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[narfstar]

Never the parents fault...

[Astaldo711]

you got it! Never the kids or the parents!

[narfstar]

Since you are new here A you may not know that I am a high school algebra teacher

[Astaldo711]

Wow that's great! I hope I didn't say anything to offend! Yours is a noble profession and a thankless one. I always try to impress upon my daughters how important math is. Now that my oldest is in the Navy, she sees I'm right. Thanks for your service to our country and our kids!

[Yoc]

Every generation looks in shock at the newer one and screams 'kids today...'
I myself can't believe the music that is popular these days and certainly I'm not interested in destroying my ears at a concert anymore no matter how much I enjoy the tunes.
But one thing some younger members here might not realize in these days of comics as a pretty much forgotten medium is in the 40s and early 50s comics were the #1 best selling medium going!  A million plus printing on Superman was not that unusual.  Today they Marvel/DC can't even come close to those numbers unless they kill off Superman.  I think parents in the 50s saw kids getting sometimes out of hand and when the 'experts' like Wirtham pointed the finger at comics they were happy to believe.  Kids are just as complex as adults and it takes a lot more than a comic, movie, tv or video game to create a delinquent.  Sadly all of them can reinforce any existing problem though and it certainly seems to me these days that the media loves to glorify the criminals in society.  When it's now considered a sign of weakness to say 'excuse me' or 'thank-you' among kids it's a sad sad day.

-Yoc

[narfstar]

I am not so much upset by kids doing wrong as for generations. What upsets me is they do not think things are wrong. People have always lied and always will. When they lied they knew it was wrong and their conscience would bother them to keep them from doing it again. Same with stealing "little" things. The kids will say that it was only.... like that makes it OK. They do not feel that it is wrong anymore. The kids have to stay behind a line in the cafeteria because they were stealing so many drinks further up. Self called Christian kids do not believe premarital sex is wrong often because their youth directors are doing it. I put the blame first on parents, then the church which is afraid to stand strong on morals because they are more afraid of losing bodies and the money that comes with them than souls, then the media which promotes foul language and frequent sex. We were given a conscience to keep us in check. As our collective conscience becomes seared we go down as a society. Thank God we are still nothing as bad as ancient Rome.

[BountyHunter]

My kids are FANTASTIC!!!!   And it's nobody's fault but mine.

[John C]

Warning:  If you think this is going to be a quick comment, then hi, I'm John.  We must not have met before...

I think parents in the 50s saw kids getting sometimes out of hand and when the 'experts' like Wirtham pointed the finger at comics they were happy to believe.

As they say in the science biz, "correlation does not imply causation."  That's something the social engineers always fail to take into account.  Unfortunately, the average Joe also doesn't realize it, and falls for the story hook, line, and sinker.  Which is a mixed metaphor, but that's between me and the MLA.

But I'm not as sure the parents are at fault as I used to be.

I mean, sure, some of them clearly are.  When I go out to dinner, I get a kick out of listening for the parents of the unruly kids, because they invariably use that comical passive-aggressive hissing voice to tell the kid "that's not how we act."  I mean, you could discipline the kid or treat him like an adult and discuss it with him, but it's waaay better to growl like an animal.

But I tend to set my sights higher.  In the last thirty years, I've learned that:
- Lying, dealing drugs, and funding terrorists is cool, as long as an American company or agency turns a profit. (Ollie North)
- You should pretend you can't hear anybody who asks uncomfortable questions. (Ronald Reagan)
- Killing foreigners is awesome if you don't have to look anybody in the face. (George HW Bush and CNN)
- Oral sex isn't sex. (Bill Clinton)
- Sex is more interesting than perjury. (Clinton's Senate)
- Selling secrets to foreign powers is fine, as long as they contribute to your campaign. (Bubba again)
- The rules don't apply when they're inconvenient. (John Yoo, Dick Cheney)
- Dropping bombs on people wins their hearts and minds. (Donald Rumsfeld)
- You can do anything to people, as long as you call them "enemies" first. (George W. Bush)
- Supporting and continuing bad policies is fine as long as you spoke out agaiinst them, once. (Barack Obama)

That doesn't even scratch the surface of Gore's gross misrepresentation regarding Global Warming, Hillary Clinton's nutcase policies, any number of things both Bushes have done, unending Congressional idiocy, and so forth.  And nobody ever calls them on it, at least not to the extent of trying to stop them.  And if it's OK for the government to torture people (which, if you believe the confessions are valid, then you must also believe that Spain was once a hotbed of people getting supernatural powers from the Devil), then how bad can stealing a couple of dollars and lying about your whereabouts really be?

