Morris Dovey wrote:
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.

But introduced at what level? If they don't start it until high
school then most students are not going to develop any fluency.

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.

And now they're loaded down with paperwork to satisfy the bureaucrats
besides.

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,

And we have to get off the backs of the ones who do. I have a friend
who has a PhD in education and is a retired teacher. Every time I see
him he has another horror story passed on to him by one of the many
teachers with whom he has contact. Idiocy like being disciplined for
answering a student's question with anything other than "look it up"
on the basis that they're "supposed to be teaching studends how to
learn" for example. I don't know how widespread that sort of thing
is--he seems to think it's pretty commonplace. The last teacher I
dated was good with the kids and good with dealing with the
administration, but quite frankly outside of work she was NUTS (not
going to go into anecdotes) and I suspect that the work had done it to
her.

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.

Good thought. The thing is if I was going to do something worhty of
my Good Teachers I'd be an author, and in that area, well, I have seen
talent and it is something that I lack.

--
--
--John
to email, dial "usenet" and validate
(was jclarke at eye bee em dot net)