Miss South Carolina Teen

120 comments on “Miss South Carolina Teen”

1. It’s not even so much that the educational system needs to be reformed, though I won’t argue that point. The bigger issue is that, for large swaths of American Culture, it’s okay and encouraged to be stupid. Or, more accurately, to be mentally lazy.

   I’m not entirely unsympathetic to why this is. For the most part, it’s a culture of lower class ethnic majority. Their lives are generally filled with hard work, and little reward. They spend a lot of time trying hard to just not think about how crummy most of their time on earth is for them, and are happy to latch on to opinions that make them feel better than others without having to actually do anything to be better than others. It’s a release from a hard life.

   But you raise a kid like this, where beer and TV are the main forms of entertainment, where you’ll work dámņëd hard all your life and if you’re lucky be able to pay the rent every month, where your place in the world is believed to be largely set based on your race, gender, and place of birth, and anyone different is a threat, where thinking about things just makes you think about how much you don’t like your life – that kid is probably not going to develop a love of learning. He’s going to look for the path of least resistance, become intellectually lazy, and be very well rewarded socially for doing so. When your environment is actively hostile to thinking differently than your parents, and those parents latch on to whatever radio or TV personality that their friends listen to, it’s a rare individual that’ll care enough to do well in school just for his own sake. Mom and Dad don’t care, so long as you don’t flunk out, and the teachers will pass you so long as you don’t cause too much of a fuss, so just go with the flow.

   You can put in whatever system you want in the schools, but it’s very hard to break out of this cycle. And I don’t have the slightest idea about what to do to fix it.

   And kudos to people who _do_ become educated coming from anti-intellectual backgrounds. It happens, and I admire you!

2. There are so many things that need to be addressed to fix the educational system that it’s beyond sad.

   #1. Get rid of No Child Left Behind. I’ve seen enough “teaching to the test” with my kids, now 8 and 10, to know it’s a waste of time.

   #2. Find the money to making teaching a viable profession once again. We live in a society that has villified even the idea of taxes. You know what? Taxes are a GOOD thing. They are used to benefit everybody. Even if you don’t have kids and part of your taxes go to support the school system it benefits everyone by producing smarter children who are far less likely to end up on welfare or otherwise being a burden on society, thereby saving everybody money in the long run. What is bad is when government revenue is WASTED on things like tax breaks for large corporations and needless invasions of foreign countries.

   #3. Parental involvement and supervision of in their kids’ education is frighteningly low. Back when most children has one working parent and one stay-at-home parent it was much easier to keep tabs on the kids’ schoolwork and activities. when both parents work young kids are sent to afterschool centers for several hours until they can be picked up and get little personal attention. Older kids just kill time alone at home and others prove the old theory about idle hands. I check my kids’ homework every night, I’m in frequent communication with their teachers and I try to supplement what their learning in class with actual exercises about learning. If they learn something in math I try to show them a practical application for what they learned. If they learn something in history it will normally only be the who, what and when so I try to supplement it with the why.

   I’ll stop here but there are so many more things that need to be added to this list.

3. She got a chance to try to answer the question again. Her answer the second time was slightly better.

   http://blog.vh1.com/2007-08-28/miss-teen-south-carolina-is-still-kinda-dumb/

4. It’s downbeat to say this, but what do you expect from a society that uses the term “Einstein” as a perjorative?

   And if Ms. Upton had actually used such a word as “perjorative” in her answer, I’ll tell you the most disappointing thing: it’s not that certain people wouldn’t know the meaning of that word, ’cause that’s okay — knowledge is a measure of exposure, not intelligence — it’s that those who didn’t know what it meant wouldn’t care enough to get a dictionary (if they even had one on their shelf) to find out.

   To delibertately dismiss exposure in the name of improving one’s knowledge IS a measure of intelligence — a very telling one.

5. I’m with Peter: I don’t blame her, but I think she is a symptom of a larger problem.

6. Her ‘redo’ on the link above is actually very good. Paraphrased: I and my friends know where it is on a map; I don’t know anyone who doesn’t; but if the statistics are true, we need to improve our educational system.

   The blogger attacks the first half of her answer ignoring the second half. And the first half is understandable. Anyone who receives a good education from a good school would likely react with the same surprise and doubt of the statistic, because they haven’t been exposed to the 20% yet in their life.

