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 Post subject: School unfair?
PostPosted: Tue Sep 09, 2003 6:30 pm 
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http://www.cnn.com/2003/EDUCATION/09/09 ... index.html

This is debate material so why not?
Do you believe American schools are unfair to america? Do they have a bias against their own country and produce students with a negative outlook of the US?

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PostPosted: Tue Sep 09, 2003 6:40 pm 
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I remember going to school and the War of 1812 was barely covered.

Focusing on the dark parts of American History my ass.

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PostPosted: Tue Sep 09, 2003 7:02 pm 
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Most teachers view their job as a chore, this rubs off on the students. Every year the school system creates millions of children who equate learning with suffering.


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PostPosted: Tue Sep 09, 2003 7:17 pm 
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...no, it's the opposite where I am. All I hear is crap about democracy.


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PostPosted: Tue Sep 09, 2003 7:49 pm 
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The schools aren't patriotic enough! Quick, call the idea police!


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PostPosted: Wed Sep 10, 2003 5:58 am 
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Educators tend to be left-wing; it's not surprising that left-wing bias seeps into education, and it cannot be denied that today's leftists are biased against America, to a greater or lesser degree depending on the scope of their leanings.

However, being unsurprising doesn't make it any less important, and it is important. It wouldn't be such an issue if there were roughly equal numbers of left- and right-leaning teachers, but that simply isn't the case.

Ideological diversity is the one type of diversity that the left wing is unwilling to tolerate.


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PostPosted: Wed Sep 10, 2003 10:10 am 
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Maybe there's a reason why all the educators are left wing?

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PostPosted: Wed Sep 10, 2003 10:29 am 
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Not all but most.

And the reason probably has something to do with the fact that it pays crappy, and you'd have to be a bleeding heart lib to educate. The people who arn't losers go on to business.

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PostPosted: Wed Sep 10, 2003 10:35 am 
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One of my roomates is about to finish off his Poli-Sci BA, and he is as conservative as they come when it comes to government. He could give a rats ass about religion, and is anti-censorship, but those are his only major differences with the Republican party. He plans on becoming a college professor. He is sick and tired of all the liberal profs he has to deal with and will be the first conservative one he's ever met.


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PostPosted: Wed Sep 10, 2003 2:07 pm 
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krylex wrote:
One of my roomates is about to finish off his Poli-Sci BA, and he is as conservative as they come when it comes to government. He could give a rats ass about religion, and is anti-censorship, but those are his only major differences with the Republican party. He plans on becoming a college professor. He is sick and tired of all the liberal profs he has to deal with and will be the first conservative one he's ever met.


May ten thousand follow in his footsteps.


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PostPosted: Thu Sep 11, 2003 2:43 pm 
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Schools these days are simply awful. Speaking as a Senior in high school, I can positively say that school teaches us nothing of major use. Do you know what school is, these days? School is simply memorizing information for a test, taking said test, then forgetting all about said information. I think it's stupid that your intelligence is judged from a FUCKING SCANTRON SHEET. Here in Texas, we take nothing but tests. Freshmen have the practice TAKS, Sophomores then take the TAKS for real, Juniors have the TAAS, and Seniors such as myself are worried about getting scores on the ACT and SAT. Can you believe this bullshit?
I also think teaching methods are horrible. Most of my teachers show no enthusiasm towards their work. Why do I need to learn a useless geometric equation that I will NEVER, EVER, EVER need to use in real life? Seriously, can you think of ONE situation where it will come in handy, besides being a fucking rocket scientist? Teach me something that will help me in life. Add, subtract, multiply, divide. That's all you'll ever need in life, or so EVERY NON-MATH TEACHER HAS TOLD ME. Teach us things we can use, damnit!


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PostPosted: Thu Sep 11, 2003 2:51 pm 
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What do you plan to be Gir? I can give you a math forumla for nearly every job.

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PostPosted: Thu Sep 11, 2003 3:11 pm 
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I'm aware that there are SOME useful forumlas for most jobs, but they're taught as you take up that profession. I don't need the square root of X angle times the sum of an area of a tetrahedron.
Not when I'm flying in the Air Force. I already know most of the formulas I need for flying, and they all use basic symbols and equations.


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 Post subject: I think my mind auto-shutdowned to prevent angst...
PostPosted: Thu Sep 11, 2003 4:56 pm 
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My threshold of attention is really really short right now (I can't even use the correct words and grammar) so I'll make this... short?

I haven't even read the article... but schools are, and (maybe/perhaps/hopefully, but not really) will always be unfair and imperfect. In my opinion, I'm really, really, REALLY fortunate to have had all the teachers I had. I can say that they all were (reasonably) hard-working and dedicated to prepare and truly educate children. I'm really shaming all the teachers I've ever had by typing this stuff now (and probably all my ancestors too) but... yeah. I can easily say that it's the best education I've ever had... but since it's the only education I've ever had... >_<. Actually, my mid-long term memory (not to mention short-middle memory) is shot to heck and I can only recall High School somewhat clearly. I went AFK for a bit and I've forgotten what I was thinking about.

Anyway, my school system isn't free from the plague of standardized testing either. In it's attempt to make itself look better to the world, The Almighty Aptitude tests have become our masters. Truly useful stuff is only taught when teachers can squeeze it in, or in those classes that don't have a required test. Whatever, I'm not feeling very cynical today... or coherent.

Oh yeah, elitism. Totally elitism. GT and etc. It's good in a way... but...

/me bails out before gross motor functions fail.

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PostPosted: Sun Sep 21, 2003 11:32 am 
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General Gir wrote:
I'm aware that there are SOME useful forumlas for most jobs, but they're taught as you take up that profession. I don't need the square root of X angle times the sum of an area of a tetrahedron.
Not when I'm flying in the Air Force. I already know most of the formulas I need for flying, and they all use basic symbols and equations.


