Will you also change your name to Jim Jones and give these little girls Koolaide? And what will you teach these little girls in the "wilds of the Amazon?" And why would you disgard them when they are 30?

Fish hooks, matches and a hug? Sounds like a rather perverse fantasy to me!

Issywise's psychology degree should have a field day with this post. 

Wise Merlin

Okay, so maybe I'm too kind in giving people the benefit of the doubt.  But...... I can't imagine a parent not caring about the success of their child.  One thing, I think it is more a matter of most homes having both parents working (if lucky enough to have 2 parents in the home).  Secondly, many parents of teens become indifferent believing that their job is done and their child is free to make their own choices (bad mistake-teens need parental guidance just as much as a 3 year old).  Lastly, I think some parents lack skill and just don't know what to do. 

Kay

AMERICA'S BIGOT LAUREATE & VILLAIN EMERITUS.

My son-in-law was raised in a communist country. If a kid was inadequate in terms of conduct, aptitude, or effort the education system ejected him into the labor market. No more school on the public dime. Time to go to work.

Communists ran education the exact same way they managed sports and the arts. If you couldnt  or wouldnt and were an obstacle to others you were history.

American schools, on the other hand, buy the pupil's problems in exchange for special education cash, but are clueless as to how to fix the kids.

Stop the pampering beyond elementary school. Toss the slackers and retards and miscreants out. Let them wash cars or groom poodles or flip burgers or rot in jail. Use the education money for real scholars.

I feel your frustration, myfavoritejob. You have a nearly impossible job when the parent blames you, the child ignores you and the ADMINISTRATORS ARE IDIOTS.

The incentive for turning in work and assignments, IS A FAIR GRADE. THAT IS the incentive. What SEEMS to be lacking is, "What is the PUNISHMENT for NOT doing the work required?" This is the area that ADMINISTRATORS are responsible for and are ignoring AND NOT dealing with. This is the area PARENTS are ignoring. It is the administrators and parents responsibility to MAKE SURE the child is doing the required work to learn the subject, NOT THE TEACHER'S responsibility.

It reminds me of a teenager who is hired by, say, McDonalds, and the teen thinks they get paid for showing up. "Oh, I must work while I am here, ALSO?" the teen asks. "Do I get MORE money if I also work, besides showing up?"

Personally, I DO NOT think administrators should be paid AS MUCH AS teachers, because they ARE NOT held accountable for their administrative rulings that they impose upon teachers. I think "professional administrators" should not exist. Administrators should be required to have at least ten years of classroom teaching experience.

Keep up the GOOD work you do. I hope the educational philosophy returns to a more SENSIBLE and workable, common sense approach that has well educated children graduating from the system.

Wise Merlin

is a good idea.  Though I think they should go in pigeon holes, pidgin being a word that describes a mixed language incorporating the vocabulary of one or more languages to allow users of different languages to communicate, as in pidgin English. 

I went to school when English was an important subject, both grammar and literature.  Being the picky kind of guy I am, what I learned then served me well when I became a newspaper writer and editor for a few years later in life, and still does.  At one point I was assigned to work with a high school student on a history project she was doing for school.  I was appalled when I read the work she had done and when she said the teacher didn't care about the English, that he just had to be able to understand what she meant.  When I went to school, no matter want the subject, the English had to be correct.  You could lose marks for errors in the subject matter and a separate set of marks for English errors.  The US education system lead the way in "student focused" learning, essentially loosey-goosey methods and standards.  We in Canada tended to adopt them about the time they were being proved wrong or inadequate in the US.

As many in this discussion have pointed out, part of the change in attitude in students rests in the long absences of parents from the home due to work demands.  These demands are the consequence of an economic development model called Fordism, in which mass consumerism is necessary to consume all the goods available because of mass production.  We have to buy stuff we don't need to keep the factories busy.  And both parents have to work to have the money to buy all this stuff we don't need, leading to the rending of the social fabric that we see in the don't care attitude of the students.  The absence of the parents leads children to believe they don't care, so the children don't care.

How do we fix this?  Some are beginning to say that we need to see the end of capitalism.  I tend to agree.  Capitalism is really greed dressed up in good clothes.  Greed being one of the seven deadly sins as listed by Pope Gregory 1 in 590 AD.

At this point I'll quit as I'm starting to get off topic.

bfreem

I had a similar idea but it was on a school-wide scale.  I like your idea much much better.  Very easy to implement!  Also, if they have a shop class, the wall slots could be made even more cheaply.   I personally think that electronics in school is a huge issue that needs to be addressed.  Why do the schools continue to write policies without thinking through a way to actually enforce them?

I have great concern raising a young one in these times.  Already, he has picked up things at pre-school that make me cringe.  It may seem silly to some, but he came home using "poopy" and singing songs where the only lyric is "poopy".  I've discussed with him that Mommy doesn't like poopy talk (which squashed it) and I wonder what's next?  I have to always be the biggest influence on my child and failure is not an option.

Thank goodness for teachers that do care.  Such as myfavoritejob.  Parents and teachers cannot draw a line between them.  We are on the same side and must support each other and be a united front to the child/student.

