Gene Kearns wrote:
On Thu, 18 Jun 2009 09:02:22 -0700 (PDT), Frogwatch penned the
following well considered thoughts to the readers of rec.boats:

|Just had a bunch of local science teachers visit here to see how
|things are done in an environment like this. They asked me what I
|thought of science and math education and I told them that science and
|especially math are taught as if it existed apart from life. .... Kids are
|bored silly at how it is taught today and I never learned anything in
|science in high school.

You have to understand how today's education is defined. "Education,"
now, is defined as earning a certain score on a "standardized" test.
"No Child Left Behind" has destroyed any hope of children
understanding the course content, because that is not how
"accountability" and "Adequate Yearly Progress" are defined. My wife
teaches middle school and the 6-8 grade students lost approximately a
month of school due to having to take test after test after test. They
showed great "Adequate Yearly Progress!"

The only problem is that when these students matriculate to the
Community College or University system, (with respect to Reading,
Math, and Composition) approximately 60% can't function at entry level
competence in at least one of the disciplines and 75%+ are not
competent in at least two.


When my kids came home from middle school and started talking about
BCR's and ECR's I asked them what they were. They are a paragraph and
essay, respectively. Why do they need to change the names with each new
generation? And, now they are going back to calling them paragraphs and
essays.

Also, during a parent teacher conference, during one of my kids
elementary school, I asked the teacher the teacher if there was anything
I read or do to understand how they were teaching math these days. The
teacher told me to buy "Math at Hand" and "Math to Know." Purchasing
these books quickly enabled me and my wife, a scientist, to understand
how this "new math" was being taught. Why didn't they suggest that we co
out and buy this book at the beginning of third grade.