Eliminate high school honors classes to increase diversity?

@Oylok,

Quote:

I have seen some teachers break through those motivational barriers. Usually they are fanatical Christian types who are determined to chase after that 100th sheep like the fate of the world is at stake. Their eyes seem to glow with a divine light

And "Teach for America" holy rollers remain motivated for a few months or years generally, only the research indicates that this motivation does not translate into success in the classroom. Lack of success does them in in short order though.

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@hawkeye10,

hawkeye10 wrote:

Oylok wrote:
I have seen some teachers break through those motivational barriers. Usually they are fanatical Christian types who are determined to chase after that 100th sheep like the fate of the world is at stake. Their eyes seem to glow with a divine light

And "Teach for America" holy rollers remain motivated for a few months or years generally, only the research indicates that this motivation does not translate into success in the classroom. Lack of success does them in in short order though.

All I have is anecdotal evidence, but the guy I'm thinking of had been in the game 40 years. He taught students basic remedial Maths, and the next semester they would come to me ready to soak up much tougher material like stats and symbolic logic. His zeal was contagious or something.

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@Setanta,

Quote:

Unless one is familiar with how poor people live, i don't think one can understand the disadvantages under which they labor.

Like the fact that many of these "lazy" students have worked all night at shitty jobs just to help feed their families?

Good for nothing punks sleeping through class and not turning in their homework.

They're simply ruining things for the rest of us (wink, wink, nudge, nudge).

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@boomerang,

I think the concern here is not so much to make them feel good in school but rather to motivate as many of them as possible to strive to attain their real potential and thereby get out of that situation. Providing them with the ready excuse that is someone elae's fault and thereby lulling them into complacency is certainly no favor to them - or to anyone faced with such difficulties.

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@boomerang,

Quote:

Like the fact that many of these "lazy" students have worked all night at shitty jobs just to help feed their families?

Good for nothing punks sleeping through class and not turning in their homework.

They're simply ruining things for the rest of us (wink, wink, nudge, nudge).

If a well-meaning student sleeps through class it is not the teacher's job to tolerate the aberrant behaviour. We need to ask in that situation what can be done to prevent the well-meaning child from dozing off. One answer might be: fix the system so that children don't have to work "all night at shitty jobs just to help feed their families."

There was once a concept in America called the 40-hour work-week. Surely it is utterly inappropriate for the workload of a child (job plus school) to exceed 40 hours? I know that 80 hours of misery a week seems to be the new paradigm for how to live one's life, even as a child, but I think that's wrong.

But this is not an argument for eliminating Honours. If one group is being forced to do something ridiculous like work through the whole night, it makes even less sense to throw them in with students who have the evening to study and the night to sleep.

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@georgeob1,

Quote:

Providing them with the ready excuse that is someone elae's fault...

You mean the ready excuse of ... the truth? If a sixteen-year-old student has to stay up all night working at Arby's to pay for food, is it his own fault?

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@Oylok,

Quote:

Surely it is utterly inappropriate for the workload of a child (job plus school) to exceed 40 hours?

Actually, that's unrealistic. I probably worked 60-70 hours a week on school work while in high school if you count class time. Still, it shouldn't change my argument much.

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@Oylok,

Quote:

If a sixteen-year-old student has to stay up all night working at Arby's to pay for food, is it his own fault?

No, and if he really needs to be their to pay for necessities rather than for a nice car or something then we have all failed this kid. However, we should not compound the problem by ruining schools by removing standards because he cant cut the standard and we feel sorry for him and dont want to tell him that he is washed up. Maintaining the integrity of the education process should be sacred, neither social engineering projects nor bleeding hearts should be allowed to ruin the school.

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I wish people wouldn't continue to believe such across the board generalizations about various populations.

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I'm new to da face, so hi everyone. Let me tell you a little about myself. I'm an accomplished individual and I can tackle any course I come across.

This is the information box of the facebook page of one of those 'lazy' inner city minority kids. I don't think she was talking about school though (course) I think she means life.
And believe you me - she will.
And that's why it's rewarding and fun to teach someone like her. And there are a lot like her. We just don't ever hear very much about them.

