Excellent, as usual, and completely accurate! "Grammar School," has been completely destroyed over the years. Rote learning is ESSENTIAL in the prepubescent years, and without it there is NO FOUNDATION to build on! Without a solid foundation (literacy), we have created a system (and world) where everyone is trying to build castles in quicksand pits. My grandmother never went beyond the 8th grade (it wasn't compulsory to do so until the 1950s), and yet, she could do arithmetic in her head (including division), knew exactly all of the basic facts of history and geography), and was an avid, life-long reader. She had perfect penmanship ans spelling too. She would have embarrassed 99 percent of today's high school graduates, and many college graduates as well. The thing is, she was no great intellectual either. By her standards she was normal. She was already exasperated at how far the schools had fallen in the 1970's based on what we weren't being taught back then. I can't imagine what she would have thought of what has happened since.
My grandma too. Child of Mexican immigrants; dropped out in the 9th grade -- she'd wipe the walls with the typical college grad today and she'd do genteelly (her favorite word and one I'd bet dollars to donuts most college students have never seen in the wild.)
Agreed and agreed. There's always been a difference between teachers who organically create their own lessons and those who merely 'teach from the book,' use 'teachers pay teachers,' or scurry from classroom to classroom before school looking to 'borrow' lessons. Teachers who create their lessons know and understand them intimately, and are well-suited to conveying that knowledge. And the shifts to 'teaching to the test' and to 'skills-based curricula' have likewise been disastrous. The longer I teach, the more thoroughly I understand that there are no short cuts and the only way is the hard way.
If I may, there's a side to AI I haven't seen mentioned and as a mother of 7, 5 that didn't grow up with tech, 2 heavily but our youngest is still only 14 & goes to public middle school. Id like to try...briefly to call attn to a horrific side to this AI conversation for anyone that it may benefit. With a great deal of paper & pencil work out thr window & mandated tech devices made mandatory for all children from ipad to Chromebook come browsers that NO school has ever been capable of locking down securely enough to even stop great data breeches revealing all our children's private everything but beyond this a much much more serious issue we experienced, are experiencing..is that when these kids find an avenue it can be to sites that still today haunt me so heavily I've been forced to relent to panic meds to help me process what happened to our daughter beginning grade 6. 2 tech teachers with lets say different ways, very liberal ideals that made them feel 6th graders required grooming as a part of their pub school experience & taught our student along with their 1 other classmates how to "make friends when they're lonely " on the internet. This was the beginning of a very hellish experience we are still battling today with very little to almost no assistance. These sites were adults pretending to be just kids in school too and needing a friend. They provided links for the kids to get to the darkest most abhorrent things you as a mother or father ever want to see. Well it led half this clasd to something called the dark web. In my 50s I didn't even know what this was. The AI chatting I was checking up on began to scare the H out of me and included photographs that no child under 18 should ever ever see. It included beastiality, and much much more yall. This dark web, however, is nothing but the worst of anything you can imagine. I will spare you the details. The links the children got from the AI chat taught to them in school, by grown ups, teachers...provided links to this dark web and it took off as the most evil wild fire. Children became addicted and so sneaky in school, school having thr audacity to not take one iotta of responsibility we went higher and higher to our state's governor office and when we learned images of our daughter were confirmed (by the state attorney generals office, NICMIC, ICAC (internet crimes against children)..something in me just died.
We'd always supervised our young daughter on the internet heavily. She deftly learned to evade us and so so very well. Began staying up all night having snuck their Chromebook from our room at night while it was charging and watching and chatting and engaging with disgusting destruction pedophiles. Our family had every device we owned confiscated voluntarily in hopes of the state getting to the bottom of it. Still nothing fell bk on the school. This has been such a nightmare for our family our daughter ended up in a psych hospital when all devices were gone and she couldn't engage as she had for what was found to be 1.5 years!!!! Yet no persons have been found to charge, to hold responsible, for what theyd done to all these kids... the school immune to any wrong doing didn't even loose their jobs!! We are not a wealthy family for if we were I'd find a team of attorneys to hold those 2 teachers, the school and everyone of adult age that already knew about it all put away for the rest of their lives! While other unsuspecting parents reading this mat scoff; I warn you YES it can happen to your family too...right under your very noses. School doesn't = saftey on the internet or the grown ups they hire to "teach" our children and the use of AI explodes to the darkest corners a child will hold with them for the rest of their lives. I beseech you. Please, take heed of the very shortened version of what I've shared and be vigilant and think very hard about having to comply with schools mandating the use of the internet. There can be a very high price to pay.
Unfortunately, this is not the first time I've heard a story like this. There are some really awful stories related to the AI "friends" that lonely adolescents are turning to for social reasons.
It used to make me mad, but then I realized that students need teachers like me in the classroom because people like me can help them to see that reading great books is the cheat code to human greatness. Second, the only reason I'll ever get a principal job in our current system is to be willing to lie. I stopped being willing to play their insipid, hurtful game in the early 2010s when I fully realized what it was doing to otherwise good kids.
True, true... but I also want admin to be (or to have been) good teachers. My current admin was an AMAZING teacher, and now she is the best admin. I wish that for everyone.
