J. Clarke wrote:
Morris Dovey wrote:

Not in the US, although the school program was modeled after New
York
State's curriculum. Don't kids in at least some NY and NJ public
schools have the opportunity to learn other languages? I'd be
astonished if kids in south FL, TX, AZ, and NM don't have the
opportunity to take Spanish. The teacher for both languages was
Lebanese (and the only non-American teacher in the school).

The public schools in Florida, Virginia, Louisiana, and California, at
least when I was there, offered _no_ languages until high school. The
Louisiana Catholic parochial schools taught French from first grade
on, but no Spanish.

That's grim. I don't know about LA, but I'm fairly sure that languages
other than English are now common (or at least not rare) in FL, VA, and CA.

In high school the Spanish teachers were not native speakers and were
marginally competent, which, combined with the starting in high
school, meant that most of the students learned "Queiro ir al cuarto
de bano" (should be a tilde on that n") and that was the end of it.

New York and New Jersey might be better. They would have had to work
at it to be much worse.

Yeah - at some point along the way someone decided that it was more
important for teachers to know about theories of education and how to
handle administrivial paperwork than about the subject they were to
teach. The results speak for themselves.

We sat quietly and regurgitated whatever the teacher told us, no
matter how stupid it might have been.

I'm sitting here giving thanks that this didn't happen to me because I'd
have been dead meat - I can learn, but I've never been able to memorize
anything.

I was blessed (although it didn't always seem that way at the time) with
teachers who wanted their students to /think/ - who were always asking:
"So where do we go with that?" or "When might that be useful?". I had an
English teacher (not in public school) who regularly walked over in
front of my desk, looked down at me, and smiled broadly just before he'd
ask: "And what does The Dove think of /that/?" I'm sitting here laughing
about it now, but in the beginning it absolutely terrified me.

Well, you begin to see the problem. I don't deny that there must be
_some_ decent public schools out there, but I never attended any. The
two good teachers in the ones I attended were constantly battling the
system.

I /do/ see the problem. Somehow we need to replace indifferent
instructors with _teachers_ who know their subject, the value of its
knowledge, and who see that the future is in the hands of their
students. It's the "somehow" that's the hard part.

Good that you managed to hit on a field in which you could apply
_something_. Most people need to know about potics like they need a
hole in the head.

Hmm. I was a math major who went into computer new product development
(and who only rarely ever used any of the math) :-b

I only tackled the solar technology because (at age 60) I decided it was
important enough and potentially valuable enough to use up my last years
demonstrating its potential.

Think of it as an attempt to be worthy of the efforts of those Good
Teachers, however lame that might seem.

--
Morris Dovey
DeSoto Solar
DeSoto, Iowa USA
http://www.iedu.com/DeSoto/