(Heck, look at the case in New Jersey:  Almost fifty high-level politicians and religious leaders in an international money laundering and organ trafficking scheme!  I mean...wow.  I'm just speechless.  And it's not ANYBODY's lead story!?)

Add in a few generations of incompetant social engineering experiments in the schools and a generation of "helicopter parents" (whose actions would have completely mortified all of my peers growing up, by the way), and it's no real surprise that they don't take any responsibility.  We've taught them NOT to take responsibility if they want to get ahead.

My favorite bit on the school side is when students ask how the teacher/professor could possibly have covered the material if it's not in the student's notes.  Apparently, "maybe you weren't paying attention" isn't the answer.  I blame the Anti-Monitor, personally.  Damn him for causing history to rewrite itself.

[Astaldo711]

Kids learn from what they see. It bothers me how blase' TV and movies are about teenagers being parents. It makes it okay in their eyes. With both my kids, my wife and I never spoke "baby talk" to them and people would be amazed at how clearly they spoke. My 9 year old saw previews for that TV show with the pregnant teen and she was shocked. "She's just a kid! She's not even married!"
I can remember when I was younger an excuse parents used for their bully sons was "boys will be boys".
Nothing will change in the movies or TV because it sells.
I'm a big believer in personal responsibility and also believe it lies with the parents to teach that personal responsibility.

[narfstar]

Nothing will change in the movies or TV because it sells.
I'm a big believer in personal responsibility and also believe it lies with the parents to teach that personal responsibility.

Amen to personal responsibility. Lawyers make a living out of making excuses why it should not be so. As John said there is a correlation if not cause with what goes on in the media. Just watch (or not) show like "According to Jim" or "Still Standing" where lieing and drinking are celebrated. You can not tell me that does not affect kids whose parents have not grounded them well. My son was always grounded and knew where we stood on such issues. We also never talked baby talk to him and when he was a kid he would correct our grammer.

[Astaldo711]

Amen to that narf!
When my daughter hears someone say "Valentimes Day" or "liberry" instead of Library, she cringes and looks at me like "What's wrong with them?"
I very rarely drink and when I do, my daughter looks at me funny. That's the way it should be. She's never seen me drunk nor will she ever. I'm tired of that whole drunk, high, let's get a stripper, frat boy mentality that's so prevalent.

[phabox]

Always makes me laugh when I hear todays kids using the excuse that they "are bored" ( especialy during long school holidays) as the reason for their anti-social activities.

I'm SURE kids have more to do now ( DVD's, CD's Ipods, PC's, Gameboys, Playstations, ect, ect) then I did 45 years ago but I alway managed to steer clear of trouble.

-Nigel

P.S.  I began upsetting the forces of law and order in 1975 when I bought my first car, but thats ANOTHER story  !

[misappear]

I've been thinking about this topic for hours since I read the first postings.  Ya know, I don't know if kids read less now than when I was a kid.  I remember back in the late 60's and early 70's when I wa in high school.  Even the kids in the honors sections weren't all avid readers.  Sure, plenty were, but a lot weren't

I teach high school now.  I see a lot of kids carrying around books, reading in class before the lesson starts, or even at the end of class if we have a few flex minutes.  Again, it's a minority, but there are quite a few who are always sticking there nose in a novel. 

Compare the diversions and distractions these kids have now versus those available to us 40 years ago, and I don't believe the number of avid young readers is that bad.  There are a lot of problems with education, personal responsibilty, the lack of parental oversight, and a host of other issues pertaining to kids.  But on this one thing - reading for pleasure - I think there's a respectable number. 

