Today's students: superachievers or illiterates?

Parents Forum
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<p>There are some articles about how awful today's students are. There was the recent study saying that the majority of college graduates are functionally illiterate. There are the complaints from professors about students who don't know grade school grammar, don't know when the Civil War was fought, etc.</p>

<p>On the other hand, I've also read how today's students make my old salutatorian/AP Scholar with Honor self from back in the day look like Ferris Bueller in comparison. I was a superachiever back when Bush was president (Bush Senior, that is), but today's superachievers HAVE to win the Nobel Prize, be all-state varsity sport champions, be the next Mother Theresa, be valedictorian, AND earn a perfect 2400 on the SAT (even retaking a 2350 in an attempt to do so).</p>

<p>Help me resolve these paradoxes. Or is student achievement (and the lack thereof) as polarized as political partisanship?</p>

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<p>I have a friend who is an English Professor at a CC. He gets very frustrated that many of the kids do not have the basic skills required to even graduate HS, but somehow, they did. I think these reports are based on this type of problem.</p>

3

<p>I don't see a paradox. You can have a few who do well (in spite of the system) and a majority who don't. You can have some who get tutored or have the gumption to learn by themselves and then everyone else.</p>

<p>Of course, people talk about grade inflation and the way the SAT had to be renormed (or whatever they called it) because scores were going down. That is, if my old SAT were rescored today, I would have scored higher. For instance, it used to be you couldn't get an 800 if you got any question wrong. (I missed one on the math ...) Now you can.</p>

<p>The only countervailing trend I know of are AP courses and their increasing popularity. But then some people complain about how the quality of those isn't what it used to be, either.</p>

<p>The competition for elite schools is higher today. But I think this is a function of the higher number of students applying, not that the applicant pool has gotten stronger.</p>

<p>The reason kids don't know things like grammar or whatever is because these things may not even be taught. Modern pedagogical ideology wants to pursue the chimera of "higher order thinking skills" divorced from factual knowledge. I don't think kids are any stupider than they used to be; the schools have changed.</p>

<p>For example, perhaps you have heard of the math wars, traditional approaches favored by mathematicians and many parents versus the "fuzzy math" or "new new math" favored by educators? <a href="http://www.mathematicallycorrect.com%5B/url%5D"&gt;www.mathematicallycorrect.com&lt;/a> I think you get the same sort of problems in other subjects as well. Read some Hirsch sometime, like "The Schools We Need and Why We Don't Have Them."</p>

<p>I took my daughter out of public school in favor of homeschooling because, for one thing, they refused to teach her grammar and the like. There have been actual news stories locally about teachers who catch flack from their superiors for actually teaching the subject!</p>

<p>There has to be some reason that homeschoolers, mostly untrained in education, manage to consistently get higher standardized test scores.</p>

<p>I'm talking averages here, not blasting anyone's ability and knowledge based on where they happen to go to school. There are some smart and highly accomplished young people in all sorts of educational situations.</p>

<p>I do have to wonder, though. After two years of homeschooling my daughter -- who hadn't been doing well in public school at all -- she took a summer course at Brown following 9th grade. The instructor wrote an evaluation saying that her writing and other skills surpassed those of most Brown freshmen. All I had done was actually instruct her in grammar, vocabulary, and writing, the subjects the public school had refused to address because they weren't "in the curriculum" and "research shows" it was best not to teach directly.</p>

4

<p>DianeR, You make some very good points. There is less emphasis on grammar, punctuation, syntax, etc., than when I went to school. I am old enough to have gone to Catholic schools back in the days when students spent a lot of time diagramming sentences. There were many things wrong with my elementary education, and in some ways the public schools today are better, but I did learn to write clearly despite an average class size of 60. </p>

<p>I have two sons in our local (excellent by the usual standards) public school system. My older son (7th grade) is having a tough year. There are two problems. First, the school groups students heterogeneously and persists in the fiction that everyone can learn together. The only exception is math, and my son is happy in a "superaccelerated" 8th grade math course that is covering 9th grade material. Every other class contains the entire spectrum of public school kids, ranging from bright kids to special ed kids to disruptive kids. Second, most of the bright kids are overly focused on grades (as opposed to learning for its own sake). My son is irritated by the constant refrain, "Is this going to be on the test?" One girl even chastised the French teacher for spending class time teaching a French song, thereby taking time away from material that would be on the test. Third (OK; more than two problems), the teachers are under the gun in terms of preparing for standardized tests and covering material. My son has been discouraged from asking questions in class that go beyond the prescribed material because, in the words of one teacher, "Even 5 minutes out of a 40-minute class is too much" to take from the planned curriculum. Actually, my son's questions usually are not really tangential, they are on point but go more deeply into the material. He also sometimes questions the teachers' statements, and one teacher in particular takes offense at this. I hasten to point out that my son is considered one of the most polite and well-mannered students in the middle school. </p>

