Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Ummm, I'll Take "Parents Are to Blame" for $600 Alex

All humans are equal. Not due to some kind of doctrine or text written up by some old fogeys in the 1700's, but because it's true.

All humans have the same DNA and ergo, barring instances of mental impairment, all humans genuinely, literally and factually are equal.

Ergo, why I don't blame the kids, I blame the parents.

But you can see where this is going; we're going to prevent kids from excelling as it may be deemed racist.

Help us all.

ht to Maggie's Farm

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Captain

Did your parents drop you on your head as a baby?

Anonymous said...

This story just demands the question of what middle schools with middle school-level classes are really good for.

I went through middle school in the late '90s. As I recall, 6th through 8th grade math (assuming one doesn't take algebra in 8th grade) consisted entirely of going through these stupid books of politically correct word problems that consist primarily of nothing but the same arithmetic most kids finish learning in 5th grade, with a sprinkling of very basic forms of geometry and statistics, and furthermore, watering down the actual math by forcing the kids to write out a paragraph for each answer, "explaining their reasoning", meaning that rather than practice on 30 math problems, the kid only gets to do six, but still has to spend an hour or two filling two pages.

It's practically child abuse to insist on wasting months and years of a child's life holding them back from whatever they could be learning. You could very well be cheating them out of a college education by making school so tedious that they conclude it's not worth the time and money to go through more of it. All because it would be racist to let white kids get ahead just because SOMEBODY (I'm looking at you, Donkey Party) decided to systematically destroy the black work ethic.

Captain Capitalism said...

Anon,

Yes, many times. BUt I still turned out to be the genius that I am today despite that.

Lord knows how intelligent I would have been if I wasn't dropped those 53 times.

Sheila said...

I homeschool my kids & my nephew.

But I also write full-time, and I was getting busy with all the homeschooling, so I decided to sign my 14-year-olds up for online courses offered through our Board of Education (I'm in Ontario).

My kids are supposed to be in grade 8, so I figured grade 10 was about the right level.

Then I saw the assignment. It looked remarkably familiar. It was what I had taught my 11-year-old that day. I called her over and asked her to do the homework. She did it fine.

So I dropped the course, because it would be a waste of time. I'll just go back to teaching them myself.

I do math maybe 1/2 an hour a day. It's not like we work super hard at it. But doing 1/2 an hour a day, one on one, makes your kids 4 years ahead.

I find all middle school classes are useless. Grade school is for learning the tools (math; phonics; sentence structure; how to write a paragraph). In high school they put that into practice. So we just skip grades 7 and 8 altogether.

As to that article, I can't believe the spokesperson saying that the problem is racism! Look, if it's white kids who want to take the courses, let them! But you're right, Captain. Soon they won't let them at all so they can all learn nothing together.

Anonymous said...

I agree with neoprophet that middle school math is a waste of time, I was lucky enough that I didn't have to endure it since my elementary school had a "gifted" program. All I had to do was complete 3 packets, one for each grade of math and was thus able to skip straight to algebra 1-2 as a 6th grader. What is also funny is that middle schoolers going to high school for classes isn't new. I remember in 8th grade they used an entire school bus so 5 of us could go to the high school to take algebra 3-4.
The head of the high school math department was always collecting statistics about minority students but rather than cut back his advanced programs he would instead go out of his way to recruit minorities into his programs.

Anonymous said...

neoprophet,

You had to write a paragraph to explain your answer? All I had to do was show my work and write the correct units (feet/second, etc.). Sometimes I needed to write a single sentence to explain why I took the positive answer from solving a quadratic equation (negative being an impossible answer in some problems).

I'm still wondering why teachers hate standardized tests. How else are we supposed to measure student success? Interpretive dance?

Anonymous said...

"I'm still wondering why teachers hate standardized tests. How else are we supposed to measure student success? Interpretive dance?"

Standardized tests let us see how badly the teachers are doing. Any hard metrics for student performance are a danger to bad teachers and a failing public school system.

Besides, when you can measure how much children know, right-wing, fascist, child-haters start compiling the data into graphs showing the near-zero correlation between education spending and student performance.