Re: Short quiz

On Tue, 20 Nov 2007 23:24:18 -0600, Ric Locke
<warlocke@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
<news:500jef8xse4l.k9ra19n32u20$.dlg@xxxxxxxxxx> in
rec.arts.sf.composition:

On Tue, 20 Nov 2007 17:29:43 +0000, Catja Pafort wrote:

Brian M. Scott wrote:

The schools here -- and I doubt that
Texas is very different in this respect -- are under great
pressure from the state and from parents to produce good
results on the statewide exams. This pressure of course
ultimately falls on the teachers, who then have little
choice but to teach to those exams. The way the system is
set up, it's more important to get the maximum number of
kids up to the minimum standard than it is to get *anyone*
to a higher standard, so it's not surprising that there's an
awful lot of teaching to the test.

That has been my (second-hand) impression of the British
system, too. With the added factor that it appears that
school won't enter everybody who would like to take the
test into the examns, because bad results will lessen
their rankings; so that increasing(?) numbers of pupils
leave without qualification at all.

If that happens, then it's not exactly in the interest of
pupils or society as a whole.

I know of no proponent of the test system that regards it
as the best possible method, and very few who consider
it anything but an intrusive stopgap measure.

Really? I certainly do, even if you're talking only about
the U.S.; in some other places national syllabi and
third-party testing are considered normal.

When you end up with a cohort of "students" who cannot
compute 5+2 and get the same answer three times running,
read above the "See *** run" level, or put Julius
Caesar, Thomas Jefferson, and John Kennedy in
chronological order, but can describe male homosexual
intercourse in some detail, cries of "we don't have time
for anything but teaching to the test" tend to elicit
shrugs: So?

It's perfectly understandable that many will see little need
to worry about the better students when so many are so weak.
A bit shortsighted, but very understandable. Note, however,
that this is a very different matter from the one that you
brought up in your previous post, the perception that the
schools are more interested in teaching basketweaving and
promoting self-esteem than in teaching academic substance.
*That* perception is actually rather dated; I might be off
by a little one way or the other, but I'd say that the worst
excesses in that direction belong to the 70s.

And yes, that's a dramatic overstatement, but the
/perception/ isn't far off that -- and perceptions are
what people /have/, and they vote accordingly.

More accurately, it's *a* perception; there are others, and
they're by no means confined to fervent supporters of the
public schools. Cleveland parents are likely to worry first
about whether their kids are physically safe in school, and
there's no mystery at all about the source of this concern.
If they care whether their kids learn something -- sadly,
not all do -- the next question is whether conditions in the
schools allow teachers to teach and interested students to
learn; sometimes they don't. Many teachers are operating in
conditions that warrant hazard pay; it's a wonder that they
can accomplish anything at all. And I say this in full
recognition of the fact that by my standards quite a few of
these teachers have serious academic shortcomings. (For
that matter, the same can be said of some teachers in much
better systems -- and I'm not guessing.)

It might be worth your while to pause briefly and try to
determine where the perception came from. Your first
answer will almost certainly be wrong.

There's no mystery: there's an element of truth to the
perception, and it meshes beautifully with the ever-popular
notion that the younger generation is going to hell in a
handbasket. And since people like simple solutions and
don't like to think themselves even partly to blame, it's
much easier to blame the schools for this state of affairs
than to recognize the considerable role of more general
societal changes, to say nothing of parental shortcomings.

Brian
.

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