Maggie's Farm

Do tell. England is having education problems. In Germany, the schools send the dumb ones off to trade school in the 7th grade.... too bad, parents, your brat is dumb...off you go now.

ha ha. If you don't eat your meat, how can you have any pudding? Much less some nice liberal arts.
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Gringo,

My daughter graduated with a degree in Justice/Forensics with the intention of working for the DOJ or the FBI. Because she had three years to kill - they won't accept her until she's 27 - she decided to go to grad school for a degree in teaching. She emails every night and tells me about her classes and adds that they seem sort of meaningless. I can attest to that after twenty years of teaching and having to take ED 501 courses. Those professors are from another planet and several times, the entire group of secondary teachers walked out of those classes. Anyway, my daughter is doing her practicum in a 2nd grade class and mentioned that the teacher liked group work. Elementary teachers tend to like it because they need the break, but the majority used groups to ease the burden of the intensely diverse levels of intelligence at that level of schooling. My daughter is extremely sweet and accepting of everyone, and she is what schools type "Gifted & talented". In every group she was stuck in throughout her years of elementary and grammar school, she had the trouble makers, the idiots, and the slugs. She didn't complain, but I know she despaired.

Last night we talked about turning students loose in a group to work, and we talked of her experience, and I told her that in twenty years of teaching tenth and twelfth grade, I never put the kids in a group. They were already in a group - my class, and we rocked. Admittedly, the students were in appropriate levels, unlike elementary school, but we both agreed that group 'learning' was a farce and served only to foster dependence on others to do the 'learning'.

(I got fired-up over this one... :) Sheesh, no bigger idiots than college education professors. They don't live in the real world.
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Disaster is right. No more of a disaster than on the teachers who had to constantly keep up with multi-levels of work. Maddening. There was still some of that around in the mid-eighties when I started, but only in elementary and grammar school.

As for Horace's comment about adults eager to learn... My daughter has had many classes with adults in them, and several classes had Iraq veterans in them. She said the presence of the adult students changed everything as they were excellent models for those who value learning. One very interesting comment from her was that after one or two classes, everyone forgot age and became friends. She said the whole class would often go out for ice cream or coffee after class and all got into being silly or serious ... They valued each other as partners in learning I guess is the best way to put it.
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