Quote:
Originally Posted by Rochard
This is not true at all. The kids do not run the school.
My kid's school doesn't have a uniform, but it surely has a dress code and it's well enforced. Tank tops, cut off sleeves, and no spaghetti straps. Spaghetti straps aren't even allowed at the dances. My was kid was sent home last year once because her shorts were "too short".
|
While I don't have kids many of my friends do and most of them have kids that are now in grades between 6th and high school. The grocery store I mostly go to is right next door to the high school. If you go over there at lunch time or after school the place is swarming with kids (as you would expect it to be) and it looks like a shift change at a strip club. A while back I saw a girl wearing white pants that were basically see-through. You could see her orange thong sticking up out the top of them and you could see right through them. She had a shirt on that was basically a short tank top that showed off her belly ring. She wasn't the only one. There is an endless parade of short shorts, skimpy tops, lowrise jeans and various other stripperwear. Maybe it isn't every high school, but this one clearly has no dress code or a very relaxed one.
Add in that a lot of the kids are just little disrespectful pricks. A friend of mine is a cop who has 2 daughters. One just got out of high school a year ago and the other is a sophomore now. Between being a parent and occasionally going to the school on calls he is around the kids a decent amount. Several times he has seen students tell teachers to go to hell and screw themselves. When asked why they take it the teachers just tell them that they choose what battles to fight.
If I told a teacher to go to hell I wouldn't be here typing this because my mom would have killed me and disposed of my body.
I'm not saying it is all kids. There are a lot of good kids, but it just seems like there is an overabundance of shit stains these days. . . but maybe it is just where I live.
Quote:
|
And somewhere along the line if someone's kid reads and writes at the 5th grade level and graduates from high school... This shouldn't be blamed on the teachers. Kids gets report cards sent home, parents should know what level they are reading at, as well as their STAR testing. If at some point in time a kid is below level, the parents need to do something about it. My kid was doing poor in math last year. It's not the teacher's fault - They teacher has twenty-four kids in her class and twenty-three of them are doing fine in math. We were told she was testing well below average in math and she was failing. We started paying more attention, helping her with her homework, making sure assignments were turned in, and this summer we bought her extra study material (books) and put her in tutoring. My kid just missed two weeks of school due to our vacation, took a math test that was covered when she was out on vacation, and got a perfect score.
|
You are correct that it is the parents problems. . . to a degree.
The problem with my nephew is his mom. She never EVER punishes him. He does what he wants, he says what he wants. He is a disrespectful little shithead and she goes to great ends to make excuses for him. He has been arrested several times and, like I say, failed all his 8th grade classes and eventually got expelled from high school. She refused to hold him back, because, well. . . she never stands up to him. She has done him a terrible disservice by teaching him that there are no consequences for his actions. Not too long ago he got arrested for breaking into a car. Now he is 18 so they held him for 4 days until he could get someone to bail him out. Since this is no longer juvenile he got real punishment. The judge gave him 6 months in jail on a 2 year suspended sentence. Basically if he can go 2 years without getting into trouble the charges will be dropped. If he gets in more trouble he will have to serve his 6 months. I am about 98% sure he will end up serving that 6 months.
So his mom failed him. However, at some point I think the school needs to step and say, "These are our standards. If you can't meet them you don't graduate and move on." That is how it was when I was in 8th grade. My brother failed 2 classes his 8th grade year and he had to go to summer school to make them up or he couldn't graduate and move on. My mom didn't have a say in the matter. When you are unlucky enough to have a shitty parent sometimes the system needs to step in on your behalf, but now the schools get paid based on graduation rates so they just move everyone along and let other people deal with them later.
Quote:
While I'm ranting... We bitch about how we spend less and less on schools... Have you been to your kid's school recently? The blackboard has been replaced by a dry erase board, but otherwise it's the same - same desks, same books, same pencils, same silly stuff on the walls that we had when we were kids. But there's more - the overhead projector has been replaced with a digital camera that hangs above her desk so students can watch what the teach is doing... The teacher also has a laptop, a classroom computer, and remember that tall cart with the VCR and TV? That's been replaced by a DVD system with a wall mounted flat screen... Seems to me like they have it all now, yet oddly enough we blame everything on the schools and our teachers.
The problem isn't the schools or the teachers. It's the parents.
|
There is a school in Philly (I think, but it my be Pittsburgh) where everything is digital. Instead of being issued text books the kids are issued laptops. All their books are on the computers. The teachers can drag and drop assignments and every night the school has at least one teacher available online for tutoring. They teach not only the fundamentals, but the teach the kids how to use the computer (if needed) and they have school uniforms. Everything is streamlined and students there do very well. If kids gets out of line the parents are immediately brought in on the discipline and then if the parents don't do anything about the kids are kicked out of the school. I will admit that the school requires kids to apply and interview to come there so, like private schools, they can cherry pick the best students, but I think the school really shows how they can match modern technology with a little old school discipline and come up with something good.
It isn't always how much money you spend, but how you spend that money that counts.