Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

Interesting article after reading yesterday´s brou ha ha on the discussion board:



http://channels.netscape.com/ns/careers ... loyeesfail

hi A-One

if you're talking about the bru hahahaha here about my writing being rejected at litkicks, then i don't see how the article applies because if i'm not being published by litkicks because of my lack of writing skills, that's something i certainly didn't know!

but it's a good article, nonetheless

thanks!

hope you like your artist page

anonymous, your free association left us with an interesting point.

mark morford (San Fran Chronicle) speaks of less than 50% of Americans who care enough to vote. This article speaks of 33% of American employees failing at writing well enough to do their job.

What's gonna happen to the greatest democracy on the planet?

Over here, in israel, all kinds of surveys and state-wide tests showed a while ago, that kids are learning less than ever. New programmes have been instituted to reverse the downwards trend in the lower levels.

In high school, we see kids who year after year have been showing up with less general knowledge and specific skills.
Hopefully, when public schools get more stringent, we'll see better starting levels in the 7th grade.

The Nobel Prize winners in Chemistry (the 2 from Israel specifically, not their American partner) commented that the budget for research in Universities is being slashed. What's gonna happen here in Israel to higher Academics?

If we get it together to teach our kids to read and write and help them succeed at higher education, how are we going to fund higher studies?

It's a mess, in short.

judih

Dear Judih and all:

I think it's unnecessary to remind most members of this community that I spent many years teaching in public schools.

As a teacher at the "college level" I was in a position to see how prepared young people were to read and write in "college." ( I use the quotation marks to indicate that what is called college is not really deserving of that name.)

The problem, as I see it, is simple, and I speak after three decades of everyday classroom confrontation.

Asking students to read something difficult might lead to the awkwardness of their not being able to understand the text. Asking them to write frequently ( as I did) and evaluating what they write stringently ( which I did) will inevitably lead to ranking students at different levels according to their ability.

Is this not a desirable end? Not according to the educational theorists who posit the rules under which teachers operate. ALL students "have something to offer" and "what they have to offer" and "who they are" must not be undervalued.

This moronic, blurmeister-smoothed attitude is ubiquitous in the educational system here. It is linked to whatever trend is current: "teaching the whole child"; "celebrating our diversity";"grading holistically"; "celebrating who and what we are" ; "appreciating individual learning styles"; "making the teacher a guide on the side instead of a sage on the stage"; "learning together as a community"--I could go on and on, wave after wave, describing educational "styles" going and coming and going again.

What is wrong is that we do not want students to fail at anything. Further, in English and composition at least, we do not wish to assert that there is a right or "correct" way to do something, such as use standard English.

Why is this the case? Because social "operators" now conduct the affairs and make the policies in schools. Cadres of management, closely linked to legislators, devise "theories" to "re-invent" traditional techniques. But, often as not, as in the brief "back to basics" movement ( quickly subsumed and immured by the "self-esteem" movement . . .), basics are overlooked. They are tiresome work for students with attention spans fostered by tv-watching, groomed to expect instant satisfaction.

An amusing popular version of this was the "celebratory" school bumper sticker. For a while ( about a year or two) proud parents displayed a bumper sticker proclaiming:

MY CHILD IS HONOR STUDENT OF THE MONTH AT SIERRA SCHOOL!

But it wasn't long before those stickers went away and were replaced by:

ALL STUDENTS ARE HONORED AT SIERRA SCHOOL!



And English teachers, wanting popularity, tenure and general economic security on the job ( who can blame them?), acquiesce, re-invent themselves season after season, and eventually ask for very little from their students.

Teachers may appear to ask for genuine, solid achievement, but the risk of failure or a low grade is not part of their contract with the student. Knowing nothing is at stake, and that they can continue in the pleasant state they enjoy indefinitely, many students simply do not perform. They know they will eventually pass or get a diploma anyway. All their friends and siblings before them did.

Employers know different. That explains why many of the tech-connected jobs in Silicon Valley ( San Jose) are snagged by immigrant workers from India, Pakistan, and Taiwan or are outsourced to other nations. The indigenous population simply lacks the math, reading and writing skills to be employed.

Unless and until we are ready to "leave some behind" we will not reform the schools in the US, at least not where basic reading and writing skills are concerned.


--Z

Sorry, anonymous-one, but I have to disagree with one sentence in this article:

"Those who have mastered these writing skills are among the most sought after employees"

I would have to disagree, just based on my own personal experience. I don't think corporations put writing skills very high on their list of priorities these days. Perhaps that is part of the problem with the downward trend in education.

I interviewed repeatedly for a position in the Grievance Writing Dept at my former job. I was constantly passed over in favor of inexperienced employees with atrocious writing skills. I know there were a few good writers on that team, and I believe they corrected many of the mistakes before they went out. They didn't catch them all, however, and emails I received from that department revealed that many of the employees there were poor writers.

What corporations say they want in their employees, and what they really want, are two different things.