   And she sounded fairly intelligible in the rest of the conversation as well, where she didn’t have three days to prepare her answer.

7. Peter, great reply. Substitute “American” for “Australian” and it’d describe my country’s problems too. As Kirby has stated, here in Australia as well we’re encouraged to be intellectually lazy.

8. And that’s why I like Peter David.

9. I hadn’t heard anything about this until this morning, when a colleague of mine showed me the video before a meeting.

   While I definitely feel sorry for her, I don’t think it was an issue of a mini-stroke. She seemed too coherent in terms of facial expressions — it was too clearly someone flailing around for a response to be anything else. (She had a moment in the middle where she clearly felt like she finally had it … and then it all went to hëll again.)

   Apart from that, I agree with most of what’s been said here, most particularly about American culture and the glorification of stupidity.

   My two additions, for what they’re worth:

   — Some of the people I feel the MOST sorry for in this would be Miss SC’s teachers, past and (if relevant) present. Assuming that they were decent teachers, they must be cringing up a treat at this point.

   — Considering that we’ve already had about 4700 presidential debates and it’s only August of ’07, I’d propose that we lock each of the candidates alone in a room except for a camera and ask each of THEM this question, along with a few others. No chance to rehearse, and knowing that people will see the answer. Let’s see how well they do.

   TWL

10. If I might borrow a phrase: “…we’re encouraged to be intellectually lawe’re encouraged to be intellectually lazy.
    zy.”

    I wonder if it might be more basic than that, though. There’s a lot of teaching of facts, but very little of the application of these facts, and even less on how to research further facts. In my second English comp class in college, we had a research paper. Now, along with my writing, I also did some work in a library for a year, and one of my favorite things is to figure out how movie effects work. I know how to research. Now, this was a fairly young teacher, not too experienced in handling her own class, and it came across sometimes. There were a lot of questions being bandied about on how to research(shocked the heck outta me) and not much in the way of response. Sure, structurally, she knew what to tell people, but if they needed help in the research end, they were pretty much left high and dry. That same semester, I had an Intermediate Algebra teacher, I learned more from that man about math than from any other teacher, because he showed us not only how to do it, but he showed us WHY it did it, and WHAT you could do with it. Also, if we were stuck during a test, or if we bolluxed one up, he’d help us to get the right answer and show us why it was right, and where we’d gone wrong.

    Also made me think of my acting classes, my radio classes, and my speech class. My radio classes all said the same dámņ thing to me–you’ve got the face for radio, and a great voice, you just talk too dámņ fast. My acting classes with one possible exception were all really simple for me. My speech class, run by your stereotypical effete gay professor, that was another ball of wax. Most people aren’t taught to speak in public. Most people would rather have a proctologist assist in a root canal than speak in public. Well, this guy knew it, knew that he could do it better, and proceeded to belittle everyone in the class. Several people despised this guy by the middle of the semester, one of whom actually stormed out of the room, slamming the door impressively, and all he did was make a sly joke. So, it was evident that all he was interested in was his own ever-increasing opinion of himself, and not in assisting any of us to become better speakers. Maybe this South Carolinian(is that the correct phrase, Bill?) just didn’t have the right training for public speaking.

11. Oh, and in response to …

    I don’t think that a country that has tolerated seven years of a president so characterized by malaprops that entire 365-day calendars are devoted to them–a president whose town-hall meeting questions are carefully vetted before they’re spoken–gets to laugh too hard at a scared teenager who had a tough question sprung on her.

    I’d like to petition that those of us who NEVER tolerated Dorkboy-in-Chief be allowed a certain latitude in this area. 🙂

    TWL

12. “Considering that we’ve already had about 4700 presidential debates and it’s only August of ’07, I’d propose that we lock each of the candidates alone in a room”

    Hey, that in itself’s not a bad idea…

13. Having watched the clip a couple of times, it appears to me as though she was *very* over-coached, and rather than listening to the question asked, she was instead thinking about all of the things she’d been told to do: Make sure people know it’s your opinion, give an example, always smile, don’t smile during the serious bits.

    She’s a 16 year old kid, and had a brain seizure in front of millions of people. Not entirely her fault, and not something to make fun of – she’ll be hearing about it for years, poor thing.

