On Wed, 2006-08-30 at 05:15 -0700, Antonio Olivares wrote: > Nowadays, looks like the same thing is happening. > With all that damn testing, and "No Child Left > Behind", teachers are just trying to "rat train" > students to pass the tests. No life skills are > learned. The ironies of this are that we dumb down things, so all can "pass", but we also push high academics on students more than we should (the extremes, with no between). We do both badly. Yet the real basics, which could be taught to nearly everyone, and be useful, get ignored. We can teach kids to speak and write reasonably, and that's more important than failing to make *everyone* a scholar. But we settle for merely occupying the underachievers with something to do during the day. We could do better. I convinced one teacher to teach a student rather than find them something else to do, instead. It was worth the effort, for all involved. I always preferred the non-mainstream work, it was more interesting, and generally more practical. More like old fashioned personal mentoring than preaching to a herd that ignores or doesn't understand you. Grasping at a straw to not go completely off-topic: It's Windows versus Linux. ;-) One is a dumbed down bit of expensive eye-candy, that's mostly useless and a time waster. The other is a capable tool, given the chance and interest. -- (Currently running FC4, occasionally trying FC5.) Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored. I read messages from the public lists.
