In today's world we have so much more information at our finger tips, it's only logical that today's kids are smarter than yesterdays. Only problem is, they aren't. What is happening? If I had the Internet in grammar and high school, I would have spent about a quarter of the time writing papers. Even in college, I had some serious hours logged in the library. Why are kids getting dumber?
It seems to me that in my father and mother's day, work ethic was stressed in every day life and especially in school. Kids learned at a very early age that hard work equaled success. This isn't necessarily true, but it is a pretty solid foundation in which to raise your children. Today's kids don't have a care in the world. I know kids today who are in high school and college who not only don't want to work, but refuse to work. In my generation, I'd be thrown out of the house. In my parents generation, a pretty nice belt mark would be emblazoned on a child's back. I'm not condoning beating your kids, but "by any means necessary" does have it's benefits.
What I find even more disgraceful is what is being taught. If the curriculum that is being taught in today's schools was taught in my day, nobody would have ever scored lower than an 80. In my father's day, none lower than a 90. I remember reading a students A+ paper and almost crying from laughter. It was five paragraphs and totalled approximately one and a half pages, double spaced. When I was in school, that was my introduction. Five paragraph essays were a memory from 6th grade.
It gets worse. I went to college eight years after I finished high school and I had professors who for the sake of an unbiased grade would ask that we not sign the papers but put our social security numbers atop of projects. The first paper was returned and the professor nodded in approval and said my paper was wonderful. I asked how they knew how it was mine and they replied "It was concise, it was well written, and it was the only paper with footnotes and a bibliography." How sad is it that a professor knew that I would know these things because I was only 6-8 years older than my classmates.
Now we have schools (especially Catholic schools) who are not teaching true curriculum's, but teaching to the SAT college entrance exam. It has made the test almost all but useless and it deprives the children of a true education. Reading Hamlet is much more important than spending three weeks exploring how to understand synonyms and antonyms for roughly 40 questions on a test you'll take once. Just a note. A synonym is not a spice used in mulled cider, but you saw that one coming, didn't you? The SAT and the regents exams are absolute jokes. I was a horrible English student in high school, not because I was a rebel with a cause, but because in our English classes, we mostly read books I had already read. Listen all you high school teachers out there. Yes, Catcher in the Rye is a wonderful book, but it's not a junior or senior year book. Sadly, I read the thing in 6th, 8th, 9th, and 11th grade. That is ridiculous. It's just not that good or that complex. My point is, I cut class almost every day and scored a 99% on my English regents in 11th grade. My average grade for the year, given to me by the always lovely (insert ironic tone here) Miss Curry...a 60.
The SAT is even more of a joke. The night before the exam, many of my friends crammed or stayed home (the test was given on a Saturday morning) to rest. I went out on a nice 10 hour bender and as the sun rose, I found myself in the doorway at the high school, wreaking of booze, and not in any shape to think of anything other than sleep. I entered the room. Listened to the rules about how to take the test, how not to proceed to the next part until the time was up, and how when we were finished we were not to speak. So the test is handed out and I began. Forty minutes later I was finished with the entire test, ignoring the directions I went up and handed it in. The proctor scowled and returned me to my chair, where I snored for the next two hours. 1140. Not bad for being drunk and finishing in two thirds of an hour. I later took the test as a goof when I was sober and scored 1260. The thing that always got me about this test was how it was explained. Why was it schools, Kaplan, Peterson or any other professional test service always told you the important rule - DO NOT LEAVE ANY ANSWER BLANK! This is the worst advice and the root to all SAT evil. In case you don't know the test is scored on a scale based on the correct #of answers. You get 400 points for writing your name and it goes from there. What they don't tell you is that you get 1 point for each answer that is answered correctly and -1/4 for each answer that is incorrect. This gives students the misunderstanding that if they don't know they should guess because it's only 1/4 of a point. Here's the thing...if you put this format to a regular test consisting of fifty questions you get some scary results. Say you know forty answers and don't know ten. You answer the forty and leave the others blank and you receive an 80% grade. If you guess and you get all ten wrong that would be -2.5, giving you a 37.5 or a 75%. That's a big difference. The reason they tell you to guess is because in guessing you have a one in four chance of getting it correct. This is why they tell you, when in doubt guess C. To me this isn't logical. What if the questions you don't know just happen to not be C. Plus, why would a test score in a way that the most important exam of your life is a guessing game? Silly in my opinion.