14. It’s not a stroke; I’ve always believed that this phenomena is a pretty common remnant of our evolutionary past.

    I mean, back in the day, when a cave bear jumped out at you, thinking was not a very high priority. You KNEW what you had to do: run. In fact, any blood going to your brain is blood better sent to your feets, which had best be doing their duty about then. It’s a common thing to feel your skin grow cold during fear as your body constricts the blood vessels and takes blood away from the skin surface (so as to reduce the inevitable bleeding that is part and parcel of a cave bear encounter). I think it’s also the basic mechanism of “test anxiety”. Confronted with a test, the modern equivalent of a cave bear to hear my students talk, the body reacts as it would a physical threat, turning our young scholar into a grunting wide eyed sack of anxiety, unable to recall even obvious questions like “What is your name”. Don’t even ASK them to make fire without flint or steel.

    (It also occurs to me that in moments of fear one’s senses become particularly acute–the slightest sound becomes distracting. A kid who nervously taps his pencil during a test is liable to get dirty looks and metal protractors thrown at him.. I’ll bet Miss South Carolina was able to hear every snicker, which probably wasn’t helping.)

    My niece went to the Miss New York pageant twice and the question and answer portion was sheer torture for both the contestants and the audience. Even if you’re rooting for one person it’s no fun to see one of her competitors get the flop sweats on stage, if you have even a modicum of empathy. I remember one poor girl who just could not answer the question–she had it repeated and you could see that it might as well have been spoken in Aramaic. She just shook her head sadly and said she couldn’t answer the question, while the hearts of everyone in the audience sank. (I might add that the questions seemed almost deliberately designed to NOT be able to be answered with the cliched “and world peace” response. My niece’s was some dopey tax policy question, as I recall.)

15. I just watched the clip (I hadn’t heard about it until now), and it seems very obvious to me that she was extremely nervous and just froze up and began spitting out words. It’s happened to me (though never quite that bad), and to most people, I’m sure. I agree that it’s not something to be made fun of.

16. I’d like to petition that those of us who NEVER tolerated Dorkboy-in-Chief be allowed a certain latitude in this area. 🙂

    Hear! Hear!

    Let’s not just lock all the candidates in room. Let’s lock them in the Thunderdome.

    I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt and just say that she was flustered. Not everyone can come up to a quick and perky answer on the fly.

    But, let’s be honest, the question segment of these beauty pangents is just a meaningless puff piece thrown it to try and convince people that they’re not just cheesecake contests.

17. unable to recall even obvious questions like “What is your name”.

    I recall an old Shoe comic strip from 20 years ago which has Skyler (preteen? hard to tell when it’s a bird) panicking before a final. He’s psyching himself up, and says, “okay, all I need to do is get through the first question. Here comes the test…

    “Name.
    “Name WHAT? Name WHO? Oh, God, I’m losing it!
    “Oh … wait … MY name. Calm down, get a grip…”

    It being my senior year in high school, I surreptitiously posted that strip above every copy of the exam schedule I could find. 🙂

    TWL

18. As someone who gets tongued-tied the minute I have to stand up to speak in front of a group of people (even people I know well), I feel a little bit of sympathy. I’m so bad that when I was secretary for a voluntary organisation, I used to remain seated to deliver my reports. Seated, I was ok, but on my feet, even with notes…

19. ” Bill Mulligan at August 29, 2007 09:52 PM “

    I think you’re referring to the “flight or fight mechanism”

20. I try to go back to my high school every year for career day, during which I usually get a group of about 15-20 juniors and seniors, half of whom are actually interested in a career as a writer or journalist; the other half consisting of kids who want to get out of their regular class for an hour. At any rate, during my regular spiel, I always talk about the need for communication skills, which include being able to spell!

    The last time I did this talk, the teacher came up to me afterwards and thanked me for mentioning the need to spell, as it was a skill that a lot of students seemed to neglect. I was quite surprised, as this was my former high school, from which I graduated after taking four years of advanced English classes and getting college credit. The teacher turned on his overhead projector and slapped a copy of an essay he wanted me to read. My first response was that it had been written by somebody who was mentally challenged: lots of punctuation and grammar errors, and just about every other word misspelled. The teacher then explained that this was in fact an average essay, which he now used to show his students how he would deduct points for each of those errors.

