Comments on: That’s it. As a society, we’re probably doomed.

By: Lydia

Lydia — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 00:33:59 +0000

I have read all of the posts. I am a parent who tried to go through the school board, and nobody would help me. My daughter is an excellent student, as far as grades, but when it comes to following directions and listening she is failing, at least that is what they say. I have finally had it and took her out at the end of her 2nd grade school year. She is going to learn all the things I wish I would remember from school.
She was learning about 3 presidents instead of say 10 in the past 2 years, and I said that is a shame. I wanted to teach her through history, but as a parent who only knows what I remember from school I didn’t know where to start. I love the idea of Story of the Worlds, but I don’t know where to start.
I see what the teacher is talking about since we just left a public school, most of the parents sent the kids to school without the school supply list at the beginning of the year. I gave to the classroom for Kindergarten and 1st grade the things I noticed they didn’t have. I had a problem with the principle, which started this year, which helped me to make my final decision to homeschool.
I hope the teacher finds the money to work with the students on the important history they need. I also hope this teacher doesn’t get sick, considering nobody will be with the children if she isn’t there.
All the luck with you.

By: Anne

Anne — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 04:55:45 +0000

Hi. I read this with trepidation. I live in Australia and am a trained teacher. For years we’ve watched as the American educational system slowly began to unwind and we’ve watched the same thing happen in the UK. For some reason our educational authorities seem to think that we’ll be able to cpoy what has happened in the US and the UK, but we’ll get different results. I think not. We took our kids out of school at the end of last year and I am now homeschooling them. We came across the Classical method by chance and after reading “The Well Trained Mind” have launched head long into teaching our kids. I don’t know if you are aware, but about 30 years ago they threw out formal grammar education in our schools. I am one of the products of that generation. I know the basics and no more. I’m dleighted to say that in using “Language Lessons for the WTM” with my kids I’m getting the grammar education which I was denied. The multiplication table has recently been removed from the mathematics curriculum as it is “bad” for children to learn things by rote. I’m not joking. It’s only a matter of time before our social studies curriculum – already undermined and torn apart by special interest political lobby groups – suffers a similar fate.
To fix education you’d have to pull the entire thing apart and start again. The students coming out of our universities are very politically correct and socially aware, but wouldn’t recognise a noun if it jumped up and bit them. They cannot calculate in their heads and would be hard pressed to find Canberra (our nation’s capital) on a map. What they think they are going to teach our kids is beyond me.
I really and truly despair.

By: Charlotte Cushman

Charlotte Cushman — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 16:52:54 +0000

Never mind – I see it says to call the office. Thanks

By: Charlotte Cushman

Charlotte Cushman — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 16:51:32 +0000

Susan – How can we contribute to this?

By: Katy

Katy — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 21:29:56 +0000

I struggle a lot with this. I went back to school to get a teachers’ certification. I spent time in the schools. It feels hopeless. I don’t know that I would last long in such an uphill battle. Now that I have my own kids, I want to home educate because I know I can do a better job. But I feel a sense of responsibility. How can I use my cultural power to help these kids who are powerless and lost in a system that pushes them further down?

I recently read a new book by Andy Crouch called “Culture Making” that encourages Christians to change their posture towards culture from condemning, critiquing, copying and consuming to that of cultivating and creating. I was talking with my pastor about it the other day, and he asked if I was familiar with The Clapham Sect. It was a group of Christians in England who met together and thought up creative ways to do just that: spend their own cultural power for the sake of the powerless. One of them was William Wilberforce. There were others, and they did much more than abolish slave trade (although that was an amazing accomplishment in itself).

Although homeschooling is a committment, in many ways I think it frees families to get out of the frenetic business of school schedules, extra-curricular activities, and all of the oversight and compensation that must be made for the hours spent in less-than-ideal classrooms and peer situations. I’m noticing that most families with school-aged kids have no time and energy left. I wonder how homeschoolers could use our time and the wisdom we’ve gained teaching our own kids for the benefit of others? There certainly aren’t easy answers. But The Clapham Sect gives me hope that with a little creativity and a lot of grace, it’s possible to change the tide.