And in terms of kids not getting sleep - the three students I most struggled with in that respect were from upper middle class white families - one was addicted to his computer games and played them to all hours of the night- his mother was a textile/portrait artist and his father was a dentist.
Another was on drugs - pills that he stole out his dad's medicine bag (his father was a doctor - his mom had moved out and he cooked himself a box of spaghetti every night which he ate alone.
And the other kid had major depression- I can't remember what his parents did - but they lived in a nice house. I used to have to make home visits and I'd go to one kid's house who lived in the projects whose grandmother would meet me at the door and make me a cup of tea and then I'd go to this kid's house and you could fit the other kid's whole apartment into this kid's entry hall, but he was always the only one home.

So yeah - all systems on every level are prone to breakage.

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@aidan,

And the reason I mentioned that is to say that in school a teacher can only control and change what s/he can control and change.
You can't control anything else but how you teach the kids. You can't control their home life- you can't control society's response to them-you can't control their ancestry or cultural history and what scars it may have left.

But you can meet them where they are and adjust your methods as best you can to meet their needs.

That's what I'd call the adults in the situation not making excuses to explain their own reluctance to exert themselves and change.

And sometimes no matter how hard everyone tries it's still not especially successful - but sometimes it really, really is.
But even when it's not - at least you can say you tried.

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@Setanta,

Quote:

Apart from the silliness of lumping all people from Asia into a single group and talking about culture

Your response to hawkeye (I seldom read his whining posts) reminds me of a member of this forum who would continually post that Asian kids do better in school than kids of any ethnic group born here or children who emigrated from other parts of the world.

I was teaching at Arlington (MA) High School at the time, so I began watching the honor roll. Two percent of the students were Asian. Very few made the honor roll. There was a girl who took AP calculus during her junior year and earned an A although she continued to be in ESL classes.

Now, several of the more conservative members of this forum routinely condemn ESL classes. While I never thought they were perfect and while I dislike the materials used and the uninspired methods of teaching ESL, I recognized then that the classes are necessary.

I currently teach developmental English at a community college and I see foreign born students wrestling with English. Among the difficulties Asians face with English are verb tenses, articles and prepositions.

Furthermore, Asian students are not necessarily well-behaved in the classroom. The younger brother of the girl mentioned above was routinely suspended for his behavior.

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@Oylok,

Some of those students have to work. Some are even the major bread-winners for the family . . . their behavior is not aberrant.

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@plainoldme,

Quote:

Some of those students have to work. Some are even the major bread-winners for the family . . . their behavior is not aberrant.

POM...
Are you suggesting sleeping through class is "normal and accepted behaviour"?

When a child is of school age, his or her job is to be in school. A child has no business supporting his/her family in a country that calls itself "developed". I am not blaming the child, as the child is not ultimately at fault. However, a teacher simply cannot be expected to tolerate it when students sleep through lectures during the day. (After all, the thread is about K-12 children, I think, rather than the grown-up students that your user profile suggests you deal with.)

Sorry about the late reply, but I drifted away for a while.

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@Oylok,

How in the world could you have pulled out that I suggested sleeping in class was normal and accepted behaviour?

When I read this, I immediately thought of one of my students, who is older than 16. I refer to the section of Remedial English that he is as "night of the living dead" because having a discussion in that class is next to impossible.

However, he works the overnight shift at a McDonalds and recently began working for UPS as well because his mother broke her arm which is currently held in place with steel pins.

Because I teach English and because we, the instructors, begin by asking kids to write a narrative essay on something familiar -- why I decided to go to college; my most important possession; a life changing event -- we are presented with stories that often make us cry. For two of my students, their most valued possession is the urn of parental ashes on a shelf in the living room while a third values the wedding ring his father gave to him after his mother's funeral. Then, there is the girl from Africa who came to the US to go to school and have a profession because the civil war in her country continues to prevent her from achieving her goals.

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@aidan,

Quote:

You can't control anything else but how you teach the kids. You can't control their home life- you can't control society's response to them-you can't control their ancestry or cultural history and what scars it may have left.