    The lesson I learned from all of this? Gosh, if a top-ranked college prep school in one of the most affluent counties in New Jersey and ultimately the United States had a problem like that, I could only wonder what other communities and other states with less money and poorer education systems had to deal with. Judging from the discussion at hand, I guess I now have some idea.

21. She’s just a kid who froze on TV. I say let’s cut her some slack. She’s from South Carolina for goodness’ sake – do they even have schools? (I keed, I keed)

22. I’ve read on more than one occasion of someone who had been blind practically since birth, within a year or so of having their sight restored, asking their doctor to blind them again. They go from a linear world, where, say, their furniture simply does not exist until they encounter it in their living room, to the spatial world we all know where the 2-inch airplane hanging in the sky outside of our kitchen window has no existential effect on our enjoyment of our meal. Such a recovery of sight, with the patient transitioning from a linear to a spatial world, alters his or her very relationship with reality, and in turn alters the patient’s very identity in a way he or she can never be verbally warned of. We, taking for granted the practice of managing our sighted experiences into full development in late adolescence, are unqualified to issue such a warning.

    Likewise, our reasoning, in the form of language, is linear, but our experience is spatial. If we judge ourselves by how well we conform to socially acceptable roles, then there is less demand for us to construct our own reasoning, relying on a reasoning we simply inherit from the role we adopt. We then learn to smother our own unconscious reactions to our experiences, rather than learn to articulate them.

    If the public role we adopt is one that comes with great privileges, those same privileges then become enablers of our straight-jacketing our own feelings and intuitions.

    It takes intelligence to acquaint ourselves with our own feelings and intuitions, so that we may put words to our authentic experiences. But it also takes intelligence to adopt a socially-approved role with which we may straight-jacket those same feelings and intuitions. Not all intelligence is of equal benefit in equal degrees, if they can be said to be beneficial at all.

    Each school-aged generation must be taught to divest themselves of privilege — by the generation preceding them who pursue privilege aggressively. The faster pace of progress, and the increased privileges produced by it, only increases the severity of this problem.

23. “If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day; teach him how to fish and he will feed himself for ever.”

    Build a man a fire, he is warm for a day; set a man on fire, he is warm the rest of his life.

24. I am definitely in favor of teaching critical thinking to children, starting in elementary school. Of course, a LOT of people would object to this.

    And, it doesn’t help that, in elementary and high school, showing mental aptitude gets you labeled as “nerd” or “geek”. Why would kids want to learn?

25. George should have been impeach the first term

26. PAD for President!

27. Peter David: I don’t think that a country that has tolerated seven years of a president so characterized by malaprops that entire 365-day calendars are devoted to them–a president whose town-hall meeting questions are carefully vetted before they’re spoken–gets to laugh too hard at a scared teenager who had a tough question sprung on her.
    Luigi Novi: And what about those who haven’t tolerated it? Those of us who have criticized that president at numerous opportunities, who protest what he and his cabal have said and done, who have voted against him? I don’t think the “country” has tolerated him. Just some of the people in it. Speculate on mini-strokes all you want, but it seems to me that criticism of Upton is merely consistent with the same intolerance of Bush.

    Though I’m loving the irony that the question was about education.

    (Oh, and Peter? I think you misspelled non sequitur. 🙂 )

28. Posted by: James Blight at August 29, 2007 07:15 PM
    It’s downbeat to say this, but what do you expect from a society that uses the term “Einstein” as a perjorative?

    And if Ms. Upton had actually used such a word as “perjorative” in her answer, I’ll tell you the most disappointing thing: it’s not that certain people wouldn’t know the meaning of that word, ’cause that’s okay — knowledge is a measure of exposure, not intelligence — it’s that those who didn’t know what it meant wouldn’t care enough to get a dictionary (if they even had one on their shelf) to find out.

    To delibertately dismiss exposure in the name of improving one’s knowledge IS a measure of intelligence — a very telling one.

    James, I don’t mean to be snarky but the word is PEJORATIVE. (I only mention it because it looked wrong to me, so I consulted my online dictionary which affirmed my feeling.)