This leads us back to intelligence. Why is it that the average kid doesn't know who the vice president or the speaker of the house is? Why don't they understand any geography? Why do they believe that if you do the bare minimum, you get a car. If you do less, you get college paid for. So many parents are going into debt to send their kids to college only to have their kids get out of college and work in fields that do not require any. My brother is a prime example. Four years at Keene State and Ithaca College and he became a police officer. Not to say that the education was a waste, but honestly, did taking freshman English help him with his career or his life any more than freshman English in high school?
As I look back on my school years I can honestly say that the grade I learned most in was 6th grade. I took Latin which helped me understand word etymology. I took English with a woman named Ruth Chapman who opened my eyes to Shakespeare. It was 6th grade and we read at least three Shakespeare plays, Animal Farm, 1984, Catcher in the Rye and Of Mice and Men. Most kids don't read any of these until high school. By then they despise reading due to the lack of intelligent literature they have had crammed down their gullets that they close down and refuse to read, or at the very least comprehend.
So many classes today are a waste of time in my opinion, regardless of whether I liked them or not. English, Math, History and Science are obviously important. Career Ed, Sociology, Accounting and Economics are all useless. I would throw art in there because if you don't have artistic ability by high school, you probaly won't eve. If there is art history, kudos. If I ran a school I would require political science so that children who are about to graduate and become voters understood the political processes and even the voting process. I would require speech communication. Public speaking, even for job interview purposes is incredibly valuable. I would require 30 minutes a day of exercise (not gym). I would also have school only four days a week from 9-5. The other day children that weren't required to be in class would have some sort of job at the school. This would acclimate them to work. They could cook and serve food, clean the school, do landscaping, assist teachers in grading papers, etc. During this "day 0ff" I would also have group tutoring by the students themselves. I know from experience that people learn more quickly when things are explained by a peer than by someone in a position of authority.
Finally, and this is a big one. Some responsibility falls on the parents. Parents today are not doing nearly as good a job as our parents. Too many kids and their parents sit and watch shows like Survivor and Lost together, but don't discuss their days. Listen, I like lounging around and watching movies and sports as much as the next guy, but if I had a child in school, the TV would not go on until all the homework was done and choirs were finished. That would go for me to. If I'm going to teach my child a lesson, it's hypocritical of me to sit and do nothing, when I know there is probably something better I could be doing....like teaching my kid about something maybe I know that his teacher doesn't, because chances are his teacher was one of my classmates who didn't know how to footnote or write a bibliography and still doesn't.
It seems to me that in my father and mother's day, work ethic was stressed in every day life and especially in school. Kids learned at a very early age that hard work equaled success. This isn't necessarily true, but it is a pretty solid foundation in which to raise your children. Today's kids don't have a care in the world. I know kids today who are in high school and college who not only don't want to work, but refuse to work. In my generation, I'd be thrown out of the house. In my parents generation, a pretty nice belt mark would be emblazoned on a child's back. I'm not condoning beating your kids, but "by any means necessary" does have it's benefits.
What I find even more disgraceful is what is being taught. If the curriculum that is being taught in today's schools was taught in my day, nobody would have ever scored lower than an 80. In my father's day, none lower than a 90. I remember reading a students A+ paper and almost crying from laughter. It was five paragraphs and totalled approximately one and a half pages, double spaced. When I was in school, that was my introduction. Five paragraph essays were a memory from 6th grade.
It gets worse. I went to college eight years after I finished high school and I had professors who for the sake of an unbiased grade would ask that we not sign the papers but put our social security numbers atop of projects. The first paper was returned and the professor nodded in approval and said my paper was wonderful. I asked how they knew how it was mine and they replied "It was concise, it was well written, and it was the only paper with footnotes and a bibliography." How sad is it that a professor knew that I would know these things because I was only 6-8 years older than my classmates.
Now we have schools (especially Catholic schools) who are not teaching true curriculum's, but teaching to the SAT college entrance exam. It has made the test almost all but useless and it deprives the children of a true education. Reading Hamlet is much more important than spending three weeks exploring how to understand synonyms and antonyms for roughly 40 questions on a test you'll take once. Just a note. A synonym is not a spice used in mulled cider, but you saw that one coming, didn't you? The SAT and the regents exams are absolute jokes. I was a horrible English student in high school, not because I was a rebel with a cause, but because in our English classes, we mostly read books I had already read. Listen all you high school teachers out there. Yes, Catcher in the Rye is a wonderful book, but it's not a junior or senior year book. Sadly, I read the thing in 6th, 8th, 9th, and 11th grade. That is ridiculous. It's just not that good or that complex. My point is, I cut class almost every day and scored a 99% on my English regents in 11th grade. My average grade for the year, given to me by the always lovely (insert ironic tone here) Miss Curry...a 60.
