Marijuana.com

Cassius

Again I ask, why are we focusing on enhancing the learned of students who are already motivated to seek their own education?

Give a man a fish, he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish, he will eat for the rest of his life.

That should be the goal of our educational system. To light the spark of internal desire to grow and learn, so that all of our children can seek their OWN educations. I'm not saying that some kids don't require more effort put into them than others. I'm also not saying that some kids don't have such extreme behavioral problems that the effort required to light this spark isn't worth the investment. What I am saying is that those students who already have the spark inside them, do not need to be "enhanced" or focused upon. It takes very little time to help them pursue their education, just like it takes very little time for a graduate professor to guide graduate students. If you are willing to pursue things on your own, you only have to meet once in a while to review what you've learned and to plan what you are going to learn next. Therefore, spend the time AND effort on those in the middle, UNTIL they've gotten the spark, too. Once they get the spark, continue to guide them as you do the self-motivated students, and work on the lower ones, etc.

You may say that's what teachers already do. I say it isn't. That's what a few teachers do, but the vast majority either focus on the motivated students to the exclusion of everyone else, or focus on no one at all because they're so jaded by having to working within the confines of a system that ties their hands all too often.

Time is the only "resource" it takes to motivate students to learn, and we all have the same 24 hours in the day. Some teachers are magnificent about "lighting the spark" in children's desire for education. I don't expect all teachers to be that good at it, but I do expect all teachers to be trying to achieve it. To me, it seems like that vast majority of teachers in the US secondary education system don't even know what the goal is, don't even know who's teaching methods they should be trying to emulate. They just wing it, give everyone "busy-work", and collect their paycheck, bitching about how little teachers get paid.

Herein lies the misconceptions that I think you're having trouble getting past. Maybe it's because you're too close to the issue given your mother's occupation, I don't know. I'm pretty sure you're just repeating the kinds of things you heard all the time from her, anyway. I can totally picture American teachers saying things like that. It sounds to me an awful lot like the excuses that parents make about the kinds of deficiencies we're talking about in children.

Here's a few charts illustrating why I think this is so, why I think time is the ONLY resource it takes to motivate children to learn:


Clearly, poor quality output of public schools is not because of too little spending per student -- it's a system problem.

__________________

{ Cassius, Your Humble Narrator }
{ Posting Guidelines | Erowid Drug Information Resource | instantfilehosting.com }

 

Cassius

Oh yeah, thought of one more thing.

I already addressed this with the graph above which illustrates that inflation-adjusted per-student spending has increased significantly over the last 40 years, but I'd like to offer some evidence to address the second part you mentioned:

Here's a chart to address that too:



As you can see, the student-to-teacher ratio has also dropped over time, yet SAT scores have continually fallen. In fact, the SAT was even adjusted in 1995 to reduce its standards so that scores would seem to be higher!

Mamabudz

No -- it would destroy the "Pot creates bad students" image -- when the entire Honor Roll tests positive