I got stuck into a class for the gifted in 5th and 6th grade (it was a combined class, both grades in the same classroom with the same teacher). In 6th grade they stuck me in the 7th grade math class, and in 8th grade they bussed me to a high school to take freshman algebra.
All of this, from a public school system.
Now in High School, the problem that I noticed wasn't that the students were just slow, it's that they didn't even want to learn. The majority of these students dropped out as soon as they turned 16. Andy Rooney had a rant several years back about the problem of poor performance on standardized tests in American Schools. He nailed the problem right on: You can lead a student to knowledge, but you can't make him/her think. He upset a lot of people when he identified the source of the problem. He said something to the effect of: To get smarter students, we don't need better schools, better teachers, or better classroom materials; We need to start with better parents.
I have to agree. It doesn't do a whole lot of good to tell your kids that a good education is important and then leave it at that. You've got to enforce it and get involved. If your child is doing poorly in school, hey, no TV, no hanging out at the mall with friends, etc. If they want to have fun, they'd better start improving. For a while, they wanted to do away with giving an "F" for "Fail" because they didn't want the students to feel bad. If you do that, where's the motivation for improvement? Positive reinforcement? Sure, it works, but not as well as the shame factor.
FYI - I went to High School in South Phoenix. I'll leave it up to you to guess what ethnic background the majority of the students were. |
