🚀 go-pugleaf

        A new subscriber to PHYSHARE,  I entered the net during the
conversation initiated by Donald Simanek on the inability (unwillingness?)
of college students to think independently.

        I'm a college teacher of some fifteen years who now teaches full time on
the high school level at Pasadena (CA) High School.  What I observed when I
came to high school teaching astounded me.  The educational system that
placed the United States highest in technology is now dealing with a student
population that mostly thinks we live inside the earth ("we would fall off
if...").

        That our students are so unwilling to think and so unable to
abstract is certainly NOT the fault of incapable former teachers.  Rather,
the problem seems to be that the mission of public schools is no longer
education, but rather
the achieving of the nation's social goals.  We are no longer, for example,
able to separate students into high and low achievers and thereby challenge
the more capable students.  Our charge from the educators (read
non-teachers) is
to "ensure that all students experience success".  In heterogeneously
grouped classes in which a substantial portion of the students can only do
rote, one-step operations, the entire class does only rote, one-step
operations so that the low achievers can feel warm and fuzzy.  Very little
critical thinking gets taught.

        In my AP Physics and AP Calculus classes I often must teach students
how to do fractions because they have been trapped in low achieving classes
in which little was taught.  What's the solution?  I don't know.  As long as
there is money
in abundance for low achieving classes and no money for honors students,
little can change.

        Before teaching high school I thought I knew, because I read the
data.  I didn't know.  Even our best and brightest are being drowned by a
system that tends the weeds rather than the roses, because there are so many
more weeds.  I marvel that some students succeed despite the environment.
Meanwhile, our students still think we live inside the earth.




                                                     Wes Davis