On Mon, 19 Dec 2005 22:17:42 GMT, Shortwave Sportfishing wrote:

On Mon, 19 Dec 2005 16:47:11 -0500, JohnH wrote:

What is causing the decrease in the work ethic of students?

Parents. Because of the nature of my wife's work with her Union,
local, state and national, she's out a lot of evenings and I sometimes
field the calls from parents who like to bitch and moan about too much
homework or why do they have to teach math - that's what they make
calculators for. It's got so bad at one point last year that I just
didn't answer the house phone at night. It's way too much work for
the parents to observe, orient and help the kids even if they do
understand the material.

I swear to god this is a true incident. Wife was out and I caught the
call accidentally - it was a parent who wanted to know why there was
all this homework about the structure of government - her daughter was
going to be a Irish Dancer and really didn't need to know all this
sort of thing.

I swear that's true. There is another parent of one of my wife's
students who truly believes that "exploration" of the child's
environment is much more important than structured teaching.

Your last sentence is especially true of math books. I wonder why the county spends so much money on
them.

Math is math and everybody who doesn't understand math wants to make
it understandable.

What they don't realize is that math is based on rote learning - you
can't really "get" math until you understand the arithmetic of
multiplication and division by rote - that's my opinion anyway and
it's pretty much substantiated by what they are doing in Europe. some
of the Czech and Hungarian Universities are teaching real mathematics
the real way - doing it, explaining it, some of it by rote teaching of
the mechanics.

They are very successful.

Another true one:

I had some kids (8th grade) at the board doing problems. A girl had to multiply 6 x 7 as part of her
problem. She asked if she could go to her desk to get her calculator. I said no. She said she didn't
know what 6 x 7 was, so I told her to write seven sixes and add them up. At his point, she got teary
-eyed and someone else said, "42".

That evening her dad called and proceeded to jump all over me for 'embarrassing his daughter'. I
told him it wasn't my fault she couldn't multiply, and *he* should be embarrassed. I suggested he
get some flash cards and use them in the car next time they went to Kings Dominion. He said he was
going to talk to my principal.

I never heard any more about it.
--
John H

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