Ooo, I have an idea!
March 1st, 2011
Teach meth-making and pimp-math!
Public school students in the nation’s largest cities, many from low-income households, trail their peers elsewhere in the United States in a test of science proficiency, said a report released on Thursday.
Fourth- and eighth-graders in most of the 17 participating urban districts typically scored lower than the national average, according to the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress Science.
The analysis, also known as the Nation’s Report Card, Trial Urban District Assessment, tested between 900 and 2,200 students in each grade in school districts from San Diego to New York, including students in Atlanta and Boston public schools and the Los Angeles Unified School District.
Demographics of the participating urban districts vary from both the national average and between districts.
Some districts report that English is not the first language of up to 40 percent of their students. Anywhere from 47 percent to 100 percent of students in the urban areas are from lower-income families, according to the report.
Uh huh. Well, that’s a whole other problem that fuzzy-bunny multiculturalism and open borders policies have failed to address. I was an above-average reader in elementary school, and felt very held back by the ESL and black kids. Yes, the black kids. Their parents didn’t seem to have a lot of time for bedtime stories or ABCs. It’s a cultural thing, and should be addressed by schools instead of being swept under the rug of political correctness.
“Even for students who don’t enter careers requiring some science competence, as citizens they will soon be involved in issues like climate change, energy policy and medical research,” said Friedman, a former director for the New York Hall of Science.
Oh good god. The educators aren’t upset because the system is churning out functional retards - they’re upset that they can’t push popular social policies and pseudo-science like climate change to kids that can’t even fathom what a “climate” is. Stalin would be proud.
All in all, the problem with every school subject needs to be dealt with at the very base - literacy. Once you get kids reading and comprehending, then you can teach the other subjects. But if a kid can’t do his ABCs or can’t read above second grade (or not in English), you might as well toss the rest of the subjects right out the window.
Once they are reading, then and only then you can start to experiment with ways to make the subjects engaging. Teach science from a cooking or cause-and-effect perspective. Lots of hands-on experiments for the video game generation, who are very visually oriented. Teach physics by using gun shots as a way to explain velocity. But for god’s sake, teach literacy first.
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