29. Peter, I think she answered the question demonstratively, instead of verbally.

    America is a country that values beauty over intelligence.

    In a pageant like that, as you say, the answer must be upbeat. Because America is a country where a beautiful lie is valued more than an intelligent truth.

    Disclaimer : Yes, I’m generalising. Not all Americans are dumb, but your “culture” leaves a lot to be desired. And yes, the rest of the world has similar problems. For example : http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/education/article2344054.ece

30. How to think 101 engage your brain and sneces in high radified ideologies before you think the word What.

31. HOW to think 101 engage your brain and senses in high radified ideologies before you give yourself the option of preset programs on WHAT you think.

32. Joe, can I ask which HS you speak at? I teach at a fairly high-powered college prep school in an affluent county in New Jersey, so I can sympathize. 🙂

    TWL

33. Excuse me, I, Mr. Teen(-plus) Illinois, would beg to differ with Mr. “Teen” New York’s above answer.

    The reason one-fifth of Americans can’t find America on a world map is a LACK OF INTEREST.
    –By kids
    –By parents
    –By schools
    –By adults in general
    –By the news media
    –By the entertainment media.

    Try and name 3 broadcast tv series set outside America. Sure, there are movies set in foreign countries, but they are often backdrops in action movies and while featuring American tourists passing thru (often in high speed cars, bikes, planes, etc. in hot pursuit). How often is foreign news reduced to “it bleeds, it leads” or “it MIGHT bleed, it leads”?

    There used to be greater interest in international news decades ago–but that was due to concerns about the Cold War. Outside of business folk invested internationally, the average person simply doesn’t care about international news.

    That’s what happens in a superpower. When Britain dominated then Britains were more focused inwardly. When Rome dominated then Romans were more focused inwardly. Today, America dominates so Americans are more focused inwardly. In countries not superpowers then there is greater world concern, at least in what the superpower is doing. The giant tends to be less interested in the nearby ants but the ants are quite focused on what a nearby giant is doing.

    But here’s the dirty little secret: MOST people are that way. MOST people are more interested in local events, thus people tend to more interested in their state, their country, their city, their community, their home than elsewhere–until or unless it’s demonstrated how THEY are AFFECTED.

    Show people how THEY are AFFECTED by the world at large and they will take a greater interest.

    — Ken from Chicago (Mr. Teen-er-plus Illinois)

34. Joe, you’re right about spelling. I suspect the problem has gotten worse, much worse, since emails, IMs and text messaging have become so popular. When a kid keeps using “Ur” for “your” it can get to be a habit.

    My own modest spelling abilities have certainly not been improved by the invention of spellcheck.

    I’m more concerned by the fact that so many kids simply can’t put words on paper in a coherent form, spelled well or not. They can express themselves verbally so why should putting those words on paper be so difficult? Granted, speech is an inborn ability that has been with us for a long time while written language is a relatively new invention. It doesn’t surprise me that some kids are not hard wired properly for easy reading/writing skills. But the problem seems to be getting worse.

    On the bright side…those of us with kids can easily ensure that they will stand out in the crowd simply by encouraging them to write well.

35. here’s the video link from youtube:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-D77VDmMvsQ

    um, watched it twice now, but still can’t decipher what she’s on about.

    why do they only get 30 seconds for such an obviously trap question

36. >The bigger issue is that, for large swaths of American Culture, it’s okay and encouraged to be stupid.

    Worse, it’s not exactly a new phenomenon. It’s been deeply ingrained in U.S. culture for over 40 years.

    As for knowledge of the outside world, that, too is sadly neglected. A New Jersey couple – long time friends – who were well-educated, and TREK fans even, decided to celebrate their daughter’s high school graduation by sending her to spend a couple of weeks in a foreign country. Well, Canada – it was all they could afford. She stayed as my guest and we spend much time conversing. I was dismayed at how she seemed to feel a need to explain every US cultural reference as though I couldn’t be expected to know what she was talking about. I finally told her that I was well aware of those things and she needn’t elaborate unless I asked. In exchange she was embarassed (and rightly so) to admit that she didn’t even know what a ‘province’ was.