I've got to tell you though:  You would not believe the number of parents who are pulled in for conferences on their slacker children who claim that they can't control their kids.  I swear it's "Don't look at me, it's not my fault I can't control him." 

Many have pondered this point; The folks I work with seem to agree that we stay teachers for that 1/3 of all our students who actually give a s**t.   

I think two things need to happen:  Public education needs to collapse and be completely restructured (no more band-aid reforms) and Parents need to be held responsible for what their kids do and don't do.  If a kid doesn't pass a state exam it's probably because the parents haven't checked homework and the like in, well, forever. 

I'll stop now before I drive myself nuts (again.)

[Astaldo711]

I've always loved to read and thankfully have passed that along to my girls. While I believe it's a parents job to get the kids in line, at some point the kids need to be held accountable for their own actions. Believe me, you can do everything right - encouragement & praise, checking the homework laying down moral guidelines, etc. and sometimes the kids are still going to be hellraisers or not try hard in school. Another thing that's hamstringing parents is society. If parents teach their child for example that sex before marriage is wrong and the child then sees many movies, television shows, and any number of public relationships where not being married and having kids is okay, it's hard to counter.
Another thing is how society removes all fault from children. Yes, they will follow what they see but at times it's like the parents have to undo what everyone else is teaching them. For instance, when I played little league, I had to TRY OUT. If I (or anyone) wasn't good enough, you weren't on the team. My niece was in dance class and for the recital, she had to prove she was good enough. Now if you want to be on a team, it doesn't matter if you can play or not. If there's a recital, you had better let everyone be involved. I think this actually began with whining parents that couldn't accept that their child wasn't good enough and everyone just gave in. Sometimes you HAVE to say NO!
Look at all those horrible people trying out on American Idol. They're told that they stink and they can't believe it because no one ever told them no.
Kids have to be prepared for a future where they just might not get everything they want.

[narfstar]

Here we have the mutual agreement society. I did write several pages on what I hoped to be a book called "You Can Drag Kids to School but You Can't Make Them Think."  I do not know that it will ever be a book. I look at how much I have done and how much more I have said than most books and figure that I just can not BS enough to fill out a whole book. My graduate thesis was actually accepted with fewer than the minimum pages. Fortunately the advisers realized that my succinct style said what it needed to say. Even following the crazy guidelines of say what you are going to say, say it, then say what you said, I could not get enough pages. I am considering making a blog instead. I so wanted to have a best seller, make money and reform education. My book is a TOTAL revamp of US education. I throw the baby out with the bath because we are just drowning them.

[Astaldo711]

Sounds good narf! Our educational system has need it for a long time! Keep us posted on your writings, I for one would love to read it.

[John C]

Some thoughts that, alas, don't have any way of stuffing them into a narrative.

- I tend to suffer from the same problem in writing, and the advice I've been given is to be specific.  Cite studies, show visuals (graphs), conduct interviews, and so forth.  It seems like filler to you or I, but it also helps people understand the points you're trying to make.

- As a lifelong A student with several friends who weren't, my impression is that homework only really serves to prevent kids from interacting with their parents, so I'm not surprised that the parents don't get involved.  It depends on the specifics, of course--you can't really learn arithmetic without having to go through the motions hundreds of times--but in most subjects, assignments are busywork, social studies usually being the worst with fill-in-the-blank answers.

- On the homework topic, in my classes (I teach graduate computer science, which is obviously a different animal than the rest of you), one of the principles I try to keep to is that every part of the class should teach something, from my lectures (usually theory) to the homework assiignments (usually key details) to the exams (usually applications of the rest).  Even after a decade at it, I'm not sure it's optimal, but I at least don't feel like any part of the class can be removed.

- My sister and I were both reading complete books by the time we were two or three, and speaking well long before that.  To this day, I cringe when I hear baby talk and it infuriated me when I was little.  In fact, I excused myself from a date a few years back with an otherwise charming woman because she spent a long time babbling and screeching at some poor boy.  I figure it's like "the waiter test" (as in, if someone nice to you and not the waiter, then she's not a nice person), but less subjective.