Great teachers can make great administrators, but all too often something happens to them once the pressure of dealing with parents, bad teachers, and the demand that no "bad news" reach District-level administration.
I do wish the same, but in my experience, the pressure of an administrative job done ethically in a system that punishes honesty and conscientiousness is too much for most people to withstand for long.
I think I'd rather be genuinely stupid than artificially intelligent. Every iteration of competency based education gets further away from humanity and organic learning.
So many comments but one I want to make is that this dependence on AI is just the next step from mandating students use tech in the classroom.
I have a similar debate with my husband regarding raising our kids screen free. He agrees they shouldn't just be plopped in front of a TV all day, but then he keeps pushing for them to learn to use a computer/Internet! Our kids are young elementary to preschool, there is ZERO reason for them to even USE a computer at their ages. I even pointed out to him that we grew up without tech and only learned at the middle and high school level and we both turned out fine.
My argument is that you can learn how to use something at any point so long as you are willing and able to do the work needed to learn. Yes, sometimes being younger means an easier time of it, but I argue that for kids tech isn't too difficult to learn and can be picked up later. Especially since the user interfaces of new tech is sooooo much more user friendly! I grew up with Unix systems which if you're mildly aware, are much more convoluted to use because you must know a computing language. An iPhone is so ridiculously, stupid-easy to use that even TODDLERS can use them!
I teach in a school where it’s all “skills, skills, skills” with no room for amazement and wonder. On top of that, our tested departments have to use a canned curriculum which doesn’t allow for the reading of novels or the exploration of math beyond what the SAT demands, which might as well be what you describe. Needless to say it feels like a soulless place.
It feels like the most successful teaching I do is on the gridiron every fall. It shouldn’t be that way.
For sure. Being able to use a can opener (after an enormous struggle this girl just barely manages is - her class applauds her success): https://old.bitchute.com/video/dxA9zUt67NG8 (90 secs)
Are likely both good solid first steps to getting back to basics and becoming able to, you know, survive. Lest we end up here in our current ignorant condition:
Excellent, as usual, and completely accurate! "Grammar School," has been completely destroyed over the years. Rote learning is ESSENTIAL in the prepubescent years, and without it there is NO FOUNDATION to build on! Without a solid foundation (literacy), we have created a system (and world) where everyone is trying to build castles in quicksand pits. My grandmother never went beyond the 8th grade (it wasn't compulsory to do so until the 1950s), and yet, she could do arithmetic in her head (including division), knew exactly all of the basic facts of history and geography), and was an avid, life-long reader. She had perfect penmanship ans spelling too. She would have embarrassed 99 percent of today's high school graduates, and many college graduates as well. The thing is, she was no great intellectual either. By her standards she was normal. She was already exasperated at how far the schools had fallen in the 1970's based on what we weren't being taught back then. I can't imagine what she would have thought of what has happened since.
My grandma too. Child of Mexican immigrants; dropped out in the 9th grade -- she'd wipe the walls with the typical college grad today and she'd do genteelly (her favorite word and one I'd bet dollars to donuts most college students have never seen in the wild.)
Agreed and agreed. There's always been a difference between teachers who organically create their own lessons and those who merely 'teach from the book,' use 'teachers pay teachers,' or scurry from classroom to classroom before school looking to 'borrow' lessons. Teachers who create their lessons know and understand them intimately, and are well-suited to conveying that knowledge. And the shifts to 'teaching to the test' and to 'skills-based curricula' have likewise been disastrous. The longer I teach, the more thoroughly I understand that there are no short cuts and the only way is the hard way.
Great information! As an educator, I have been speaking out about the harms of using computers to teach (rather than a tool) and how tech profits have significantly risen while performance continues to decline. I recently wrote about it here https://restorechildhood.substack.com/p/the-edtech-paradox-screens-in-schools?utm_source=cross-post&publication_id=818243&post_id=155372010&utm_campaign=1220212&isFreemail=true&r=16e4vl&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
If I may, there's a side to AI I haven't seen mentioned and as a mother of 7, 5 that didn't grow up with tech, 2 heavily but our youngest is still only 14 & goes to public middle school. Id like to try...briefly to call attn to a horrific side to this AI conversation for anyone that it may benefit. With a great deal of paper & pencil work out thr window & mandated tech devices made mandatory for all children from ipad to Chromebook come browsers that NO school has ever been capable of locking down securely enough to even stop great data breeches revealing all our children's private everything but beyond this a much much more serious issue we experienced, are experiencing..is that when these kids find an avenue it can be to sites that still today haunt me so heavily I've been forced to relent to panic meds to help me process what happened to our daughter beginning grade 6. 2 tech teachers with lets say different ways, very liberal ideals that made them feel 6th graders required grooming as a part of their pub school experience & taught our student along with their 1 other classmates how to "make friends when they're lonely " on the internet. This was the beginning of a very hellish experience we are still battling today with very little to almost no assistance. These sites were adults pretending to be just kids in school too and needing a friend. They provided links for the kids to get to the darkest most abhorrent things you as a mother or father ever want to see. Well it led half this clasd to something called the dark web. In my 50s I didn't even know what this was. The AI chatting I was checking up on began to scare the H out of me and included photographs that no child under 18 should ever ever see. It included beastiality, and much much more yall. This dark web, however, is nothing but the worst of anything you can imagine. I will spare you the details. The links the children got from the AI chat taught to them in school, by grown ups, teachers...provided links to this dark web and it took off as the most evil wild fire. Children became addicted and so sneaky in school, school having thr audacity to not take one iotta of responsibility we went higher and higher to our state's governor office and when we learned images of our daughter were confirmed (by the state attorney generals office, NICMIC, ICAC (internet crimes against children)..something in me just died.
