🚀 go-pugleaf

The response of Dennis Showers to Wes Davis's weeds and roses message is
exactly what  I have come to expect from the "education
professionals."  Wes is right, and he has obviously stepped on some
toes.  I applaud him.

Showers demands studies and evidence for
Davis's assertions:  the professional educator bases his judgements on
well-researched studies, never on anecdotal evidence.  Why then does
Showers *repeatedly* cite anecdotal evidence in his diatribe?  Let me
give examples.  (1)  Showers claims that America has been a leader in
technology because scientists like Einstein fled here from unsafe
countries.  He never cites studies which calculate the extent to which
American technology has been influenced by immigrants.  He is only
guessing.   (By the way, can anyone name a contribution Einstein made to
American *technology* after he got here?)  (2) Showers claims to know
personally floods of foreigners just dying to come here.  Sounds
anecdotal to me.  Where are the studies to show that a substantial
fraction of foreign physicists, or anyone else, wants to come here?  (3)
Everyone has heard of those educational studies that reveal the
ignorance of the average American student by showing that many of them
don't know _____. The blank is usually filled in with some fact from
geography or history.  Showers claims to invalidate this whole genre of
studies with -- what else? -- anecdotal evidence.  Yes, some students
admitted to an interviewer  that they feigned ignorance or hadn't really
done their best work on one of those tests.  Showers warns us, "Let's be
careful about these claims."   I have a warning of my own:  Beware of
schools full of students who either make a "mistake" trying to spot the
largest geographical fea
ture on the planet or who are so sarcastic that they won't answer a
straightforward question.  I want to see a study showing what fraction
of students have to be interviewed one-on-one before they can work up
the concentration needed to identify such geographical details such as
the Pacific Ocean.

Showers and Davis are using "social" in different
ways.  I really don't think Davis is complaining about social goals such
as equipping students to participate in a democracy.

Showers misses
Davis's point about "warm fuzzies."  I believe Davis's complaint is
directed at the stupidity of heterogeneous grouping and the idiotic
theory behind it -- not at teachers who make "warm fuzzies' their
primary mission.   Davis's point is that heterogeneous grouping forces
teachers to teach only rote skills because that is all that weak
students can handle; therefore, the brighter students are cheated out of
a challenging curriculum.  I know that I am flaming here, but I am
puzzled at how thumpingly wrong Showers is about Davis's *main point*:
did my computer just not receive the part of this message that dealt
with the unfairness of heterogeneous grouping for bright students?
Davis is not being an elitist to want schools to sort students by
ability:  he is simply speaking out for the students who are cheated by
schools that don't.  I  beg of everyone out there not to try to claim
that cooperative learning -- read that, "communal ignorance" -- is the
solution to the heterogeneous classroom:  only the hopelessly naive
don't know that CL in the *mixed classroom* is a way to get the brighter
kids either to tutor the weaker kids (no, I don't see that as beneficial
to the brighter child) or to do their work for them.

If Showers doesn't believe that there are weeds, then he had a better teaching
assignment than most teachers I know.  Perhaps he should visit my college prep
physics class in which most of the students (seniors)
cannot convert from cubic centimeters to cubic decimeters:  they've all
had at least Algebra II and, of course, are using calculators.  It is
not because they haven't been led by the hand through many examples of
similar conversions and not because they haven't done similar problems
"hands-on."  It isn't because they haven't done basic measurement in
physical science and in chemistry.  What's wrong?  THEY DON'T GIVE A
DAMN ABOUT SCHOOL.  THEY ARE WEEDS.  Dennis Showers can get as defensive
as he likes about the American high school student, but it won't change
 the fact that a distressingly high percentage of them are leaving
school with next to nothing under their belts academically.  It also
will not change that fact that at some point -- I think at least by
ninth grade -- schools better separate the students who want to learn
from those who don't or NOBODY is going to do any learning.

R. Lee Blankenship-Brown
Pelion, S.C.
A.C. Flora HIgh School
Columbia,  S.C.
lblankenshipbrown@scarolina.edu