Teach Your Children
May 21, 2009 Political
In Texas, there has been an insidious tendency to give students grades that they have not earned through doing their work. Currently, if a student does not feel like doing the work of an assignment, they still receive a 50 on their gradesheet.
In addition, some teachers are being told that students can take tests multiple times, and pick the highest score among them. This, of course, results in much more work for the teachers, and an unwarranted sense of entitlement among these students.
Karen Garza, chief academic officer of Houston Independent School District said, ” A teacher’s professional judgement” should replace a student’s responsibility for fulfilling academic requirements.
The tendency of schools to just rotate our children through with no real sense of education clearly makes education a farce, but much of this is parent- driven, as they believe that their children should be the equivalent of Einstein- after all, these children are brilliant in their parents eyes.
Well, unfortunately, we may never know, if this trend of just giving grades away continues- with as much new knowledge as we have gained over the years, you might think the standards of schools had increased, not slid to the bottom of the heap in a wild rush to ignorance. What do you expect though, if you happen to be among those who use a Playstation to keep their children placated, and do not insist to be included in their childrens’ education. Ignorance breeds ignorance, and we, as a nation, are rapidly losing the race to every other nation with regard to the level of education and professional skills.
When you have an educational system that has a policy of giving grades to those who didn’t earn them, you have the same situation as happened when the Catholic Church was selling dispensations and blessings. A totally crooked system that should be shut down and reset.
But this seems to be the norm in educational circles, even in universities now. The Ivy League Universities- Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, Columbia, and others, have dropped the requirement of History as a subject that must be taken. How utterly stupid is THAT? If you cannot put the world in context of what has happened before, you have no “roadmap” of where you want to go, nor of the best way to get there. That these “prestigious” universities would even consider this means that they have lost their prominence in intellectual terms- now they are just expensive “community” colleges. I would wager the Community Colleges are better, because they actually have to produce results and work twice as hard as those who sit on their “laurels”.
The fact that a State Senator, Jane Nelson, R- Flower Mound, even has to propose a bill that would ban the practice of school districts granting minimum grades is in itself a disgrace. Our future rests with these young people and to falsely grant them any grade for work they did not do is a crime against our country, and serves these children not at all for their future.
It is true that the world needs janitors too- but do you want your child to be a janitor just because the teacher was allowed to take the easy way out and pass your child through with no knowledge at all, or would you feel better if you had a say in your child’s education? To do this, you have to take an active part in your child’s education, you have to hold both your child AND the teacher to the highest standards possible. If the school you have your child in won’t raise their standards, raise hell- you have a PTA- these teachers work for you- and get together to demand the best for your children.
On the other side of the equation, push your children- demand that they excel in class. They may dislike you now, but they will thank you later, when they find that educationally, they are at the top of the food chain, and they have their choice of jobs they will actually like to go to, and jobs that actually pay well. They will not have to be janitors- they will have a choice, and choice is a good thing.
If you teach your children right, they will teach theirs, and the world will improve.
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Tags: bad teachers, ignorance, schools, universities