Censorship in School
A black student was driven out of school for her essay about Frederick Douglass. She pointed out connections between keeping slaves illiterate and failing to teach black students today. This connection is pretty obvious to anyone familiar with history and modern education, but it really pisses off teachers when pointed out
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What's happening is due to perspective: The teacher is attempting to educate the entire roomful of students and not just a single student. What adds to perception of "nothing going on" is the fact that the education is delivered one lesson at a time which lasts from 30 minutes to an hour at most.
What the bright 13 year old doesn't see is the time it takes the teacher to prepare: the lesson plan, the handouts, check the teacher's guide to make sure all the important points are covered and etc. Nor does the bright 13 year old take into account the fact that for every bright willing-to-learn student the teacher has, the teacher is also saddled with a dozen bored Beevus-and-Buttheads who really couldn't care less about learning anything. An awful lot of quality education time gets wasted keeping the Beevuses and Buttheads of this world busy working and not goofing off.
Yup. I said it. The real problem, the very real 800 pound gorilla in the room that nobody wants to admit exists, are the large numbers of students who really don't want to be in school learning anything. Even worse, they refuse to sit quietly while anyone else learns anything either, so the bright 13 year old, who got the lesson during the first 5 to 10 minutes of it, then spends the rest of the lesson bored to tears while the teacher pokes and prods the Beevuses and Buttheads through the lesson.
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[This is the version I read since I couldn't get your website to open up:
http://www.democratandchronicle.com/article/20120228/NEWS01/302270062/douglass-essay-jada-williams]
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Very thought provoking. It will be interesting to see what everyone else makes of it.
:]
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From the perspective of students right now that doesn't matter at all. Schools are in fact failing to provide an effective learning environment. Smart students are frequently stifled; school actively interferes with their learning. Slow students are frequently shamed and fall further and further behind; they don't actually learn the material. Most of the material is aimed at average students, who usually do okay if they do the work. But to students at the ends of the bell curve, school can be maddening, and it's no wonder that some of them break under the pressure.
I realized all of that very early on. It helps that my parents are teachers, so I had an inside view; but it wouldn't have taken me much longer to spot even without that. It's painfully obvious to anyone who pays attention. What varies is the fluency with which students are capable of expressing their observations that school is not meeting their needs.
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Many school districts do have the "advanced placement" classes in place but only on HS level. One of the best kept secrets in American education is how often the AP classes are filled with white students while the regular classes hold everyone else!
At least when I was in HS, a bright student could go to school during the summer and cut as much as two years off their time in school.
I knew a pair of sisters who skipped two years of HS that way and then went into nursing school.
These days most school districts won't allow the smarter kids to do this any more.
(I skipped one. I only wish I'd known about this sooner so that I could have skipped two.)
:]
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Most kids aren't dumb, though some of them may be working uphill against challenges.
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I quite agree with you.
BUT....
The 800 pound gorilla in the room that nobody wants to discuss is what do you do with all the kids who aren't motivated to do their best in school and who outright refuse to allow anyone to motivate them.
The political correctness folks refuse to admit that there are kids like that or they sweep the whole thing under the rug by making it 100% the teachers' problem to deal with.
Anybody who says that all children can be motivated to learn, hasn't had to deal with some of the ones I've seen. One good case of "crazy kid syndrome" would make believers out of most of them.
Kids with learning problems get plenty of help over-coming those problems and have since before the mid 80's. Even Mississippi's public schools were doing one-on-one extra tutoring to help slower students stay up to speed back then and Mississippi is not a well-funded state.
:^|
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And the ones that are left? Move them out of the class with the students who actually want to learn, so they're not in the way.
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