What it takes…
Posted on November 27th, 2006 by Tariq Nelson
…to make a Student.
From the NY Times
On the morning of Oct. 5, President Bush and his education secretary, Margaret Spellings, paid a visit, along with camera crews from CNN and Fox News, to Friendship-Woodridge Elementary and Middle Campus, a charter public school in Washington. The president dropped in on two classrooms, where he asked the students, almost all of whom were African-American and poor, if they were planning to go to college. Every hand went up.
Filed under: Children's Issues, Practical Solutions
This article is so disturbing. Basically the solution is to make the teachers become parents. How is this a solution? This is impossible to replicate and teachers can’t work long hours such as these over a long period of time. Education in America is a mess and doesn’t look like its going to be fixed anytime soon as we refuse to make policy decisions based on facts and common sense. Parents need hold themselves up to higher standards, teachers need to actually know the subjects they are teaching and should be allowed to remove disruptive students and cut out all the bloated educational buracracy, lastly realize that not all students are college material.
I read this article and I thought it brought up some really good points. Such as the homework scam, why are parents basically doing at night what the teachers were supposed to do for eight hours that day.
The more I read the more it reinforces my decision to homeschool.
What about Chinese who have parents that do not speak good english, yet still excel?
I agree that parents must do more, but the fact is that there are so many black children that just do not have responsible parents. Much less those capable of homeschooling
The reason you have to work with black children a whole lot just to get decent results is that black children need a more controlled environment in order to learn because of their lower IQs. Blacks have a propensity for crime and chaos when outside of a strictly controlled environment.
As this study shows, when black children are put under stricter control, they can do better in school. Whites and Asians do not need such a strictly controlled environment to do well.
I believe that NE Asians are quite intelligent. However, they think differently. I can remember when I took physics in college, we would have these
Well if thats what it takes then its going to be an up hill battle because no teacher is going to work 15 hours a day, 6 days a week for 40K even 50K. You’ve got to pay 200K to get that kind of dedication and thats just not going to happen.
Ed, I know you comments were meant out of hate but we can still look at reality and make policy decisons based on facts with compassion and love. Yes there is some truth to your assertions and enviroments should be established based on reality. I mean really what is going on in education is a crime. My neice goes to a school in one of the “top districts” in our state. The girl is smart but as she gets older she gets more caught up in pop culture etc and basically her language skills are just going down hill. So you would think knowing how many young people now don’t know how to speak or write english correctly that the school would be teaching that. No they have the girl doing creative writing using hip hop slang. And this school is in the suburbs. Its ridiculous.
Teach the basics, drill it, teach self disclipline and realize that every child can’t go to college. That is a fact, stop trying to force kids that just need basic skills to have a decent life in America to be rocket scientists. It just makes school frustrating for them.
Insha Allah when my kids get older I really want to work on educating Blacks and Muslims about homeschooling. The hardest thing about homeschooling is living on one income and there are families and single moms who homeschool so that can be worked around. And learning to be patient with your children because you are with them all day. I think alot of people send the kids off to school earlier and earlier because they just dont want to be around the kids all day.
But as far as teaching there, there are so many curriculums out there that bascially tell you what to do step by step. In fact there is on that encourages self teaching
http://www.robinsoncurriculum.com/
Most parents have the ability but the desire and commitment are really the biggest obstacles.
My problem with homeschooling is the social aspect. I do believe in homeschooling in addition to regular school
we can make decisions out of compasion and love and still know that black kids need more tighly controlled environment. we need policy based in racial realism and need to stop shakling ourselves with political correctness that is hurting everyone
Personally I’m opposed to home schooling not so much because of any potential social impact, which I feel is significant, but also an academic one. I feel that homeschooled children do not develop good work habits as they don’t learn to adhere to a schedule, unless the parents doing the homeschooling are VERY conscientious about establishing a schedule and making sure their children adhere to it.
Most parents simply have too many other responsibilities on their plate to establish and implement a proper homeschooling program though they may have good intentions.
The other major concern is that homeschooled children don’t acquire a sufficient background in the various academic subjects, unless the parents are highly educated and recall enough of their own schooling to impart the required knowledge to their children/pupils. For example, how many homeschooling parents could tell me how to use trigonometry to solve a right triangle problem?
Now this may sound like an extreme example but it is an expected skill for secondary students in the public school system. Any student who leaves high school not knowing how to do this isn’t going to be able to progress much further in higher education or the professional world. If one is going to pump gas or flip burgers for a living then fine, but if one wants a successful career (s)he’s going to have to know how to do this particular skill, at least for academic reasons if not practical ones.
So all these things considered along with social impact I’m generally against homeschooling as an option.