Leon wrote:
"J. Clarke" wrote in message
...
Leon wrote:
"J. Clarke" wrote in message
...
Leon wrote:

Totally agree with that and I attribute the failure to poor
teachers that don't give a **** and that finally led to teachers
that could not find a job any where else. Long ago when
teachers could step in as a parent and administer discipline he
or she could actually teach. We have lost teachers that actually
taught for baby sitters.

Uh, you might want to actually get drunk with a few teachers
sometime before
you blame them. They have to do what they can with what they've
got and what they've got these days isn't much (and I'm not talking
about the kids,
I'm talking about the rules they are required to work under).
Wanna fix education, first shoot all the professors of education
and all the school boards.


It may differ with location but for the most part the teachers you
are describing are what we had 20 years ago, but not in Houston
today. Today they are asking "how to do" from the kids.

Not sure what you mean by "asking how to do", however in some
districts teachers are forbidden to actually teach subject
matter--they are constrained when a kid asks a question to
"facilitate" the kid looking it up
for himself and disciplinary action will be taken against them if
they actually get caught answering the question.

My son's calculus teacher asked the students , how to do, a problem,
she could not figure it out.

Could they figure it out? If so then she had done her job well. When a
student can do something the teacher can't then the teacher has succeeded.

I know it is not their fault, the teachers, for the most part the
good ones are long since gone.
And they are gone because they no longer want to be baby sitters
instead of maintaining discipline and actually teaching. Teaching
should also be considered a part of how a child is taught to act and
to respect others. That does not happen any more.
While I agree the restrictions/cigarettes was the root of the
problem.

I don't understand what you think cigarettes have to do with
anything. As for restrictions, it's not just "restrictions", its a
whole mass of bureaucrat-mandated bull****.

I was making a compairison, cigaretts/cancer, It started with
restrictions, then came the bureaucrat crap and eventually the cancer
spread to the teachers.

I'm not following you.

However the teachers are not the cause. They don't make the
decisions. They don't make the policies.

Don't recall saying the teachers were the cause but they have been
sucked in and have become part of the problem. The kids are more
intelligent than most of the teachers these days in the HISD.

I was more intelligent than most of my teachers through high school back in
the '60s, or thought I was. I did know more about quite a lot. But they
were doing what was required of them.

You could staff the schools with a who's who of American leadership
and they
wouldn't be any better than they are now because they'd be operating
under the same rules.

That is right and the good ones eventually leave. Those that can't do
anything else or are in it for the benefits remain.


When there's something wrong with a huge organization, it's not the
peons at
the bottom who are causing it.

Correct, not the cause but do become part of the problem.


The HS my son went to was an exception to the norm, that school had
"good" teachers and there was not a discipline problem.

And this is symptomatic of the problem. Every parent knows that the
schools
are broken, but the one that their little darling went to was an
exception.

The only decent ones my son went to was the private school K-2 and
the HS 9-12, the other 3 sucked.



That public
HS was by invitation only. The only requirement to be invited to
attend that school was that you needed to have a "Satisfactory"
average, for conduct, that's it. If a student became a discipline
problem they were warned once and the second time transferred to one
of the other HS's in the district.

So the teachers at that school weren't any better than the ones in
the other
schools, they just made the problem kids somebody else's problem.
So do you
think that those same teachers would have done nearly as well at one
of the
other schools?

Yeah they were better teachers. There was a waiting list for them to
get into the school. Problem kids were few and very far in between.
My son knew of "1" in the school, a frined of his, and he tas
transferred out.

How do you know they were better teachers? Do you have results of some kind
of teaching competition or something?

When my son began at that HS the school had grades 9-12. In all
four grade levels there were only 650 students. I would estimate
that in the other 3 HS's that there were in excess of 10K and that
is a very conservative estimate. Out of all of those students
approximately 150 were invited each year to attend Kerr HS.

And from that you conclude that the _teachers_ at those other
schools are the problem?

"Part" of the problem and the ones we delt with, 3-8 grades seem
comfortable with that. They did not care for 3 way meetings with the
principal however.

I'm curious about what those meetings were typically about,.

Kerr HS taught the kids how to prepare for college every day. There
was no week off to study for the TAAS test, which is a Texas thing
to judge how the students are coming along for their grade level.
His middle school took a week every year to review for that test.
IIRC the year my son graduated 95% of the students had been
accepted to a college. IIRC 87% of those students had been awarded
scholarships of $15K or more.

And this is because the teachers were so brilliant you think.

I would not say brillinat so much as above average and the teachers
had nothing to do with obtaining the scolarships. That was all on
the kids to do the leg work.
The system was totally different in that school all the way up to the
principal. Teachers were allowed to teach and they did teach. And
yes most all of the teachers in that school were impressive, even to
the kids. Remember, the good teachers were lined up to get into Kerr.
They wanted to teach there, that came out at every PTA meeting.

In the other schools the teachers reminded me of typical "government
workers", there for the benefits.
I know that their attitudes were not all their fault, the system is
to blame but many of those teachers were like many of the kids, lost.
You know when the system sucks badly enough and you cannot attract
good help because of that fact you settle for less than desirable to
fill the classrooms. That is what I saw.

So we've got one school that cherry-picked the whole system and managed to
do well for a handful of kids. So how do you make that work for the rest of
the system?

I'm certain that the education that my son received at Kerr HS
played a very major roll in him transitioning so smoothly into
college. I recall the 10th graders mentoring the incoming 9th
graders and most of them were high achievers. Life transitioning
into Kerr HS was a bigger challenge for my son than going from that
HS into college. I am also certain that Kerr HS played a major
part in my son getting into the Honors College his first year at
the university and graduating with a 4 year average GPA of 3.87.

And all of this you attribute to the excellence of the teachers and
not to the district policies that allowed the school to cherry-pick
students?

Do you call only accepting students with at least "Satisfactory"
conduct grade cherry picking?

Did they accept every student in the district who had such a grade?

Let me mention also that younger
borthers and sisters were also accepted regardless of the conduct
grade.

So what percentage of students in the district were these?


Many of thse kids were not brilliant but they certainly shined when
they graduated.