<p>Dbate, I’d suggest volunteering to read at the schools in New Haven. Median household income is under $40,000. Can you imagine running a household for under $40,000 a year? Your room and board for eight months probably runs about $10,000. Can you imagine paying for a family of four or five, an automobile to get to work, clothes, heat, electricity, phone, etc. on $40K or less?</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Dyslexics. High IQ dyslexics often don’t “read at grade level” but have exceptionally high comphrehension and cognitive skills. If given enough time to read the materials they can outscore the best and the brightest. Do you hold back a kid who is brighter than 99% of his/her class simply because they read slowly and hence cannot score “at grade level” on on a state’s timed standardized test? Do you really believe what you write sometimes?</p>
<p>I think the “national standards” issue is about what should be the minimal expectations at each grade. It’s not about gifted kids or LD kids. </p>
<p>As an example, Imagine if you have to move to different parts of the country throughout those elementary years. The article cites making sure fourth graders are able to multiply decimals. One school teaches multiplying decimals in 4th grade while another hasn’t even started to work on basic multiplication skills. This happens! We call that problem: “holes in their education”. The student was never exposed to certain skills and concepts. By making the curriculum “standard” avoids the issue.</p>
<p>Thanks for opening the thread. Here is a link to the Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSSI) website: </p>
<p>[Common</a> Core State Standards Initiative](<a href=“http://www.corestandards.org/]Common”>http://www.corestandards.org/) </p>
<p>What do all of you think of those standards, in comparison to what your children have studied in high school and before?</p>
<p>I’m confused, why did you change your posting ID? </p>
<p>We aren’t talking about AP curriculum here, we’re discussing textbooks used in everyday class situations. Most of the students in Texas aren’t taking AP classes. All of them are using this text. And many students who don’t live in Texas, who had no part in electing the schoolboard of Texas and no say in its textbook rules are affected by this. </p>
<p>You appear to base your opinions either on your own unrepresentative experience, or on your personal thoughts. If you are in Dbate, I hope that’s not the way they taught you to prepare an argument. Again, I can only hope that with time you will mature and learn that just because something is true for you doesn’t make it universally applicable. </p>
<p>And since you’re such a strong proponent of self-education, I hope you will look up some of the studies on inequities in Texas education or American education that are freely available to you in the Yale library.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>You are using a sample of two students at one of the nation’s most elite schools to make a sweeping generalization about how AP curriculum is standardized. As a counterpoint, let me mention the AP Math AB courses at a local high school. There are two teachers, each teaching several sections of AP AB. One teacher’s classes consistently get 4’s and 5’s on the exam. The other teacher does a poor job of covering material, and invariably introduces afterschool and weekend “tutoring” sessions in the second semester so he can cover material he’s not yet touched in class. His students do very poorly on the AP. Standardization doesn’t mean much when a teacher doesn’t hew to the curriculum, or when the administration doesn’t weigh in to make sure it’s being followed.</p>
<p>Or, consider the AP courses at D1’s school. There are AP courses within the magnet, and AP’s at the resident school. D1 sat in on one of the resident school AP courses, and reported back that it was far less rigorous, and covering material at a slower pace. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I will go out and buy a hat for the purposes of eating it if you can find a single professor at Yale who agrees with this. :)</p>
<p>Dbater, a lot of the time it’s really hard to tell what’s really you and what’s a put-on. I really hope this Marie Antoinette impersonation (“Let them self-study!”) is a put-on. Otherwise, it would be way too depressing. Because you are really inappropriately generalizing from your own experience to the lives of others, without acknowledging even for a moment how extraordinary your own experience is, both in terms of the gifts you were given at conception, and in terms of the opportunities and nurture you have received from others as you grew up. </p>
<p>If everyone was like you, everyone could self-study their APs and we wouldn’t have to devote a minute of time to worrying about educational policy. But everyone isn’t like you – you are part of the luckiest 0.1% of all human beings, generally, and I don’t even know how to place you among African-Americans, except to speculate that one wouldn’t need to rent a big room to hold a party for you and all of the other people with similar gifts. I know that you have worked hard, and sacrificed, to get where you are, but most of the world doesn’t get to go to Yale even if they work twice as hard as you do.</p>
<p>Again, laughter from the peanut gallery. You go find Summers, and ask him if he agrees that anyone can learn math and science on their own. Not just someone who is a professional academic. Show him that exact line you typed.</p>
<p>I’ll wait.</p>