Zlatko -- I think what you're missing is that it isn't just education that's changing, it's our entire set of cultural values. As I said in a recent essay posted on Litkicks, sameness is what's valued. Consensus of opinion is what's valued. If some students are better than others we have diversity, not consensus. We talk about cultural "diversity", but we really don't know what the hell we mean by that and it's a cover-up for a far worse kind of prejudice. You mentioned "social operators". Those same social operators are in every area of society, not just in education.

You are right regarding promotions in the corporate
world , has nothing to do with ones competence or
talents.

It´s not about what you know , it´s more about who
you blow.

Not literally, of course ... although blowing someone often helps!

It's more a question of being part of a certain social consensus -- thinking, acting, talking the way everybody else does, and not projecting any vibes, however remote and unintended, that put you against the grain. While this sort of thing has always had some importance in the past, it's now rapidly gaining priority in every aspect of life. Zlatko's comments about education I feel are a symptom and an example of a whole cultural shift.

I mean, think about it. We used to focus our negative emotions on minorities, on the physically and mentally disabled, on animals, and on the poor. Our society fortunately has become a little more enlightened on those things. Yeah, we've got a ways to go, especially with the disabled, but in general, these outlets for expression of our hatred have been closed off.

So, where do we go next? Who do we pick on and how do we express our prejudice and assert our needs to be morally superior to everyone else? It's not that the negative emotions have been purged from the human race just because we can't express them in the old ways. If we can't turn to race or other physical differences, then we will turn to mental, emotional and personality differences as a means for discrimination. Fortunately for us, those things are less tangible and far more easy to rationalize.

It isn't just at work or school. I think it's a sweeping problem. Will we ever learn to accept that true diversity necessitates diversity of thought as well as diversity of skin color, culture, sexual preferences and so on? I don't know.

Why should people be punished for expressing themselves? I can understand differences of opinion resulting in anger. I can understand styles of expression resulting in anger. I cannot understand when that anger results in deliberate punitive behavior on the part of others ... and that points directly to something that appears to be occurring right here, so I'll say no more.

Of course, Cat:

Society is always changing. I speak only of that aspect I have seen up close.

Because the imagery of television distorts the whole society and presents a kind of goofish amiability that never existed and doesn't exist now, and because so many citizens rely upon those distortions, the just society is far away.

That doesn't mean I can't share my trash can with my neighbor who had the "Join Arnold" sign in his front yard.

MMMMM. Come to think of it, those clippings have nourished a whole colony of white flies. Now we get to act like a genuine community and rid the circle of those critters together. Even if they are in my can.

But that doesn't mean my neighbor can read or turn off game shows on tv. He won't be writing a letter to the editor, because he can't.

By the way, his wife was once my "C" student. She's now a respected elementary school teacher. Nice lady.

Arnold just vetoed the best comprehensive clean air act in a decade today, by the way.


--Z

Cat:

That means, if it appears that I'm arguing for "strict meritocracy", I'm not.

I just feel, Like Judih, that "What's happening to the greatest democracy on Earth . . ." can be explained rather centrally by how much people care about a common language as a instrument of understanding, properly leading to the toleration of difference, not the extinction of it, or to an enforcement of conformity.

Being able to read Shakespeare and Dickens and Plato and Euripides and Emily Dickinson and Simone Weil frees you.

Maya Angelou's ( Marguerite Johnson's) favorite writer was Dickens ( she testifies in "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings"), an "old dead white guy", after whom she styled herself as a writer.


--Z

I don't think that a strict meritocracy is possible or even desirable. There are too many good reasons for measuring the worth of a person in a multiplicity of ways.

And you know that I am in complete agreement about the importance of language in defining and unifying a culture. I love the dead white guys, but I'm glad I didn't pursue the Lit path, now that I know how it's turned out for you and others.

I'm now also wondering if my assessment of culture isn't more of a California thing than a universal epidemic. I just had a look at a recent survey of education, rated by state. Out of 50, California is in 43rd place. Colorado is in 21st place, and it seems that most of the New England states rank in the top 15. Perhaps 30 years in So Cal have colored my thinking a bit ...

Oh yes, Cat:

Last year I was in Massachusetts, and it's quite a contrast with California. The guys working on the roads seemed quite alert and communicative ( I got lost several times). And the shopkeepers were glorious and proud to talk about their state's liberal history.

The biggest shock was strolling around Harvard in Cambridge. I'm not accustomed to seeing young people of that age talking passionately about ideas.

But there they were, the privileged. And ideas were theirs, and the domain of language was prosperous.

It gave me a good deal of hope knowing that not everyone was a Valley Guy and Girl in this country.

Years ago ( 1986) I took a sabbatical during which I read my poems at the University of North Dakota, among other places. Wonderful students, and I sampled classes from entering Freshmen to the graduate level in English, sat through all of them.

In a state with a population under 650,000, that is hopeful indeed.


--Z