who agreed with those of you who opposed it. We fought as best we could, but we were fighting a committed government. Only a few of us really understood that. And if we did, we couldn’t figure out why, because the ‘reform’ was clearly a wholly destructive move on the part of government.

Have you seen the Charlotte Iserbyt interviews? I posted the links upthread to the interview, the transcript of the interview, and also the link to the way the Delphi technique was misused to ram that ‘reform’ down our collective throats.

In truth, I suspect that the Delphi technique has simply been coopted to give us what they want.

So, ask yourself: How, exactly, did we get here?

And then, if you haven’t already, you might check out the links I posted.

Yep. That covers it for the schools, really – assuming that you are willing to replace all that social engineering with academics.

I too had excellent teachers on the whole. That was over fifty years ago – I do recall a couple of duds, but most were at the least better than good enough, and I’ve had a couple of truly great teachers.

Most of the kids know they are being used, they just have no way to figure out how. Mostly their self esteem is really in the toilet; except for the manufactured sociopaths who believe they are as great as the schools say they are, and take their pleasure in bullying anyone who isn’t bigger and more brutal than they are.

Check out the links I posted. They will surprise you!

Pawn Stars would be proud!!!

It’s about time. Let the real world begin!