The SAT is even more of a joke. The night before the exam, many of my friends crammed or stayed home (the test was given on a Saturday morning) to rest. I went out on a nice 10 hour bender and as the sun rose, I found myself in the doorway at the high school, wreaking of booze, and not in any shape to think of anything other than sleep. I entered the room. Listened to the rules about how to take the test, how not to proceed to the next part until the time was up, and how when we were finished we were not to speak. So the test is handed out and I began. Forty minutes later I was finished with the entire test, ignoring the directions I went up and handed it in. The proctor scowled and returned me to my chair, where I snored for the next two hours. 1140. Not bad for being drunk and finishing in two thirds of an hour. I later took the test as a goof when I was sober and scored 1260. The thing that always got me about this test was how it was explained. Why was it schools, Kaplan, Peterson or any other professional test service always told you the important rule - DO NOT LEAVE ANY ANSWER BLANK! This is the worst advice and the root to all SAT evil. In case you don't know the test is scored on a scale based on the correct #of answers. You get 400 points for writing your name and it goes from there. What they don't tell you is that you get 1 point for each answer that is answered correctly and -1/4 for each answer that is incorrect. This gives students the misunderstanding that if they don't know they should guess because it's only 1/4 of a point. Here's the thing...if you put this format to a regular test consisting of fifty questions you get some scary results. Say you know forty answers and don't know ten. You answer the forty and leave the others blank and you receive an 80% grade. If you guess and you get all ten wrong that would be -2.5, giving you a 37.5 or a 75%. That's a big difference. The reason they tell you to guess is because in guessing you have a one in four chance of getting it correct. This is why they tell you, when in doubt guess C. To me this isn't logical. What if the questions you don't know just happen to not be C. Plus, why would a test score in a way that the most important exam of your life is a guessing game? Silly in my opinion.
This leads us back to intelligence. Why is it that the average kid doesn't know who the vice president or the speaker of the house is? Why don't they understand any geography? Why do they believe that if you do the bare minimum, you get a car. If you do less, you get college paid for. So many parents are going into debt to send their kids to college only to have their kids get out of college and work in fields that do not require any. My brother is a prime example. Four years at Keene State and Ithaca College and he became a police officer. Not to say that the education was a waste, but honestly, did taking freshman English help him with his career or his life any more than freshman English in high school?
As I look back on my school years I can honestly say that the grade I learned most in was 6th grade. I took Latin which helped me understand word etymology. I took English with a woman named Ruth Chapman who opened my eyes to Shakespeare. It was 6th grade and we read at least three Shakespeare plays, Animal Farm, 1984, Catcher in the Rye and Of Mice and Men. Most kids don't read any of these until high school. By then they despise reading due to the lack of intelligent literature they have had crammed down their gullets that they close down and refuse to read, or at the very least comprehend.
So many classes today are a waste of time in my opinion, regardless of whether I liked them or not. English, Math, History and Science are obviously important. Career Ed, Sociology, Accounting and Economics are all useless. I would throw art in there because if you don't have artistic ability by high school, you probaly won't eve. If there is art history, kudos. If I ran a school I would require political science so that children who are about to graduate and become voters understood the political processes and even the voting process. I would require speech communication. Public speaking, even for job interview purposes is incredibly valuable. I would require 30 minutes a day of exercise (not gym). I would also have school only four days a week from 9-5. The other day children that weren't required to be in class would have some sort of job at the school. This would acclimate them to work. They could cook and serve food, clean the school, do landscaping, assist teachers in grading papers, etc. During this "day 0ff" I would also have group tutoring by the students themselves. I know from experience that people learn more quickly when things are explained by a peer than by someone in a position of authority.
Finally, and this is a big one. Some responsibility falls on the parents. Parents today are not doing nearly as good a job as our parents. Too many kids and their parents sit and watch shows like Survivor and Lost together, but don't discuss their days. Listen, I like lounging around and watching movies and sports as much as the next guy, but if I had a child in school, the TV would not go on until all the homework was done and choirs were finished. That would go for me to. If I'm going to teach my child a lesson, it's hypocritical of me to sit and do nothing, when I know there is probably something better I could be doing....like teaching my kid about something maybe I know that his teacher doesn't, because chances are his teacher was one of my classmates who didn't know how to footnote or write a bibliography and still doesn't.
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