Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t understand. Does it normally make much of a difference in high school what grade a person is in? I graduated high school in 1981. If I failed algebra in 9th grade, I had to pass it before I could move on to geometry. If I passed all of my other classes, I could move on in those subjects. If I had crammed algera , geometry and trig into my first two years, I could take calculus in my third, even if I was still a junior. There were a certain number of credits required to be a sophomore, junior or senior, but particular class designations mattered only once in a while. Homerooms were based on class designations, but homeroom lasted for 10 minutes and was only used to take attendance and distribute information. Aside from that, class designation was only used for a schoolwide competition in which different classes competed against each other , and for graduation related events- only senior homerooms got info regarding graduation photos and yearbooks.
Y’know, they don’t even prepare you well in the advanced courses. I wrote, wrote, and wrote some more in High School in AP & CP classes in one of the finest schools in the state, and I was still totally unprepared for college writing courses. I came to do very well in them thanks to some of the finest teachers I’ve ever had, though.
In high School, I had two good English teachers and two very bad ones.
Freshman: Hoosier school; the teacher was very big into teaching us fine literature and poetry. Quite a fun class. We did a fair cop o’ writing but nothing long or demanding.
Sophmore: Tennessee school. teacher didn’t have a clue what she was doing: she was experienced and knew what she wanted to do, but didn’t have any talent for teaching writing. She was a good literature teacher, but not anything close to a writing instructor. She wanted us to do these idiotic five-paragraph monologues, no matter the topic. It was restrictive and boring, and since I’d never done them before it was sheer hell trying to put myself in that box.
Junior: Ms. Anna Arapakos, I love you. This teacher loves teaching, lves students, and loves writing. I learned more in her classes than I learned almost anywhere else. Not only was it great fun in her classes, her topics were ones you could really sink your teeth into. I really enjoyed working on those papers and it came through.
It was not until years later that I realized why: you don’t learn writing by writing, you learn it by thinking. WIth boring topics on obscure (OK, this was high school; not all that obscure) literature peices we’d read last week, there was no interest, no conception, nothing to think about. Its hard to write well when you don’t care.
Senior: Another horrible writing instructor, albeit not so bad because she was old and didn’t really want to do much. She was also obsessed with five-paragraph essays.
The same patterned was repeated for the first two years of my college career.
I have little to offer in regard to suggestions about how to reform the system. Clearly, what is happening now isn’t working. It seems odd to push students forward in classes that get increasingly difficult, if they have not come close to mastering the basics. If a student fails during the first few weeks, and continues to fail throughout the first semester, why not have them repeat the first semester before moving into the second semester? This would be costly but I think it makes sense. I am guessing that around 10-15% of a freshmen algebra class will receive grades below… 73. I think these students would have a better chance of mastering the content if they repeated the semester sooner rather than later. Maybe they could be in smaller classes and teachers would be able to work with them individually. I don’t know. Worth a try. Sometimes what is most effective in the long run, isn’t efficient in the short run.
I don’t know much about social promotion, but I’ve probably seen some of its effects.
I work a college and have seen undergraduates who needed a calculator to find the square root of 16; and I’ve even seen graduate students who, when giving a presentation, had to read (stiffly, I might add) their opening line of “Hello, class. How are you today?” off of an index card.
But what really gets me are cases like the one I read about in the Metro section of the Washington Post yesterday.
(I apologize for not posting the link, but I couldn’t pull it up without registering–which I did. Every time I tried to log in I was returned to the registration site. My computer accepts cookies and the SDMB and every other site knows who I am when I open up their webpages and log in. I only get this with the Post’s site. But, that’s another rant.)
The article is an opinion piece by Marc Fisher entitled “Principal problem in D.C. schools: No accountability” 4/13 Metro section.
The gist of it is that the principal of one of the worst-performing elementary schools in the city is an academic fraud herself. Hired to transform the school into better performance, she has driven off dedicated teachers and ruled by intimidation.
Her “doctorate degree”–which qualifies her for a six-figured salary–is from an unaccredited degree mill that advertises “degrees in 27 days” and was shut down by the FBI justs days after she “earned” her degree.
The D.C. school system, upon learning the fact (in it’s wisdom) said it would down-grade her salary from a doctorate level $115,226 to a Master’s-plus 45 hours course work level of $113,751.
WTF? Fake your resume, get caught, do a terrible job, and still earn six figures?
No wonder students think they don’t need to take academics seriously–just look at the principal.
And they learn this at the elementary school level.
High school classes are also not always restricted to grade, or only one grade.
And let’s say I pass all my subjects with flying colors, but fail 10th grade English. Why should I have to take ALL of those subjects again, just because of one class?
Why not just retake the class I failed?
It makes a lot more sense to me.
Well, I have a proposal. Eliminate those moronic elected school boards and hire some professional administrators to run the schools and manage the budgets.
Give them some freedom to set policies and make those policies known to the parents before they bring their child into the system. Set a base line and measure productivity. If the parent is unwilling to accept the school systems policies and procedures, then give them a home schooling kit.
Here in Memphis they already have a superintendent of schools who is suppose to run the system, unfortunately she answers to a bunch of fat assed, loud mouthed elected morons who can’t read a budget and couldn’t pass the GED if they had a year to study.
These morons, when faced with million dollar cost overruns, actually made and seconded a motion and then passed it with a unanimous vote that said they would follow their own fucking policies with regard to contracts in the future.
These are the same people who actually discussed, at length, removing “french fries” from the school menu. These people actually think their “15 minutes of fame” has arrived when local television comes to record their 3 stooges antics.
One of these morons, as the board was faced with a 30 million dollar shortage for this years budget, actually suggested sending the budget forward without paring the 30 million or coming up with 30 million - the moron wanted to just send it to the city council and I suppose, pretend there wasn’t a 30 MILLION DOLLAR SHORTAGE. Me, I think the city council would have NOTICED.