- The "everyone's a winner" garbage is definitely not helping anybody.  I recently spoke with an author who was telling me that a recent college graduate approached her cold, asking for help finding a high-paying job.  Every time she asked about experience and background, the kid talked about courses he took and vacations he had taken to different parts of the world.

- What's worse than everybody being a "winner" is that kids also seem increasingly insulated from decision-making.  High school is just to prepare you for another few years of school, and I've noticed an upswing in kids going for graduate degrees "just to compete" (and to put off paying their student loans).  They keep expanding child labor laws and basically preventing kids from accomplishing anything until they're well into their twenties...at which point, the best job they can get is answering phones, anyway.

So yeah, I do impatiently await the demise of the educational system (and probably the economic system, too, since that's also too far gone to fix...and maybe health care, as well), and hope there are some intelligent adults left in the room when it's time to put things back together.

If it helps anybody, in my dwindling spare time, I've been trying to investigate the idea of running a school as...sort of a series of "micro-apprenticeships," where students learn English by staging plays at community theaters, math and science by working on real projects with engineers, and so on.  It's an idea that requires an entirely different kind of administration (not to mention creating an insurance nightmare), but I've noticed that kids (and adults) respond best to responsibilities and relationships, not rules and accolades.

[Astaldo711]

I agree. A practical application of education is what's needed. When a kids asks "Why do I need to know this?" Don't just give the same old "because you do!" answer.
When I was in school, I was TERRIBLE at math. I always thought that I wouldn't need it. Wrong! They should show kids WHY they need it. Something like "okay, your assignment is to balance a checkbook" or "your iPod is 30gb. Figure out the average size of these songs and figure out how many it can hold."
I've never responded well to the "do it because" mentality. If I'm shown why something needs to be done a certain way, I work much better.
English was the only subject in high school I ever got an A in and I'm somewhat of a grammar Nazi. I cannot stand it when I hear things like "well, anyways.." or "alls I know is..."
Since the dictionary is adding or has added things like "Staycation" "Frenemy", etc. I guess all you need to do is constantly mangle the English language and sooner or later you will be vindicated.

[narfstar]

I do not believe in "graded" homework because you never know who did it. I did not need to do my Alg homework so I copied Calvin's. We both got the same credit. What about the student who felt it wrong to copy. He gets punished for being honest. Not to mention the students who have no help or have to work after school. Kids with smart helping parents get good homework grades, think science projects, those who get the shaft in home life get it again at school. Math is by application but Algebra is useless and an unfair punishment for most students. Students should not be punished because they are right brained instead of left brained any more than punished for being left brained. You can learn all the math/algebra you need for auto mechanics in auto mechanics, cosmatology in cosmatology, etc class just makes it hated. Everyone can be a winner if willing to work at and not required to take subjects for which they are not prepared.

[John C]

You're absolutely right.  While I've appreciated all my math teachers (except the differential equations guy in college--he was a nice enough guy, but really shouldn't have been in front of a room), I've never understood the point of the class except as an end in itself.

I don't know about the rest of the world, but in New York, it's even weirder, because we have "Sequential Math" mandated statewide.  Rather than the traditional algebra, geometry, trigonometry, calculus approach, each course surveys a little bit of each, plus propositional logic and a few other pieces.  Oh, plus a healthy dose of (again) social engineering, as all the "word problems" involve a multicultural selection of names.  As you might expect, this means spending a lot of class time rehashing things that you haven't seen in about a year.

Meanwhile, your chemistry and physics teachers have probably taught you some differential and integral calculus in passing because they were needed to explain what was going on.  But they can't call it that, because then the Board gets on their cases for teaching math...

Thankfully, I have less worry in students copying off each other.  I end up using those grades to account for the fact that some people (especially technical people) with an added time pressure.  I don't give it enough weight that a student can succeed based on the strength of the homework alone, but it's enough to push an otherwise marginal student through.

