Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Distractions . . .

"Students learns (sic) about disabilities"
"With one hand frozen at their sides, New York Mills first and second graders Monday attempted to put on sweaters and jackets, simulating how a stroke patient has to get dressed."
While this exercise is well-intentioned, it is an example of why our kids can't read, do math, don't know our history, don't understand how our government works, and don't know basic scientific principles. There are too many distractions from the children learning the core knowledge that they are expected to know.

If not learning about disabilities, its the ride for missing children, or drug awareness, or recycling . . . if not honoring their teachers (with teacher authored skits) or international cup-stacking competitions which were also OD stories of the last couple weeks.

Your money, and your children's time are being wasted.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

One only has to turn on the local cable education channel to grasp how much time, effort and money is spent on the non essentials. The drop out rates and low preformance levels are no surprise.

Anonymous said...

Hre we have a good example of left wing do gooders at work. This is nothing but feel good nonsense engineered by social workers, administrators & teachers, all well paid, while our students graduate from our h.s's not being able to read past a 4th grade level. And the OD is part & parcel to this idiocy by continually featuring these stories on the front page of it's newspaper.

Anonymous said...

According to today's OD, the UCSD just hired ANOTHER administrator. The salary? Only $93,000 per year. This is nauseating. While the State of NY is getting ready to cut school aid, this school board & the supt. goes out & hires another high priced employee. Obviously, the Supt. & the board don't give a damn about the tapayers who are footing the bill.

Anonymous said...

People ask me (I'm not from here) why I haven't gotten married while living in Utica for the past 9 years.
Well, aside from the fact that all the normal young people have left, that most of the "leftovers" are awkward, divorced several times, full of baggage, and/or rude to people they didn't meet in highschool, but the literacy and bare minimum intelligence of the young women here is atrocious. It took many of the women in their 20s a minimum of about 5 seconds to sound out a 6-letter word that I learned in 5th grade. I've seen women repeat in their emails easy typos to detect... For example, confusing "must've" and "most of." (she did it three times in one paragraph.. and then flip flopped them once.)

I've edited papers and reports for friends attending MVCC and SUNYIT, and teachers noticed such a change in quality that they immediately were accused of "buying" a paper. (And I'm not an English major, nor did I do well in English classes in comm college downstate...)

Is the education here bad? yes. Oh God yes... And it's been bad for the past 20 or so years at least. Of course what I'm seeing is only exasperated by the fact that the cream of the crop had left the area and never come back.

So please continue to have this low standard of education. it gives us "outsiders" something to laugh about when we talk to your local home-schoolers.

Strikeslip said...

Anonymous, you are viewing things through the lens of someone who simply does not like the Utica area for whatever reason. Poor education -- based on a systematic failure to transmit core knowledge to students -- is (at least) a nationwide phenomenon.

I was invited to guest lecture an environmental law class in a college with a good reputation on Long Island 15 years ago. I do a lot of questioning to lead students to the points I try to make. When we were discussing the legal authority for congress or a state legislature to promulgate environmental laws the students were clueless. They did not understand the functioning of the three branches of government. They did not understand the relationships of the branches to the founding documents.

Later, privately, their professor was very apologetic, embarrassed that his students did not know the basics. But that was not the professor's fault. He had every right to assume that the students had learned such things in high school or earlier.

While Utica-area administrators and teachers could fix this problem for us, they don't . . . not because Utica-area educators are dumber than the rest, but because they are following the rest. There IS a conspiracy, and its reach goes far beyond both here and the present.