Kay

I loved Chess. When I lived in Brooklyn, N. Y, I belonged to chess club of about 20 members. I was, maybe, the l2th or l3th best player. When I was in the Army in World War II in India, we played a lot of chess. The players were not too good. I was battalion champion. The officers would invite me to the officer's club to play chess. They were slightly better than the enlisted men but not one of them could beat me. There is no such thing as luck in chess. If you are superior to your opponent, you will win every game. The officers told me they all would want to censor my letters becasue I had the best sense of humor in the battalion. I am not very talented in many things but I was an above average chess player and I could make people laugh. I can't play chess any longer--I can't sit that long. I hope I can still make people laugh. God bless.

Tammi, you are so very corrrect. We have to fix the family first before we can fix eduction. Did you ever see the movie, "The Blackboard Jungle" with Glenn Ford made in l955. Well, it is now 54 years later and familiy life is much worse now than in l955. How do we fix family life? I wish I knew but I don't. God bless.

Oh, yeah, here's a couple more comments on this subject.

Albert Einstein was one of the worst sorts of students.  He was not disciplined at all.  So by that standard, he would have flunked the notions of what "education" is supposed to mean bandied about here. 

Why wasn't he disciplined? 

Well, mainly, because he was off in his world trying to figure out how the universe was put together.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart stunk at self-discipline.  That, of course, didn't keep him from writing his first symphony at the age of -- I think it was either 5 or 6.  Music simply came out of him like water out of a sieve.  It was as much about his life as physics and math were what life was for Einstein.  But neither Einstein nor Mozart were "disciplined" kids.

Einstein got into some hot  water over his lack of discipline, and particularly his inability to suck up to power and authority.  After he left college, he tried to get work in what he should immediately have been able to get work in, a university instructor in math and physics, but because he'd had a dumbassed stupid nincompoop of a power-lusting little psychopath as a university professor who disliked the fact Einstein didn't suck up to him, this stupid s.o.b. gave Einstein poor references for the next 6 years after he got out of college, so Einstein ended up working as a patent clerk in a patent office.   It was only after this power-crazed little fascist of a psychopathic professor croaked that Einstein finally was able to get a job teaching physics and math in a college.  By then, he had already invented the special theory of relativity and become renowned to other physicists, but even while that former professor of his was alive, he couldn't get around the bad references that jerk continued giving him.  It had to wait till his former professor kicked the bucket for him to get a job in what he should immediately have been able to get a job in.

Mozart didn't fit in to the typical ways of kissing up to musical authority in his day.  He didn't defer.  How could he?  The music just came to him, and he wrote it down and played it on his piano, and it just flowed out of him.  That was what he was, a musician and composer, just as Einstein was a physicist and mathematician.

So when I read idiotic postings saying punishment, retribution, top-down hierarchical discipline, is "the way" to "educate" children, I want to puke.

The best book I ever read on education was a book called, Summerhill:  A Radical Approach to Child-rearing.  It was written by the great English educator, A. S. Neill.  Some of y'all might, with intellectual profit, get ahold of it and read it.

Another interesting  book I read was the psychologist, Urie Bronfenbrenner's, book, Two Worlds of Childhood:  U.S.A. v. U.S.S.R.  Bronfenbrenner visited the Soviet Union and lived there in the 1970s and wrote this book comparing the personalities of children in the former Soviet Union with the personalities of children in the U.S.A.  I think his book  was kind of interesting, and it says something about the problems with the economic structure of the United States' capitalist system, and how that has malignant and evil and negative influences on the education of children in our country.

Another interesting book to read is, No Contest:  How We Lose in Our Race to Win, by the social scientist, Alfie Kohn.  He analyzed the problems with competition and a competitive society and what competitiveness does to the personalities and abilities to learn of children, and also simply the abilities of a society based on competitiveness to operate.

I'd suggest trying to get ahold of them and read them.

--Allan

I heartilly agree with everything you said up to the last paragraph.  I once gave a presentation to several classes of high school seniors.  One kid just put his head down and went to sleep.  My presentation turned to the rewards of self-determination and so I posted myself over the sleeping youth and pontificated on, causing his classmates to chuckle.

After class, his teacher told me that the boy's father had been arrested and jailed for drugs, it was understood his mother was addicted too. The youth had once been a good student but had lost interest: too much interference from home.  The last thing that child needed was to be sent away from school to his ignorant parents. School was probably the only thing holding him together.  In just a year, he was  no longer his parents' problem. He became yours and mine.

I think there has to be room for educators to treat the students as whole people with real life situtation they are living in. Though I think all of what you said above that paragraph is right on. I don't think we can fault the impulse to nurture students---isn't that what education is about.

You can't check a mailbox from work?  I think that schools using the internet to communicate with parents is the approopriate thing to do and a wonderful new tool for both.

The parent's role is to actively expect the child to participate in school: to be available to reinforce participation.  If you are doing a good job at that, there will be no need for communication to and fro.

From what this teacher says, too many kids come to school believing themselves free to not participate.  The only solution is with their parents.  No duress the school can appy will suffice.