By: Brenda

Brenda — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 13:56:03 +0000

This breaks my heart. It hits way too close to home. I teach, not in the inner-city, but in a very urban District and we have been hit hard by budget cuts and failed levies. Most of the teachers I work with are just like this young person, caring and sacrificial. One clue to the problem is found in what one of the comments here referred to as a district closing the better schools because they are too expensive to operate. The inequity of the school funding is amazing.

Also, I agree that more parents need to get involved and hold the School Board and the Administration accountable for the quality of education. That is only just happening in our District and the result has already created a huge improvement. Sometimes, parents direct their anger at the teacher, yet the teacher is only implementing the philosophy and policies of the District because firing is the alternative. I would love to see parent,s who do not like what is going on in their child’s classroom, step back and see where it is coming from; in other words, see the forest, not the trees.

We don’t have one room school houses, thank goodness, (my Dad was in one of those and loves what we have NOW that he had no access to), but we do still have the constitutional right to require our children be educated within reason according to our values. As long as there is a local School Board, we are in control. The problem is we have abdicated to them and they are increasingly being controlled by the state and federal government. If parents do not wake up they will find the School Board has been disbanded and the Federal Government is educating their children, and that, according to the world history I have read, is very DANGEROUS.

By: Suzanne Brock

Suzanne Brock — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 14:34:53 +0000

Someone asked where the funds go because there isn’t enough money for materials. I taught in an inner-city school in South Los Angeles and I will tell you that whenever we had extra funds, the first thing we did was hire more personnel. In schools like that, where you have classrooms full of children who really need small group instruction, one of the best ways our school found to spend money was hire competent aides for the classroom teachers. This allowed the teachers to divide the class into groups and each group got to work with an adult. My classroom functioned the best and the children learned the most when they were able to learn in small groups directed by an adult. That is why I am in favor of continuing to spend money on public education–more than we already do–but not in the way that a lot of people think necessary. Yes, we need books (and this poor teacher is a great example of some of the other problems plaguing inner-city and other schools). Yes, we need pens and pencils and paper. But we also need people, and lots of them, to effectively teach.

By: Gina

Gina — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 12:17:02 +0000

My kids attend a very nice suburban district that is consistently among the “excellent” rated schools. We are very pleased with their education. Our district grows at a rate of 500 students per year making it the second fastest growing district in our state. At the same time, the state cut school funding in half. The district tried two different levy issues this school year and both failed. Now the district has to cut $5 million from their budget over the summer. The district was very honest before the levy and explained numerous times to tax payers what this means for educational quality. Even so the latest levy failed 60-40. The same people who voted against the levy will be screaming in the fall when their children get only the basic education required by the state.

By: Deanna Martin

Deanna Martin — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 01:24:52 +0000

Scrap the whole free government school education and start over? Local one-rooms with local teachers chosen by local families to teach their kids?? Pipe dreams. Makes me sad. If I can help with a donation, I will.

By: Sebastian (a lady)

Sebastian (a lady) — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 00:20:55 +0000

How about recommending the process of reading aloud and narration or read aloud and note taking? SOTW is certainly vividly written to hold the students’ attention.

He could use the activity book he has purchased as a guide to narration and comprehension questions. Get the Knowledge Quest maps with a classroom license. Maybe even get the audiobook versions with Jim Weiss reading to supplement in the classroom.

Instead of buying big classroom sets of the books, he would need the book and activity guide (already purchased), maps (possibly already available in the school system) and maybe the audio.

I would recommend the book The Read Aloud Handbook by Jim Trelease if he thinks he would need to sell the admin on using SOTW as a read aloud. He could also position it as preparing the students for note taking during class lectures.
The money that isn’t spent on a classroom set of the books could be used to get supplemental books from the bibiligraphy in the activity guide. These could be placed in a classroom library or in the school library. He might want to see if there is a grant that would support this.

Kudos to this teacher for seeing an area that needs improvement and trying to figure out a way to deliver it.