How would you average an F-?

DammitJanet

Well-Known Member
EW...lmao...you know, have you ever watched Jay Leno when he does those "on the street" interviews with people and asks them what should be such really simple questions and they cant get them correct? Im really afraid that instead of those people being the minority, they are the majority now.

I guess I can be glad that I grew up in a somewhat...ok more than somewhat...political house so I knew how the government worked. I also grew up in VA and had parents born in Boston so I got a huge dose of early american history. I couldnt help it.

But heavens...dont kids listen to School House Rock anymore? "Im just a bill, just a little ol' bill. Sittin here on Capital hill." "Conjunction junction, whats my function?"
 

everywoman

Well-Known Member
No Janet--if it isn't in an Adam Sandler or Spike Lee movie or on the lastest rap or punk cd they don't know it!!! Believe it or not I have actually used School House Rock with my students. Most had never seen any of them before. It's a sad generation we're raising here in the South.
 
F

flutterbee

Guest
Wow. All 5th grade students in Ohio have to know all 50 states and they take the test over and over until they get it right. Wynter has been learning about the 3 branches of government since 3rd or 4th grade.

This just astounds me.

by the way, my grandfather was on either the only ship or one of the only ships in Pearl Harbor that didn't get hit.
 

donna723

Well-Known Member
OMG, Janet! I was going to say the same thing about the Jay Leno interviews! I know they only pick the "worst cases" to show on TV, but there's way too many of them to be a coincidence! And have you noticed how many of them describe themselves as college students? It's just pitiful! Many of them have no earthly idea which places are states and which are cities, or who we fought in World War II, or that Abraham Lincoln was president during the Civil War! How could you get all the way through school and in to college and NOT know those things? Do they not teach it any more? We had History all through elementary school and junior high, plus Civics classes. Then both American History and World History in high school and they were a requirement for graduation! How could someone live 18 or 20 years and not have even absorbed some of this, even if they didn't have it in school!

And something else I've noticed about the "dumbing down" of our schools! I don't want to sound like an ol' fart with the "back in my day ..." tales, but - there sure are a lot of differences now! For one thing the grading scales are different now. When I was in school, 94 and up was an 'A', 87-93 was a 'B', and so on. Now it's generally lower. And it can even vary from one school district to the next, which caused a big stir here when they were awarding lottery scholarships on the basis of a '4.0' GPA being an 'A' - it could vary by several points.

And there used to be no such thing as "remedial" college courses to catch up with what you should have learned in high school but didn't! When I was a kid, the universities had very strict entry requirements and if you didn't take and pass certain courses in high school (like Physics and Chemistry and higher math subjects), and if you didn't have a certain GPA (at least 3.0 for the State universities when I went), you didn't get in to college. Period! And if you didn't learn what you should have in high school, even if you managed to pass those classes somehow, you would be behind and you would fail your classes in college ... too bad ... so sad! It's a whole different world today!
 

DammitJanet

Well-Known Member
Did you hear the latest? They want to do away with the SAT's because they dont show a true measure of how smart a person is or how well they will do in college...only how well they fill in a bubble test...lol.

There actually is something to that theory because I can ( or used to be able to) take just about any bubble test and pass it with at least an 80%. I actually took the air traffic controllers test and while I did study for it, I took it with people who had either been pilots or in the Air Force and got 87% right...lol. Trust me, I dont have any flight experience. I am just gifted in the bubble test department.

But exactly what is the alternative for colleges to use to determine a students readiness for higher learning? Should we just ask them?
 
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