First off: Yes, it's true that those "the math you'll need for your career" posters you've seen are somewhat misleading, and it's also true that you'll generally learn what you need as you go along. However, math isn't taught because it's directly useful; it's taught because you will need to think mathematically in a lot of jobs.

Knowing all the formulae in the world won't do you a lick of good if you don't know how to use them. If you can't understand how to reason algebraically, how to use variables and some basic problem-solving tactics, you won't get very far in quite a few professions. If I remember my SATs right, they give you all the formulas you need to use; it's the reasoning skills that you'll need in life, and it's (theoretically) the reasoning skills that they test. In practice, it might be otherwise, but that's a debate for another day...

P-M


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PostPosted: Sun Sep 21, 2003 11:45 am 
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My school wants to canonize me because I have the highest SAT score of anyone here.

I shit you not.

Anyway, back to topic.

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PostPosted: Sun Oct 26, 2003 2:47 pm 
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Ok, sorry to sort of-kind of-maybe be guilty of reviving a dead thread here, but with only two or three really active threads running and this one only a month old, I don't feel too bad about it, and I feel somewhat compelled to get my licks in on the other side of the fence.

Let me start by saying that I went to one of the most liberal high schools in the whole goddamn country. When a bunch of students organized a protest walk-out and march regarding the war on Iraq last year, the administration decided to excuse all absences from third period (when the walk out began) to seventh (when, theoretically, the march would be ending). Kids who don't even know the difference between Connie Rice and Don Rumsfeld will, when asked about their political feelings, blurt out "I think the Bush administration is hurting our country!" Hey, it's what everyone else is saying. Knee-jerk liberalism at its best.

That said, my American history course never really filled me with any great sense of liberal bias. Yes, we learned all the usual myth-busting stuff--Columbus was an asshole, there was no fucking Thanksgiving, T.R. raped the Carribean, and all that, but you know, it happened. It's not like you can say it's anti-American to teach about fuck-ups in the country's history that really happened. And we learned about plenty of Progressive leaders, union organizers, and city "bosses" helping out the immigrants in return for votes who were total assholes and screwed hundreds or thousands of people over too. Yeah, sure, Rockefeller got lambasted in class, but so did the liberal side of the coin. My teacher wouldn't even discuss his views on politics, because he wanted to avoid giving us a biased viewpoint.

It also seems worth noting that this same class was one of those AP classes that have a big, all-important standardized test in May, and yet the class was chock-full of good stuff and actually gave me a pretty solid knowledge of the issues American history raises in addition to a host of names and dates. My European History AP class was the same--no teaching toward the test. I will definatly agree that standardized tests play way to big a role in our schools. No denial here. But, it is possible to teach a good class without obsessing over them, and there are teachers that do that.

Obviously, my experiences present a somewhat insignificant segment of the teaching population (two out of however the fuck many high school teachers there are out there). It's not like I'm claiming that, because my classes weren't overly leftist and didn't teach to the tests, other teachers don't. But it does give me some little faith in our educational system. When you come down to it, remember that it beats the hell out of most Western European systems, which teach toward the one big mother of a test you have to pass to get into college. Japan's even worse. So yeah, our teachers aren't always the best, and maybe we've got a pile of standardized tests to worry about, but it could be worse.

And of course, if we want more inspired teachers, coming from all walks ofl life...we could always pay them more, I guess.

Oh, and don't forget that, courtesy of our illustrious leader's No Child Left Behind laws, there'll be a whole new battery of tests for high schoolers, which get to determine how the school gets to spend its money, how much federal money it gets, and a whole host of other things. Go Bush...glad I won't be there.


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PostPosted: Sun Oct 26, 2003 5:43 pm 
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Thanks for ressurecting this, Tree. I kinna had a few things I wanted to say, too.

First off, anything you learn from Kindergarten through 6th grade is, as a rule, worthless, unless it is math, spelling/grammar, or how to read. There are, of course a few exceptions, but they're far between. The same mostly applies to 7th and 8th grades as well, but there's a small amount more worth by then. The real learning doesn't start until high school.

As to the topic, I only had two history classes that had anything to do with the US. The first, which has already been mentioned by Tree, was the aptly named AP US History. I don't remember much from this class, as, at the time, I was almost fed up with school, but I do remember that it treated america harshly, and that we spent an entire week learning about the Kennedy assassination.

The other class was Modern World History, which, in contrast with it's name, was really about the Cold War. As such, it wasn't entirely about the US, but the US had a large part. Also in contrast, but this time to the AP class, this class was very fair in its treatment of the US. Part of this is because it was an essay-based "Choose your own viewpoint" course, where we spent a lot of time learning about the history from supposedly unbiased sources, then making our decisions about the morality behind the scenes.

There were, of course, two flaws with this. One; the writers we read were not unbiased, and, even though we were suppposed to make note of this in our papers, it held sway over our opinions. Two; there were often only two camps to belong to on any one issue, and as such we often had to conform to one of those two sides, even in light of evidence to the contrary. Even so, this course in general was much more supportive of the US in general than the actual course about the US itself. The last history course that I took at high school was European and, as such, had no content on the US, but, due to it's nature being similar to Modern World, was as supportive of the countries it did cover as Modern World was of the US.

It should be noted, however, that those two courses, Modern World, and European, were international standard courses. (IB, for those who know of it. I'm sure there're a few.) The curriculum was chosen by a panel of teachers from around the globe, and I theoretically learned exactly the same material as, say, someone who took the same course in Botswana (a randomly picked country).

It's interesting to say that a course designed by a group of countries gave a curruculum about the US that was far more supportive of the US than the course about the US that the US itself designed.

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