Category: Education

Pretty Much Illiterate

Education, Seen On Campus, Snowflakes

Then there’s this tale of woe (read it all for the full horror):

College students are increasingly unprepared for serious study, with some professors recently reporting they are illiterate, raising significant questions about the overall quality of American education.

“It’s not even an inability to critically think,” Jessica Hooten Wilson, a Pepperdine University professor, told Fortune. “It’s an inability to read sentences.”   Wilson described that she is trying new pedagogical methods to convey the same information.  “I feel like I am tap dancing and having to read things aloud because there’s no way that anyone read it the night before,” Wilson stated. “Even when you read it in class with them, there’s so much they can’t process about the very words that are on the page.”

Yeah, I know all about that.  I think I’ve told the story of how Connie (as Global Director of Training at a Great Big Accounting Firm) had occasion to review some of her earlier training materials.  These, she discovered, were about 80% text and the rest graphics.  Only five years later, the ratio had been completely inverted:  80% graphics and the rest text.  (And just so we know who we’re talking about, the trainees all had Masters degrees in either Finance or Business.  Not yer typical Fem Studies or Art History grads, these.)  When she tried to arrest that development and include more text, all that happened was that the training became less effective:  less absorption and poorer retention.

So none of the above are at all surprising to me;  only the extent is somewhat shocking.

At some point, all learning, innovation and civilization itself is going to plateau (or worse, #Muslims) instead of increasing with each generation, as before.

Socrates had it nailed.

Tradition Of Excellence

Education

My alma mater has made the news:

St John’s College in Johannesburg has built a reputation as one of South Africa’s leading boys’ schools, producing pupils who get accepted into top universities in South Africa and around the world, including Harvard University in the United States.

However, I’m still a little peeved that the College outlawed caning punishment back in the 1990s, even though that meant that my record total (124 strokes) will never be surpassed.

Let’s Get Real

Education, The Gun Thing

Apparently this group of schoolkids was on a school-sponsored walk, when a rather unwelcome companion joined them:

A grizzly bear attacked a group of elementary school students and teachers in Canada, leaving 11 people injured.  Two were critically injured and two seriously hurt following the attack while a class was out on a walk in Bella Coola, northwest of Vancouver. 

Veronica Schooner said her ten-year-old son Alvarez, who was in the Year 4-5 group, was so close to the animal ‘he even felt its fur.  He was running for his life,’ she told local media.  Ms Schooner said several people attempted to halt the attack but one male teacher ‘got the whole brunt of it’ and was among the people taken by helicopter from the scene.

Guess that school-issued bear spray didn’t work too well, huh?

Some time ago I watched one of TV shows where realtors took people to find their dream off-the-grid cabins in Alaska.  This generally involved a long trek by road, a trip upriver in a boat, or even getting ferried in by float plane.

Here’s the interesting part:  every single realtor, male or female, was packing what looked like a serious gun — mostly large-framed revolvers, but on at least two occasions, the realtors had a rifle slung over their shoulder.

This is what used to be known as “common sense”:  when you’re in bear country, take a frigging gun with you so that when Ol’ Smokey Tha Bahr is looking for a meal item, you can either disabuse him of the urge or else make it his last trip to the human buffet table.

And if realtors can do it, why not the teachers who are nominally responsible for the safety of pupils under their charge?

Oooh I know, guns are icky and you’re twice as likely to be shot by someone you know (Gun Wussies Bible, Chapter One Verses #3 and #4), but ignoring that lunacy, let’s at least acknowledge that pretty much the whole of northwestern America has a decent population of bears of the several varieties, all of which have no problem with munching on the occasional human if sufficiently hungry.

But lest we forget:  we humans and not the bears are at the top of the food chain — unless, that is, we don’t avail ourselves of the implements that put us there.

And as long as we indulge ourselves in this foolishness, there will be more casualties because bears are not like Baloo in the Jungle Book, no matter how much we tell ourselves they are.

How To Breathe

Education, Seen On Campus

I can only regard with incredulity this new adventure in education:

A renowned Canadian university has launched a bizarre ‘Adulting 101’ crash course for pampered students who can’t perform the most basic life tasks like changing a tire, buying groceries or doing laundry.

In an era dominated by digital innovation, Generation Z – or those born between 1997 and 2012 – are in desperate need of practical knowledge that older generations might otherwise consider ‘common sense’.

Adulting 101 is designed to teach basic life skills that Gen Z often struggles with, including cooking, budgeting, basic nutrition, laundry and even navigating a grocery store.  The course covers everything from maintaining healthy relationships, practicing fire safety in the kitchen and changing a tire.

For many, the course has been a saving grace – not only helping them personally, but also boosting their daily confidence in navigating the ins and outs of adulthood.

Well, I guess that once a university stoops to deliver courses in Remedial English because such basics somehow escaped the grade-, middle- and high school curriculum, why not the equivalent of 8th-grade Home Economics?

The difference is that “life skills” belong not in secondary school education, but squarely in the “parenting” remit, as the article suggests:

Jean Twenge, a researcher and psychology professor at San Diego State University, suggests that prolonged adolescence and ‘helicopter’ parenting have delayed development among Gen Z.