<p>I've strayed from the topic. To get back to it, my older son is probably going to be a good candidate for a selective school (his dream, at the moment, is to go to MIT). His grammar, syntax, punctuation, spelling, and vocabulary are quite good. (His SAT scores, taken at age 12 for CTY, with no preparation, were 640 math; 610 verbal; 490 writing. Most of the writing points came from the multiple-choice questions. His score on the essay was 3/12, and they were generous! He knew that CTY was not going to look at the writing score, and he put down just a few sentences.) I believe that he picked up these skills from voracious reading, and this is probably true of many kids who learn them despite the lack of emphasis in public schools.</p>

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<p>Yes, some kids can pick up certain skills by osmosis. For instance, they read and this gives them vocabulary, grammar, and the ability to write. Or they are lucky enough to have a teacher who will do things outside the system or parents who will teach those skills. Others, unfortunately, don't get taught and thus don't learn.</p>

<p>My daughter started out in special education at age 2 because of severe language delay. She just couldn't pick up language the usual way. It had to be directly taught. When they did so, she learned and steadily caught up academically. Then she got to all mainstreamed classes and little intervention. She still needed help with language skills (I said, they denied) but the school system refused, in the language I quoted earlier.</p>

<p>So, she came home. We studied Latin and English derivatives (which the speech path had recommended against). We studied grammar and spelling (which the school had said is best not to teach directly). She did lots of writing both inside and outside a writing program I found, much more than what was ever done at school (they preferred to assign "stupid little art projects," to use my daughter's words -- and what writing she did was only ever reviewed by fellow students). She read the sorts of higher level fiction and texts that she had been consistently told were too difficult for her.</p>

<p>And two years later, she was writing well. Four years later, her verbal scores on the ACT (unaccommodated) were in the 99th percentile. Funny how kids can learn if they are actually taught.</p>

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<p>
[quote]
have a friend who is an English Professor at a CC. He gets very frustrated that many of the kids do not have the basic skills required to even graduate HS, but somehow, they did.

[/quote]
That may be why the students are at a CC instead of a 4-year college or university. While they made it through hs, their basic skills are too weak for college, so they end up at a CC...</p>

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<p>I believe the study mentioned in the OP was for four year colleges, though, wasn't it?</p>

<p>I've certainly heard of professors complaining at four year places as well. While some at CC may be there because of weak skills, others go there because it is cheaper and/or they want to live at home a bit longer. They transfer to regular colleges later.</p>

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<p>DianeR-</p>

<p>I am a homeschooler, and I have friends who attend private and public schools. When I hear of their coarseload, I am usually very impressed. Yet, if I look at a paper or a thank-you note they wrote, I notice that they really are illiterate. Schools don't teach grammar, and I am constantly correcting (in my head, of course) everyone on tense use and noun-verb agreement. My band teacher (a college graduate) has even used terrible grammar, saying that someone's playing "stunk" when it actually "stank." It drives me nuts.</p>

<p>Most of my friends are university students in college and grad school (and beyond). Maybe I am strange, but I prefer to hang out with people who are intelligent and use good grammar than with high-schoolers who attend fancy prep schools and are "superachievers." </p>

<p>Today's kids might have higher SAT scores than they did fifty years ago, but my parent's generation is, without a doubt, much smarter.</p>

9

<p>I have been a college advisor at a CC
I saw students every quarter who were transfers from 4 year schools, but were having a difficult time academically, and transferred to a CC to bring their grades up.
I also saw students who did very well in high school, at least they were on the honor roll ( gpa 3.50 +) yet they were unable to test into college level math &/or english in the CC.
CC doesn't take math scores or previous classes- everyone has to take place ment test.</p>

<p>Cliff Mass a UW prof has also found skills to be declining

[quote]

Calculus of mediocrity
By Cliff F. Mass</p>

<p>With all the recent discussions regarding the public schools, there is one perspective that has been largely absent: the experiences of those of us in the university community who deal with the end product of K-12 education.</p>

<p>As someone who has taught an introductory atmospheric sciences class for over 20 years, my sad observation, and one seconded by my colleagues in several other departments, is that competency in math and science has declined from roughly the late 1970s until now. Many of us have been forced to "dumb down" our classes, particularly those demanding mathematical skills.</p>

<p>Interestingly, the university gave virtually the same mathematics placement test to all freshmen from the mid-1980s until 2000; students' scores declined during this period, objectively confirming our subjective impressions.</p>

<p>Furthermore, increasing numbers of our students have been forced to take remedial math courses prior to starting the normal college curriculum.</p>

<p>Why have math scores declined? One reason is surely the transition to "Integrated Math" in middle and high schools during the 1980s. Instead of teaching mathematical subjects such as algebra, geometry and trigonometry as coherent subjects, with sufficient time spent to master their principles, "Integrated Math" combines them in a frenetic mix that rapidly jumps between these subjects using lots of pictures and real-life examples.