[JonTheScanner]

Believe it or not I use my training in differential equations all the time.  Though I realize I'm probably 1 in a 1000 (who took it) or 1 in more than a million country wide.

[narfstar]

I think one of the reason that I am such a good math teacher is because I was not a math major. I was a science major who picked up math certification backward. Back in the olden days I needed 27 quarter hours in math. I had had nine freshman level then a class called Calculus and Analytical Geometry. C and A was a struggle for me so I took lower classes of Finite Math, Pre-Cal (yes after C and A), regular Calculus and Statistics. I would never be qualified to teach math if I was not grandfathered in. One method of achieving highly qualified status is three years with your students value added stores as average or above. Mine have been above. Proves that you really do not need all that overkill education required nowadays. Never had DE probably could not pass it.

Sequential/integrated math has usually been dropped after brief trials. Had a young lady at church who was at a different school than mine ask me some of her integrated math. I had no idea what she was even talking about. Even the terminology was different. There is a teacher at Lee Unversity here whose dad was instrumental in "new math." This teacher has another form of new math that is way out in left field. Look for another stupid trend to come your way

[Astaldo711]

It sounds to me that instead of trying to teach the kids math in all it's forms, they're modifying it to make it easier to learn. Doesn't make sense to me. The sciences are an international language. If you were to speak to a German scientist about Algebra, it's the same in both cultures. If I was talking to a Polish astronomer about methane lakes on Titan, it would be the same "language". Now the schools are too lazy to teach the kids and people like you have to learn all new terminology. You can hear it in the slang kids use when they talk. If the schools and parents were teaching them correctly, you wouldn't hear "Anyways, alls I know is that 'aint Bob desk, it be mines." My English teacher and parents would have killed me if I spoke like that. I can still hear my Dad "There 'aint no such word as 'aint!" and "Nuttin! Nuttin?! Nuttin is when you go in the backyard and gather nuts!"

[narfstar]

Unfortunatly my grammar continues to deteriorate through over exposure to counter examples. Some grammatical rules should change. Remember language is not static. Unlike math the rules are made by who is in charge. We would not even understand someone talking olde English to us. Ast are you aware that it was a mathematician who wrote a book that changed grammer.

"We have 18th century mathematician and grammarian Robert Lowth to thank for the received wisdom that two negatives are ungrammatical. In his 1762 book A Short Introduction to English Grammar, Lowth, who was enamoured of Latin-derived logical models, decreed that two negatives cancel each other out and create a positive; until that time, two negatives were taken to reinforce each other. Lowth's rule, though arbitrary and invented, has become "truth", as has his insistence that sentences should not end in prepositions, that split infinitives are ungrammatical, and that "they" cannot be used as a gender-neutral pronoun. Not all languages consider a double negative to be not correct."

BTW when my students ask me when will I ever use this I am honest. I tell them you probably won't.
Except to pass this class and the test. All required of you by the morons from the state department who are clueless. Yes I refer to them as morons to the students because I have no respect for people in power who do not take the time to find out how much damage they do.

[JVJ]

Unfortunatly my grammar continues to deteriorate through over exposure to counter examples.

I am a stickler for spelling and grammar, narf. It simply grates on me when I encounter errors. This whole texting and tweeting stuff is an anathema to me. This is especially strange since I hated English, but somehow the teachers "won". I don't know how, since I thought I was especially stubborn in my resistance to them. The idea that I would ever end up WRITING professionally is totally mind-boggling.

One thing that I love is the spell-checking functions on Firefox so that every time I misspell a word it gets underlined in red. Makes me look good with a minimum of effort.

And I don't argue with your notion that language is a dynamic thing, but correct spelling is a positive step towards clear communication. For me, communication is a MUST these days and, also to me, a sign of respect to the person/persons you're talking to. Others, of course, disagree and figure that if they can get your message, that's all that matters.

Exposure to contrary approaches won't change my opinions or my dedication to doing it "the old fashioned way." C'est la vie.

Peace, Jim (|:{>