posted on Jan, 6 2004 @ 02:08 AM
I agree with the posters who said that parents need to play some part in teaching their children, and I also agree with the poster who said that
highschool is about impossible to fail these days. I graduated 2 years ago. My parents played very little part in my early childhood education, when
I went to kindergarten, I could write my name, tie my shoes, and say the alphabet. That was it. Thanks to good genes, it took me somewhere in the
neighborhood of 2 weeks to learn to read. By the time I hit third grade, my parents were playing a big part in my education, I was reading at the
adult level, and doing math out of a college math book my dad and uncle were teaching me things out of. As a result of this, I was given the chance
to go from second grade straight to sixth grade, but didn't cause my mom thought it would ruin my "social interaction", but that's a whole other
can of worms.
I think some more attention needs to be placed on the KINDS of classes offered. My school offered basically no advanced placement classes until my
senior year, but at that point, my graduation requirements were met and I graduated a sememster early. I think that more AP classes should be
offered. I also think that students shouldn't get placed in special ed for spacing off in class. Make them learn. The state and schools need to
not look so hard at the damn standardized testing. At my school, the 6 of us who scored perfect scores on the ITBS and ITED, plus the 15 or so that
had average scores made up for the people who had low scores, so the curriculum was rarely changed. I also think that the requirements for a teaching
certificate need to change. Once again, my highschool. We had 5 different teachers that lost their jobs in a year because the students knew the
materials better than the people teaching it. There really is nothing better than an English teacher who can't pronounce words, put a sentence
together, and generally has no grasp on the English language. Maybe a Geometry teacher who knows jack sh�t about geometry and just spends a semester
teaching how to do proofs. Or a history teacher who DID NOT know that the USSR had broken up and Germany was now 1 country. I mean, make sure the
people with the teaching certificates know the sh�t they're supposed to be teaching.
jrod--best of luck to you if you do become a teacher. You sound like a reasonable person who seeks to make the piss poor education system in this
country work.