    Seems to me that one of the prerequisites to being a policeman is to have some knowledge of the neighbourhood one is working in. Shouldn’t this also apply to a country which sets itself as the world’s beat cop? Apparently it doesn’t think so. Which does explain a great deal about the problems cropping up out there.

37. These two statements seem to be in opposition:

    “They don’t read. They don’t learn. They don’t think. They tune out with television or computer games or Ipods”

    and

    “We need to remember that the arts enrich a civilization”

    Perhaps you have forgotten that television shows, computer games, and the music we listen to on our iPods are in fact works of art? In fact, you could make a strong argument that we are an art obsessed nation, that cares about little else except art. (Even celebrity worship largely revolves around artists… actors and musicians.)

38. Got to admit, I got pretty sick of seeing that story over and over again on the news networks.

    There were much more important things to talk about than that poor girl flubbing her answer.

    On the other hand, as has probably been said before, can anyone name the winner of the pagent? Hope she can spin this into something positive, at least.

39. Anyone remember the FOX/Sci-Fi TV show Sliders? There was an early episode where Quinn and the gang travelled to a world where smart kids were the celebrities. If only our country was like that. Other countries are. In the book The World is Flat, Friedman gives an example of the crowds that gathered when Bill Gates visited China. In China, Bill Gates is Britney Spears. In the U.S., Britney Spears is Britney Spears.

    That makes all the difference.

    Ed

40. In 9th grade, we had to give a presentation book report. I ended up locking my knees, and nearly fainted. I had to ask to sit down, another student gave their report, and then I got back up and made my presentation without a flaw. I wasn’t laughed at…in fact, other students were asking what I took in between efforts, because my second attempt was so much better than my first oxygen-starved attempt.

    There are many things that this event, and the media and public reaction to it, are symptomatic of. It’s ironic that she flubbed a question on education, but from reports I’ve read, she’s an exellent student, getting good grades and challenging herself. Her response the next day shows that she’s capable of forming a good response.

    The ridcule she’s been exposed to is an outgrowth of American’s mean-spiritedness. We love to laugh at other’s follies. The more public the misadventure, the funnier it is for us. I think there’s also a large swell of upmanship involved, too. People like to be made to feel important, and if they can think that they’re clearly more intelligent or composed than ms Teen Beauty contestant, it makes them feel somewhat important.

    The education system in this country is in bad, bad shape, and that’s saying something. My in-laws are teachers, who refer to Bush’s program as “No Idiot Left Behind.” By tying our schools’ funding to every last child’s performance, it forces them to spend 95% of their resources on 5% of the kids. Or cheat.

    We’re taking the responsibility to teach our kids ourselves. Given the overall state of schools, trusting your children to even a good school system seems risky to me.

41. um, watched it twice now, but still can’t decipher what she’s on about.

    why do they only get 30 seconds for such an obviously trap question

    Where the contestants’ preparation could be said to be tested in the talent competition, the ambush question seems to be an attempt to test the contestants’ spontaneity and, kind of like Graham Chapman squawking with his thumbs in his ears, her babbling answer was her spontaneous reply.

    If the judges were truly judging on spontaneity, they would give high scores for truly spontaneous replies, like in the Monty Python sketch. Since most contestants seem to get by by taking the safest course of issuing a bland answer, the test seems to really be about who can fake authenticity and demonstrate the least vulnerability while doing so.

    This rewarding of pretense and ridicule of vulnerability is how we smother creativity, rather than nurture it, and obstruct innovation.

42. As the parent of 3 kids whose IQ’s tested out in the Superior + range (3-4 years above grade level), we have been at odds with the school board so often that we’re all but banned from Board of Ed meetings, because our ongoing chant is “Where’s the education?” At an expenditure of $8500 per pupil (good Prep school is $10,000), education has been replaced with happy social skills. Of 180 alleged school days, 10 are lost for “Town Meetings” where the entire school is packed squirming into the auditorium to hear students read poems or vote the most popular kid as class officer, etc. Another is lost for “Be One” day, where there are no classes, just social activities to make everyone friends (My vision, and my kids, of Hëll). Another is lost for Field day, another for the end-of-year trip. Take out another 5 for 6th and 8th grade, who do expensive extended field trips out of state (my kids didn’t go). Add in local field trips, snow days, and you’re down to 170 or even 160 days, where a 60 is passing, and unless you outright Fail (below 60) at least FOUR classes for THREE semesters, you can’t stay back (even one D cancels it). We don’t teach grammar (there’s no time), we don’t teach spelling (“that’s why we have spell check”), we don’t teach penmanship (“You don’t need it any more – everyone uses computers”), AP classes are based on student popularity and last exactly three hours a week for eight weeks, that’s it. There is no more grouping kids by ability level; you must mix all the smart kids and dull kids together for all classes, because the smart ones will help the stupider ones learn (I must be stupid, because I thought that was the TEACHER’s job). I had one kid crying by second grade, because she was so “bored” (and at 3 years above grade level, she WAS). The teacher’s response? “Oh, she’s not bored. Tell her to use a different word.” It was 4th grade before she got a teacher who truly realized how far ahead she was, and taught her accordingly. She remains my daughter’s favorite teacher.