[/quote]

ttp://seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/PrintStory.pl?document<em>id=2002083521&zsection</em>id=268883724&slug=satrdr06&date=20041106</p>

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<p>Katharos: Where exactly do you think those university and grad students were educated? Probably, most of them went to public or prep schools.</p>

<p>I do think that schools should spend more time on the fundamentals, particularly in the early grades. I had very little serious, formal grammar instruction, and none until middle school, by which time bad habits were hard to break. However, despite some minor problems (I still have some comma/semicolon issues), I believe that I, and most of my friends, speak and write intelligently. I think this ability comes from reading, not from schooling. If you are an avid reader as a child, you will obtain an intuitive sense of how the English language is supposed to sound. If you aren't, no amount of grammar drills will allow you to write really well.</p>

<p>Math is another issue. I remember a friend's teacher being berated for having her class memorize the multiplication tables. Fortunately, my elementary school teachers by and large ignored the new math, and in between connecting unit blocks and drawing dots to form a pictoral representation of multiplying and dividing, we actually learned what we were doingl</p>

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<p>It's always seemed a little odd to me that I learned more about English grammar from my high-school German teacher than from any other teacher I've ever had. Outside of foreign-language courses, the last formal grammar lesson I ever had was in 6th grade - when my teacher spent exactly two days asking us to diagram sentences. She spent quite a bit of time that year teaching vocabulary, but never grammar or sentence structure or that sort of thing.</p>

<p>I should probably also note that I this was not in a "bad" school district, but in a very strong public school system in northern California.</p>

<p>I think my math education was also rather lacking; my elementary-school teachers were very good, having us memorize multiplication tables, do "minute-math drills", etc.; I was ready for pre-algebra by the end of fifth grade but was forced to take sixth-grade "review" math along with the rest of my class. I (almost literally) slept through most of my sixth- and seventh-grade math classes until my algebra teacher in 8th grade and the head of the math department in 9th took pity on me and let me move up to a class where I would be appropriately challenged. However, I can testify that several of my friends who were in the same position at the beginning of middle school are now only average or downright horrible with math, simply because two years of boredom caused them to give up.</p>

<p>I think there are two separate problems: not only are schools not teaching the basics, but they're not challenging the kids who master them early on, and both of those together lead to problems later on.</p>

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<p>At least you were taught arithmetic tables and not told to just use a calculator!</p>

<p>Yes, I know acceleration is as hard to get as remediation ... I had my share of fights over that too. I also am in what is reputed to be one of the best school systems in the country.</p>

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<p>I agree. Even at top liberal arts colleges, students don't always have the basic grammar down, even in rough draft forms. I have seen postings on the Blackboard and attachments from classmates for class presentations. I was mentally correcting their grammar and capitalization. There was even a paper on Jackie Kennedy where the student kept writing "The Whitehouse" when referring to The White House. That phrase was used in her entire 10+ page essay. I was shocked because I worked very hard to transfer into this particular school and expected smart students and more out of them.</p>

<p>Now I'm being ridiculed by my upper level seminar professor for MY writing- which I haven't faced such challenge in four years. The last time I was kicked in the butt for my grammar and language was when I was in AP Euro and my teacher decided that I needed to grasp the basics in order to write well for college. So she and a special ed teacher worked with me in the second semester of my sophomore year. Then I continued those "lessons" of how to write essays well and using proper English in my Honors English class for my junior year. By the end of my junior year, I was ready to be on my own. I still got some writing lessons from English professors in the writing center at Smith during my freshman year- they were incredibly helpful that by the time I wrote my last papers at Smith, I barely used them.</p>

<p>Writing is always works in progress. But there is definitely an issue of getting certain writing and language concepts down before high school graduation. Even I know that my brother, currently a sophomore in high school, needs to get some direct grammar lessons. Sometimes he accidently saves his papers on my laptop and so I see them. I was pretty appalled because I'm a special case compared to him. I am deaf and had language delay (not until I was four or five years old before I really started speaking). So it took me 12 years to catch up with my peers and my language was always worse than my brother, who is hearing and spoke all his life. Now it seems to the opposite... does anyone get my logic here?</p>

<p>I don't know if he was actually ever taught much grammar directly. The last time I had a teacher who taught the entire class was in 8th grade (horror!) and he was pretty notorious for coming down on students very hard about getting grammar right and would spend five weeks teaching use how to use verbs, nouns, proper nouns, prepositions, adverbs, et cetera correctly in a sentence. It was a real boot camp.</p>

<p>Anyway, yes, grammar needs to come back and be reinforced at least every other year so students don't get lazy and remember the rules. As Athena said- some times foreign language teachers are the ones who have to teach students English grammar because they have to explain the differences between English and the language in grammar- like in Spanish, adjectives comes before nouns whereas English nouns come after adjectives, etc. I learned a lot from my Spanish teachers, even in college, about English and they've affected the way I check over my essays. I remember one of my Spanish teachers complaining how the English teachers never taught us indirect and direct objects because none of us understood the meaning!!!</p>

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<p>The difference between kids from the US and those from other Countries is dramatic in my eyes. When we arrived for 9th grade, the "advanced Americans had done algebra the year before. The advanced Asians had done calc. My Asian peers and those from several European countries went to school far longer hours and many more days per year. It showed.</p>

<p>Three years later many of us Americans have caught up with great teaching (and longer hours and more homework). We have total access to our teachers who live among us and it takes learning to a new level. When I volunteer at a local high school I wonder how they can become more of a learning community as opposed to a place where kids go to take some classes and run out the door when the last bell rings.</p>