<p>Well, as I can see we’re not going to agree on this point, bring this topic back to its original purpose, discussing national standards, even if it is possible for the majority of students to learn without the aid of a teacher at as high of a level as they would with a teacher, it wll be good for them to have national standards so that they at least know what they’re supposed to be learning.</p>
<p>It’s clear from posts 25ff. from Dbate/Dbater that he/she lacks the perspective (not to mention the open-mindedness) to understand fully the role that formal education plays in overall cognitive development. It’s immaterial whether the poster does or does not see the specific influences of that formal education, or whether he/she assumes that “everyone,” “anyone” can self-study. The fact is, outcomes are different; influences are different; and the progression from one level of cognition to another is not something that is visible and dissectible. But it is observable by those who study such.</p>
<p>The poster is hardly an authority on the role of formal education in the development of the student, in his/her readiness for the next grade level and higher-level thinking, etc. I take none of the poster’s remarks seriously, having read all of them.</p>
<p>As to the feasibility of national standards, they are indeed feasible, and other nations have them. Because of our complex multi-state system, they will be more complex to implement in the U.S., and will take greater time. I for one never said they would be immediate. </p>
<p>I encourage the poster to be more open-minded in general in order to get the maximum benefit out of higher education. Perhaps he/she believes that professors are also superfluous, but that superior attitude will not benefit the academics, not to mention character development.</p>
<p>No, I don’t take them seriously, however vigorously you want to keep posting them. I believe in addressing posters. It doesn’t mean I have to agree and value all of their opinions, particularly when they’re based on such subjective and limited viewpoints.</p>
<br>
<br>
<p>I understand what you mean by self-learning. There is a relatively small percentage of the population that can do that. I’m a self-learner and learned more without college than with. My son self-taught himself to read at 2 and self-taught himself algebra at six.</p>
<p>Guess what? Our daughter didn’t even though she had the same rich learning environment.</p>
<p>People’s gifts, talents and abilities vary widely. It may be that the first six years determines the rest of your life educationally. It’s very hard to teach those that have been environmentally starved for the first six years of their life. Or that have nutritional deficiencies or health problems related to mothers that didn’t take care of their bodies while they were pregnant.</p>
<p>It’s a lot easier for older people to appreciate these problems as they see the effects of how they raise their kids and as they see the results of their peers. Furthermore our bodies deteriorate and it’s a lot easier to understand how physical deprivation can stunt the learning environment.</p>
<p>None of this information is new. I’m sure that there are plenty of books at Yale that could tell you this. Books on nursing, development, psychology and social work would be a good place to start some research on this topic.</p>
<br>
<br>
<p>We homeschooled our kids and I’ve been involved in the homeschooling
community for fifteen years and have heard about a tremendous variety
of teaching approaches. If you kill the interest in learning at an
early age, no amount of tutoring availability will matter. I am a great
fan of self-learning and tutoring instead of teaching but it clearly
doesn’t work for everyone.</p>
<br>
<br>
<p>My son goes to school in a city similar to where you are. I read the
daily arrest logs in the local paper. Domestic violence, gangs in the
high-school, guns in the high-school, randome shootings in
neighborhoods, easy availability of drugs. I grew up in your typical
poor single-parent minority household. What you say sounds easy to do
from your perspective but you haven’t lived the other side.</p>
<br>
<br>
<p>What do you do when your parents are druggies?</p>
<br>
<br>
<p>I find it disturbing that you can’t see that inequalities have a large
effect on outcomes.</p>
<p>It is natural for parents to want the best for their kids and they will
do what they can as they are a primary responsibility. The wealthy usually
have access to the best and I think that the understanding of the best
has improved in our information age. The rich can become richer because
their access to information, advisors, services, political control has
grown.</p>
<p>We also condone destructive behavior that wasn’t condoned in the past.
And we support the consequences of that behavior reaping the results
from moral hazard.</p>
<br>
<br>
<p>The best hope is good parents. All of the other stuff is very hard to
do without good parents.</p>
<p>Hmmmm. This thread has been fun, but I think everyone’s posts are going to be vanishing soon. And that’s probably a good thing.</p>
<p>"but I think everyone’s posts are going to be vanishing soon. " why?
is there something you know that we don’t?</p>
<p>No, not at all. It’s just that when a whole bunch of posts vanish, then posts referring to them usually vanish, too, and there’s been practically nothing else in this thread. If you started reading it now, it would be totally incoherent.</p>
<p>oh, i just scanned this thread again and see what you mean. I guess someone has been given a “time out”…</p>
<p>Well, I am one who just found this thread and have no clue what posts vanished or who might have been posting under 2 names. Dbate? Dbater (can’t fine any such poster). Anyone willing to post the cliff notes version of this thread?</p>