pazooter Blogic

Teachers in the Corner by pazooter Everybody seems to know now; it's the teachers' fault. And it doesn't seem that anything can be done to persuade the public mind to view it otherwise. After all, in the business world it's fairly written in stone: If you want higher quality products, get higher quality, better-skilled workers. It's obvious. To improve our national failing in education we must first and foremost improve the quality and skills of our teachers! And what do we hear from our teachers about all this? Grumbling! Oh? Members of the same profession who educated this untamed, unexplored, back-woods country and turned it into a land of innovation and invention, who inspired and trained the scientists who went on to send man to the moon and back, who are responsible for developing the finest, most envied university system in the world, are complaining about becoming better trained? There are those who would have us believe all this grumbling is simply an

Righting Rote by pazooter Rote learning has acquired a bad name in the United States. But is learning by rote , the process whereby students are made to memorize without consideration for comprehension, the baby that got thrown out with the bathwater? Historically, it's the Chinese who perfected the talent for rote learning . The master would give the statement to be learned and the entire class, in unison, would chant back the exact statement. Again and again and again until they had it memorized. Over the centuries it generally served them well. The downside was that, while Chinese students became highly knowledgeable and skilled in their cultural arts and professions, creative thinking was not, with some important exceptions, a common forte. It appears that in the United States, rote learning went the way of knuckle-whacks and butt-whumpings. Well-financed experts (i.e., not teachers) determined that comprehension was lacking and targeted most forms of force-fe

It doesn't matter much which news source you listen to, they're all addicted to the, “ Experts say.... ” gimmick. “Security experts say malicious hackers have....” (CNN) “...what some experts say is a growing fear....” (FOX) And on and on ad nauseam. Undoubtedly they have well-explained reasons for doing this. One excuse is that much of their audience does not particularly care to be bothered by such details as sourcing. Much of their audience prefers to believe that the news personalities they read or listen to are themselves the experts who say.... The corporate news industry is very aware of this. “The most trusted name in news” is a CNN slogan often repeated. To their credit, they don't falsely advertise that they can actually be trusted to report honest facts. Instead they, like all other major news networks, have invested accountant-scrutinized monies into promoting their talking heads as celebrities. And they've hired the best stage designers, graphic artists, an