Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for April 24, 2017

Gil will trade off with the history teacher, who will work in 2 weeks of geometry between the Great Depression and World War II.

It’s sad that this is the result of liberal tinkering with the education system. At least the kids have high unearned self-esteem as they protest to keep conservatives off the campus.

Lauren Caitlin Upton, Miss South Carolina Teen USA 2007

Question: “Recent polls have shown a fifth of Americans can’t locate the U.S. on a world map. Why do you think this is?”Answer: “I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to do so because, uh, some . . . people out there in our nation don’t have maps and, uh, I believe that our, uh, education like such as in South Africa and, uh, the Iraq, everywhere like such as, and, I believe that they should, our education over HERE in the U.S. should help the U.S., uh, or, uh, should help South Africa and should help the Iraq and the Asian countries, so we will be able to build up our future, for our children”.

Combine it with geography!

This is perfectly acceptable to the nutbar right as the end result of Republiturd gutting of the education system. Why should kids need to be able to find the U.S. on a map? Maps just show other countries and different places and other things that are nothing but Terrorist Hotbeds That Want To Destroy Our Way Of Life. Much better to save a few bucks than to worry about whether or not kids can identify stuff like that … its the Republican way!

Syke’s 11 RulesRule 1: Life is not fair, get used to it.Rule 2: The world won’t care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something before you feel good about yourself.Rule 3: You will not make 40 thousand dollars a year right out of high school. You won’t be a vice president with a car phone until you earn both.Rule 4: If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss. He doesn’t have tenure.Rule 5: Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your grandparents had a different word for burger flipping; they called it opportunity.Rule 6: If you screw up, it’s not your parents’ fault so don’t whine about your mistakes. Learn from them.Rule 7: Before you were born your parents weren’t as boring as they are now. They got that way paying bills, cleaning your room, and listening to you tell them how idealistic you are. So before you save the rain forest from the blood-sucking parasites of your parents’ generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.Rule 8: Your school may have done away with winners and losers but life has not. In some schools they have abolished failing grades, they’ll give you as many times as you want to get the right answer. This, of course, bears not the slightest resemblance to anything in real life.Rule 9: Life is not divided into semesters. You don’t get summers off, and very few employers are interested in helping you find yourself. Do that on your own time.Rule 10: Television is not real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.Rule 11: Be nice to nerds. Chances are you’ll end up working for one…

http://us.macmillan.com/dumbingdownourkids/charlesjsykes/9780312148232/

A teacher concerned about the overall education of a student is a rare find.

@GeekBoy_X @RPMURRAY

Not exactly. I’ve taken graduate-level courses in History of Education; let me give you a non-political way of looking at it.

(Please try not to be shocked that there’s a non-political way of looking at it.)

First, a little background: between tenure and teachers’ unions, there was nearly zero accountability for teachers. Most did as well as they could, and some slacked off, because that’s human nature.

U.S. Education in the 2nd half of the 20th century was rife with uncontrolled experiments, as one “good idea” with appeal to Education academics after another (e.g., “new math”, “whole language reading”, etc.) was used on vast numbers of schoolchildren, usually with zero evidence that it worked better or even as well as the old way.

At the same time, many initiatives were launched to teach children things not previously considered the job of schools to teach. So there was less time for the now-less-effective “3 R’s”.

As children and teenagers became, by every measure, less well-prepared to leave school than ever before, 2 things happened. Duration of schooling increased dramatically, as nearly every field of employment increased its educational requirements (much to the delight of the Education establishment). And there was a backlash against both untested/ineffective new methods and also the expansion of school responsibility.

This resulted in “no child left behind”, a well-intentioned but yam-handed attempt to require schools to consistently improve the skills of students in the “3 R’s”. Ironically, NCLB seems responsible for a significant rise in test scores of “minority” children in schools/districts where it was taken seriously. But many schools/districts did not, and “gamed the system” instead of changing business as usual (e.g., encouraging lower-performing, usually “minority”, children to stay home on test day).

Thus the “back to 3R’s” approach common today.

If this sounds like “failure, failure, and failure, followed by failure,” it’s because that’s pretty much what it is.

Consider: public school teachers send their own children to private schools at twice the rate of the general public.

At least U.S. school kids know the world isn’t flat…don’t they?

So, will he be able to mathematize geography before the students anathematize him?

“In one century we went from teaching Latin and Greek in high school to offering remedial English in college.” —Joseph Sobran

There is no stopping the dumbing down of the Americans. The plutocrat masters prefer that the masses be ignorant.

Pythagoras was Greek, Copernicus Polish, Newton Brit. You can work Geography into math. Spherical geometry was invented for global navigation.

I have taught HS Math in Denver and NYC. The geography problem is real. I can’t tell you how many times I have taken a time-out, drawn a map on the board and talked about where we are, physically, and a bit about where we came from, historically – though time, through space. I can’t sit here and give you numbers as to the effectiveness of this approach, but I can tell you the effectiveness of ignoring such ignorance: the pocket of ignorance only grows.

Well, we know who to blame, don’t we?

That’s right.

SOMEONE ELSE.

Lots of math classes teach geography.