You don’t say.

For all the mud slung by “educators” at homeschoolers, I defy anyone to come up with examples of such helplessness among the homeschooled.  We started giving our kids an allowance as soon as they reached an age we deemed appropriate, said budget to cover their clothing, toiletries and entertainment.  We took them shopping all the time, whether for toiletries, groceries or clothing, but let them make their own decisions, staying well back as they navigated their way through the stores — although we did show them basic stuff like comparative pricing and value judgements.  Hell, I think the Son&Heir learned how to shop for produce from the age of five, because he always accompanied me on the weekly supermarket trip;  and when he bought his first car (at age 19, cash, from his own savings), I showed both him and Daughter the basics of car maintenance — checking the oil, the radiator, how to use a gas pump, and so on.  Their allowance, by the way, ended at age 17 and they all went out to work, at restaurants, movie houses, drugstores and so on, and they were solely responsible for managing their savings and expenditure.

I’m not holding us up as ideal parents, but FFS, any parent who doesn’t do this kind of thing is setting their kids up for failure.

But thank goodness for the universities, who will make up for parental neglect with a course that probably costs $2,500 per quarter.  That cost, by the way, should not be covered by public subsidy or student loans, but by the fucking parents.

Fat chance.

Handing Over The Future

Education

Last week I talked about a serious young teacher quitting her job because of A.I. and how said excrescence was affecting her students.

Here’s another take on the same topic, courtesy of Insty (thankee, Squire):

“We’re talking about an entire generation of learning perhaps significantly undermined here,” said Green, the Santa Clara tech ethicist. “It’s short-circuiting the learning process, and it’s happening fast.”

Perhaps? 

From a student:

“I think there is beauty in trying to plan your essay. You learn a lot. You have to think, Oh, what can I write in this paragraph? Or What should my thesis be? ” But she’d rather get good grades. “An essay with ChatGPT, it’s like it just gives you straight up what you have to follow. You just don’t really have to think that much.”

As for the teachers:

“Massive numbers of students are going to emerge from university with degrees, and into the workforce, who are essentially illiterate, both in the literal sense and in the sense of being historically illiterate and having no knowledge of their own culture, much less anyone else’s.”

“How can we expect them to grasp what education means when we, as educators, haven’t begun to undo the years of cognitive and spiritual damage inflicted by a society that treats schooling as a means to a high-paying job, maybe some social status, but nothing more?”

Well, yeah.  Perhaps [gasp!]  not all kids are college material.  And I think this A.I. cheating thing is proving the point.

And then, from the teechurs:

“Every time I talk to a colleague about this, the same thing comes up: retirement. When can I retire? When can I get out of this? That’s what we’re all thinking now,” he said. “This is not what we signed up for.” Williams, and other educators I spoke to, described AI’s takeover as a full-blown existential crisis.

Of course, this whole situation is fixable — there’s always a solution to a problem of this nature — but don’t expect the current crop of teachers to figure it out.  Especially if it takes actual hard work and thought.

Small wonder their students are screwed up and hopeless.

Read the whole article.  It’s worth it.

Amen, Kid

Education

I can understand  an Olde Phartte  someone from my generation banging on about how the Yoof Of Today are hopeless wankers when it comes to education and being taught in the classroom.  (And yes, I use the word “wanker” in its most appropriate sense, as you will see later.)

But when a 26-year-old teacher gets all ranty on the above topic… well.

“These kids don’t know how to read,” she says flatly. “Because they’ve had things read to them, or they can just click a button and have something read out loud. Their attention spans are waning. Everything is high stimulation. They can scroll in less than a minute.”

And:

Teenagers who refuse to write even a paragraph, who throw tantrums when asked to handwrite an assignment, who beg to ‘just type it’ – not to save time or effort but to copy and paste answers from the internet or use AI to do the thinking for them.

She believes the behavior of her high schoolers is only part of the problem. What worries her is the sense that this generation, raised on screens, simply doesn’t care about anything whether it be learning, literacy or even the basics of society.

“They don’t care about making a difference in the world. They don’t care how to write a resume or a cover letter. They just have these devices in their hands that they think will get them through the rest of their life.

“They want to use [technology] for entertainment. They don’t want to use it for education.”

Hence my use of the term “wankers”:  self-pleasuring little wastrels.

Her solution?

“I think we need to cut off technology from these kids probably until they go to college,” she says. “Call me old-fashioned, but I just want you to look at the test scores. Look at the literacy rates. Look at the statistics. From when students didn’t use technology… to now.

“If you can’t read and you don’t care to read… you’re never going to have real opinions. You’ll never understand why laws and government matter. You’ll never know why you have the right to vote.”

By George… I think she’s got it.  And I repeat:  this isn’t some Olde Phartte like me;  she’s Gen Z, FFS.  And if someone in that group is starting to despair about the future generation…

She’s quitting teaching.  At age 26.

Somebody somewhere needs to give her a job — in a proper school, run as she describes it — because this is a lovely seed just waiting to grow.  She shouldn’t be wasted, because gawd knows there aren’t that many like her.