Side note: folks always ask why asian parents are so picky about schools. This is exactly why. Teach the damn 3r’s right rather then spend countless time/resources on everything else and not even get the 3r’s right. I haven’t researched this, but I’m curious what the school’s API ranking is. I’d say if it has time with this sort of B.S., it’s probably not doing a very good job education kids.[/quote]
Bingo!! Flu, can I borrow your bullshit weed wacker? I am awed by your finely-honed ability to cut to the heart of the matter.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’d be more than happy if the public schools would just manage to teach English to their students. ALL their students. But by the looks of most of the discussion and message boards (Pigg’s being the glaring exception) and chat rooms out there in cyberspace, this hasn’t been done in a long time (50 years?). I have to admit, despite my distress over the evidence of widespread illiteracy exhibited in these places, I get a perverse kick when I come across a post from a “real” American on a rant, declaring that an immigrant needs to come here and learn how to spell and construct sentences in English. However, their post is chock full of grammatical and punctuation errors, incomplete sentences, and spelling and syntax that is so tangled that I feel like I’M reading a foreign language.
But in defense of the schools, I think that, while they sometimes bring the ceiling down on themselves with self-initiated f**ked-up policy decisions, much of the time they are just trying to get people off their backs so they can get on with the business of teaching. School has become one big power-grabbing exercise for students. Control is very important to kids: almost from birth, they are in a constant struggle to control their environments, and this is never more extreme than when they hit adolescence. In the good old days, social groups would slug it out, mano a mano, and settle things with a Rebel Without A Cause-style chickenrun.
But kids have evolved. Thanks to the wonders of mass media, and also to their indulgent parents (who, unlike mine, no longer see fit to smack their kids upside the head, and tell them to grow up and get with the program), kids have figured out that they can go to school administration and plead PTSD as a result of cultural misunderstanding. Cinco de Mayo??!! I’m not even sure that these kids can count to five, or figure out the date without consulting their iPhones. But they manage to get the school to restrict the dress code for the white kids. Then the white kids’ parents (and, yes, I know some of the t-shirt brigade were of Hispanic descent) call in the media, and the white kids win that skirmish. Then the Hispanic kids walk out of class, and have the school administrators kissing their asses again…..it’s all bullshit.
As I asked in another post, how many of us could do our jobs with employees that are lazy, disruptive, insulting, insubordinate, and, often, violent? Especially if each of these employees had two loud publicity-seeking attorneys on retainer, protecting their “rights”. Teachers and administrators face this every day. I do not favor turning a completely blind eye to school administration policy, but i endorse turning a blind eye to our children’s inexcusable behavior even less.