I'm sorry you believe that. You are incorrect. You can choose authors that speak to varying cultural histories, and lead class discussions that give neglected value to students whose ethnicities have rarely been respected in class; you can call parents of children who are struggling and speak positively about them - let their parents hear things thay haven't before from a teacher - and form partnerships with the parents toward increasing their child's success... you can instruct your aide to spend time firming up that child's weaknesses,...or do it yourself at lunch or recess; you can be a smiling face to that kid - maybe the first one he's had in the classroom.

You can help them learn to control their response to society.

Teachers are POWERFUL in the lives of most students if they will only choose to exert themselves toward kids that need them.

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@Lash,

Quote:

Teachers are POWERFUL in the lives of most students if they will only choose to exert themselves toward kids that need them.

occassionally true, and when it does happen it makes teaching worthwhile, and the fact that it is so rare for teachers to have the great positive effects on kids is the reason that teaching is a noble profession. Good teachers keep chipping away hoping for the next success, which might be years in coming.

For the most part you dont see your students enough, dont have enough sway over them because few will ever hold you in high enough esteem to care what you think/say/do, to have a great positive effect on them. Most of those students whom you think think you walk on water are just brown nosers BSing you in hopes of a better grade then they deserve. As my 4.0 during her HS career middle daughter (now a pre med freshman) told me yesterday, good students learn to manipulate their teachers, which is pitifully easy to do, and telling teachers what they want to hear is a big part of the game. And before you tell me that I have a crappy daughter according to her all the best students do it with the exception of a few of the Asians.

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@Lash,

Yeah - I think I covered all that when I talked about what you could control which is your time in school with the kids, and how/what you teach them, the way you treat them, the example you set, etc.

But yeah - you reinterpret what I said and make it negative - as you continually seem determined to do.

Don't worry about me - okay? You tend to your knitting and I'll tend to mine.
Thanks.

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@hawkeye10,

Quote:

As my 4.0 during her HS career middle daughter (now a pre med freshman) told me yesterday, good students learn to manipulate their teachers, which is pitifully easy to do, and telling teachers what they want to hear is a big part of the game.

One of the many reasons I used to love courses in the hard sciences and mathematic is that your grade had very very little to do with how the teachers in those subjects view you.

The answers were either right or wrong and the approach was either correct or wrong.

Only once was my grade effected by my not being a teacher pet in my opinion in those subjects when a mathematic instructor cheerfully and gleefully declare that one problem on a test would earn me zero credit even those the answer was one hundred percent correct.

If memory serve me correctly I had apply Laplace transformation to the problem instead of the method he had taught us to use.

I had always regretted not kicking up one hell of a fuss over the issue.

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I am new to this thread but I would like to express a concern of locking out non-honor students from taking advance classes if they would care to do so.

My interest during high school focuses strongly in the areas of mathematic and the hard sciences and I eagerly sign up for all such courses.

My ranking in those subjects was never below third place and often first and yet overall I was a B student or so.

One guide counselor even told my father that I was not nearly as bright as I thought I was being an over achiever.

My father was used to that aspect of my personality as I found his slide ruler and taught myself to used it in the fifth or six grade and they would buy me secondhand books at my request such as old versions of the Handbook of Chemistry or even better the chem./physic handbook the CRC. I also would rewire the house and some of the household electronic at an early age. They would keep a large numbers of extra household fuses on hand.

To this day I can remember how happy I was that my parents for one of my birthdays purchase a Vacuum tube VOM so I guess they was not too annoy at me for blowing all those fuses.

In any case, one of the very great joys for me at the time was beating the hell out of the honor students in those subjects.

Even pre-high school kids sometimes possess special abilities in only one aspect of learning and I see little used of locking such out of the advance classes.

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@aidan,

Here's how it works.

You give your opinion on a public forum. People respond either in agreement or disagreement.

I disagreed with your statement. No need for me to "make it negative," I just disagreed with it.

I'm not "worried about you," but if I disagree -or agree- I reserve the right to say so.

You listed a few things that you don't feel you can change. I said I think you CAN have a powerful effect on those things. Period. I suggest ignoring me if you can't handle people whyo disagree with you.

Awesome, instructive post, Bill - thanks!!

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Eliminate high school honors classes to increase diversity?

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