    If I knew at the start what I know now, I would have home schooled my kids. I sent them to school brilliant, and they’ve had the brilliance beaten out of them every step of the way. What scares me is that we are allegedly one of the best school systems in the state. IF we’re good, what the hëll are the rest like?

    Maybe they’re stuck in class instead of hugging and cheerleading for Be One day.

43. Joe Nazzaro and Bill Mulligan,

    You’re both right about spelling. To say nothing of punctuation. It’s depressing how many cases of misspelling I see. Both online and off.

    I’ve even seen people on this blog spell “dying” as “dieing.” Now granted spelling conventions change over time, but even so…

    Campchaos,

    Where is this school district you mention? I want to be sure to stay away from there should I ever have kids.

    I had the good fortune at least to attend a Jesuit-run college-prep high school from 7th-12th grade where there was an emphasis on education. And still is. We were also taught how to think.

    Sadly, the first or second day of philosophy class my freshman year in college (at a private university, not a public school), the teacher said he was taking us next door to the library, to teach us how to use the library. I excused myself, telling him I’d learned how to use the library in 6th grade.

    Again, the sad– no pathetic– thing was that this was a private school that required students to have achieved certain SAT and/or ACT scores to get in. It wasn’t open to anyone who’d just gotten by in high school. And yet, despite that fact, this one teacher felt his students would benefit from learning how to use the library. Makes me wonder what his experience with previous freshman classes had been like.

    Speaking of how to think vs. what to think, I’m reminded of the Prisoner episode, “The General”, in which the Speedlearn “educational” process imparts information directly to the cerebral cortex. But the result is that the people who take the “course” on “Europe Since Napoleon” can only parrot back the information “beamed” into their heads. They can answer when the battle of this, that or the other thing took place, but not where.

    To Number Six, these people are “a row of cabbages.” Number Two counters that they’re “knowledgeable cabbages”, but that knowledge is pretty limited and more or less an illusion. If I ask you “when was the Treaty of Adrianople” and you cough up a parrotted phrase– the same one everyone gives– but you draw a blank when I ask you “what was the Treaty of Adrianople?”, the information’s not that much good, is it?

    Be seeing you.

    Rick

44. One of the things that I constantly found lacking in my own public education (and it didn’t end so long ago) was the “why.” I was always that annoying kid in class who’d sit in the back and complain about how I was never going to use the quadratic equation in my day-to-day life. So instead of telling me why it was important we sat around and learned songs to memorize it.

    It seems like the “why” of school has become to get a diploma. Frankly, that wasn’t enough motivation for me and I see it failing as motivation for many others. The “why” of school should be to learn information that will improve yourself and your life, but not many teachers show how to use the information they teach in a way that would do that. I doubt that many of the teachers know how the information they teach is useful to the average person. Why should kids have to learn it if they can’t use it? It’s like drawing dots on a grid without being told how they’re connected. No wonder we end up with people like Bush in power. He tells us the “why” of his actions. It might not be a good “why,” but we haven’t been taught how to find the information for ourselves.

45. Peter–send your post to the NYT. They might even print it and it would get the wider audience it deserves.

46. Rick Keating:

    In northern New Haven county, CT. On the other hand, we have an extremely high graduation rate (because it’s impossible to fail), very low teen pregnancy rate, no gangs, and no weapon issues. I guess it’s a trade-off.