We'd always supervised our young daughter on the internet heavily. She deftly learned to evade us and so so very well. Began staying up all night having snuck their Chromebook from our room at night while it was charging and watching and chatting and engaging with disgusting destruction pedophiles. Our family had every device we owned confiscated voluntarily in hopes of the state getting to the bottom of it. Still nothing fell bk on the school. This has been such a nightmare for our family our daughter ended up in a psych hospital when all devices were gone and she couldn't engage as she had for what was found to be 1.5 years!!!! Yet no persons have been found to charge, to hold responsible, for what theyd done to all these kids... the school immune to any wrong doing didn't even loose their jobs!! We are not a wealthy family for if we were I'd find a team of attorneys to hold those 2 teachers, the school and everyone of adult age that already knew about it all put away for the rest of their lives! While other unsuspecting parents reading this mat scoff; I warn you YES it can happen to your family too...right under your very noses. School doesn't = saftey on the internet or the grown ups they hire to "teach" our children and the use of AI explodes to the darkest corners a child will hold with them for the rest of their lives. I beseech you. Please, take heed of the very shortened version of what I've shared and be vigilant and think very hard about having to comply with schools mandating the use of the internet. There can be a very high price to pay.
Unfortunately, this is not the first time I've heard a story like this. There are some really awful stories related to the AI "friends" that lonely adolescents are turning to for social reasons.
I love all of this, especially the “teacher” who is now in admin. Classic.
It used to make me mad, but then I realized that students need teachers like me in the classroom because people like me can help them to see that reading great books is the cheat code to human greatness. Second, the only reason I'll ever get a principal job in our current system is to be willing to lie. I stopped being willing to play their insipid, hurtful game in the early 2010s when I fully realized what it was doing to otherwise good kids.
True, true... but I also want admin to be (or to have been) good teachers. My current admin was an AMAZING teacher, and now she is the best admin. I wish that for everyone.
Great teachers can make great administrators, but all too often something happens to them once the pressure of dealing with parents, bad teachers, and the demand that no "bad news" reach District-level administration.
I do wish the same, but in my experience, the pressure of an administrative job done ethically in a system that punishes honesty and conscientiousness is too much for most people to withstand for long.
I think I'd rather be genuinely stupid than artificially intelligent. Every iteration of competency based education gets further away from humanity and organic learning.
So many comments but one I want to make is that this dependence on AI is just the next step from mandating students use tech in the classroom.
I have a similar debate with my husband regarding raising our kids screen free. He agrees they shouldn't just be plopped in front of a TV all day, but then he keeps pushing for them to learn to use a computer/Internet! Our kids are young elementary to preschool, there is ZERO reason for them to even USE a computer at their ages. I even pointed out to him that we grew up without tech and only learned at the middle and high school level and we both turned out fine.
My argument is that you can learn how to use something at any point so long as you are willing and able to do the work needed to learn. Yes, sometimes being younger means an easier time of it, but I argue that for kids tech isn't too difficult to learn and can be picked up later. Especially since the user interfaces of new tech is sooooo much more user friendly! I grew up with Unix systems which if you're mildly aware, are much more convoluted to use because you must know a computing language. An iPhone is so ridiculously, stupid-easy to use that even TODDLERS can use them!
I teach in a school where it’s all “skills, skills, skills” with no room for amazement and wonder. On top of that, our tested departments have to use a canned curriculum which doesn’t allow for the reading of novels or the exploration of math beyond what the SAT demands, which might as well be what you describe. Needless to say it feels like a soulless place.
It feels like the most successful teaching I do is on the gridiron every fall. It shouldn’t be that way.
I'm glad you're coaching too -- I agree that all too often, athletics are the last bastion of real teaching and learning in American public schools.
Same in my district....but with lots of testing, too. It's the main reason child #2 went to a private school (all boys).
For sure. Being able to use a can opener (after an enormous struggle this girl just barely manages is - her class applauds her success): https://old.bitchute.com/video/dxA9zUt67NG8 (90 secs)
And know that you can actually eat fruit off fruit trees which this 27 year old “adult” doesn’t: https://old.bitchute.com/video/FMT7jPIdnBbF (1min)
Are likely both good solid first steps to getting back to basics and becoming able to, you know, survive. Lest we end up here in our current ignorant condition:
https://web.archive.org/web/20240113040845/https://tritorch.substack.com/p/diary-of-the-end-of-the-world-and