47. It would be interesting to see how graduates of the school described by campchaos do post-graduation. From his brief description, I’d say those graduates are nice, caring folks who are largely unprepared for life in the real world. Work doesn’t provide bonding time with you co-workers. It doesn’t offer hugs and support when you’re feeling blue. What it does do is offer your job to someone else if you fail to effeciently produce positive results, and there’s someone around who can do better.

    Once in a while, I hear private sector managers talk about how some new employees, fresh from college, still have their parents riding shephard for them. Some have called their children’s managers to complain if their kids get reprimanded or treated poorly at work. This is yet another by-product of a system that caters to the ego, one that is afraid to hand out poor grades or (gasp) fail a student.

    Not too long ago, wasn’t it accepted that schools graded on a curve? Meaning that a certain number of students, no matter how well they scored, were going to fail, simply based on their performance compared to their peers? While that system hardly seems fair these days, we’ve certain overreacted, in that now you practically have to be trying to fail in order to truly fail. And given the success rate of guessing, you’d probably have to actually know most of the material in order to give the wrong answers enough to fail.

    I don’t envy teachers. They’ve got a truly important job. I also don’t blame them for the current state of our system. For that, I blame the officials that think they know what makes a good education system, and force schools to teach in a certain way in order to get the funding they need.

48. campchaos,

    Jeeze! My district is a poor one (student expenditures half of what you pay) but it sounds like they could get a better education with us.

    On the other hand we do have pretty sorry pregnancy and graduation rates and gangs, though the gangs are kind of a joke to anyone who has dealt with real gangs. In Wichita I had crips and bloods in the same room. Those kids meant business, in every sense of the word. North Carolina gangs are a pretty mild lot in comparison.

    But that nonsense about the AP classes and such would not fly here. In fact I just had my favorite student booted out of my Earth Science class so she can take an Honors Earth Science class. It was obvious she was miles ahead of the other kids and would be better off at a higher level (she was home schooled and I think they didn’t know where to put her). Great kid and I hate to lose one like that but you have to do what’s right for the the student. The average IQ in my class just took a precipitous dip, however, and that’s never fun.

    We have a 7 point grading system so you need a 70 to get a D. You fail, you fail. The football coaches kick off anyone not passing science (and make them run laps if they get referrals for misbehavior). Bullies are given zero tolerance. Anyone who fights is arrested.

    We’re far, far from perfect but it bugs me to hear about schools that have so much more money to use and are failing in ways that are easy to fix. No kid should ever be too bored at school because they are ahead of the material. There plenty of ways to feed them projects that will get them interested.

    Now the kids who simply aren’t interested, who have no ambition other than to get a flunky job or go on welfare and make just enough to be able to get drunk/high on weekends…don’t know what we do to get them to broaden their horizons. But there’s no excuse for what’s happened with your children.

    (The thing I hate about threads like these is having to be real careful about spelling so as not to look too dopey when whining about the Sorry State Of Our Youth, as opposed to when we talk about, oh, zombies or something, when I can just type pell-mell, accuracy be dámņëd.)

49. Tangentially related to using math in everyday life, someone once told me that he hasn’t done basic addition, subtraction, multiplication and division since he was in school. He just uses a calculator. Me, I do the above on paper more often than not. I refuse to become dependent upon a calculator. Yes, it’s sometimes faster to just punch in the numbers on a calculator, but at least I can still figure out a problem if one isn’t available.

    On a related note, I don’t know exactly how they make calculators work, but I suspect that someone could program a calculator to show that 2 + 2 = 5. And if you have a generation of students who are encouraged to just use a calculator, rather than learning basic math, who knows what could result?

    Speaking of teaching basic math, I’m reminded of a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon where Calvin’s dad is trying to teach him about addition. Using pennies to illustrate 2 + 4 = 6 (or whatever the equation was; I just remember (O.K., I’m reasonably certain) that Calvin had four cents), he asks Calvin how many pennies he’d have if he adds Calvin’s four pennies to his two.

    “Two cents,” (or whatever amount his Dad originally had), Calvin says. His Dad directs his attention to the total number of pennies on the table only to hear Calvin protest:

    “But those four are mine!”

    Rick

50. “But those four are mine!”

    Almost as good an answer as…

    “Some beans.”

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