Perhaps in an effort to regain their raggedy collective dignity regarding the memoir hoax, The New York Times returned to the well for a third day of coverage on the story. The most recent article quotes, among other people, Connie Rice.
Evidently in addition to falsifying the narrative, author Margaret Seltzer set up a phony foundation that she claimed was helping “to reduce gang violence and mentor urban teens”—but it turned out not to exist.
(This came to light when it was found that the gang experts that faux memoirist Margaret Seltzer said were on her board of directors, had never heard of her.)
Here’s what Connie said:
Constance L. Rice, a co-director of the Los Angeles office of Advancement Project, a civil rights advocacy group, who wrote a report last year about reducing gang violence for the Los Angeles City Council, said that there were 50,000 to 80,000 gang members in Los Angeles County, and it was always possible that Ms. Seltzer worked with some of them. But Ms. Rice said that she did not know Ms. Seltzer or her foundation and noted that, as a white woman, Ms. Seltzer would have likely stood out in most neighborhoods of South-Central Los Angeles.
Ms. Rice said it was just as likely that Ms. Seltzer had taken her inspiration from television and movies. “She’s been watching too much of ‘The Shield,’ ” said Ms. Rice, referring to the rough-edged police drama on FX set in Los Angeles. “All you have to do is go to a couple of movies or watch ‘The Wire,’ ” the Baltimore street drama on HBO. “You could riff off that forever,” she said.
Okay, so much for literary gossip:
Meanwhile, back in the real world, a California Appellate Court ruled —stupidly—on Wednesday that the parents who are homeschooling approximately 200,000 of the state’s kids, may no longer do so without a possessing a teaching credential. The LA Times covered it, but the San Francisco Chron has a longer, better story.
And who do you imagine was (predictably) THRILLED by the ruling? According to the Chron, it’s the director of the CTA, the state’s largest teachers union.
“We’re happy,” said Lloyd Porter, who is on the California Teachers Association board of directors. “We always think students should be taught by credentialed teachers, no matter what the setting.”
Fortunately, the California Supreme Court, not Mr. Porter, will have the last say on all this. Let’s up the Supremes behave themselves.
This home schooling ruling is a disgrace. I have a great-nephew who’s being homeschooled and it’s been a terrific success. He’s a very sharp and engaging kid who was born with Downs Syndrome. Despite some challenges, he performs academically at “the norm.” He’s a voracious reader and is always one of the top prize-winners at the county fair with his art, gardening and cooking projects. The local public schools weren’t an attractive choice for a kid with special needs and when they applied at the local K-12 “lab school” associated with a university education department – where he’d had a very good experience in pre-school and inspired one of his student teachers to focus academically on kids with special needs – the director said they didn’t want him there because he would ultimately bring down the averages of college attendance the school reports. No kidding. (Actually, I’ll not be surprised if he attends college.) So they chose home schooling, combined with lots of group activites like 4-H and a book club, in order to gain the social experience that home schooling doesn’t provide.
Home schooling is all over tha map – much of it is obviously related to religious fundamentalism – but if a parent is willing to make that kind of committment and there is some association with an institution that can periodically make sure that progress in basic skills and learning is proceeding, it can be a totally legitimate – and often excellent – option. The AFT is shooting itself in the foot by supporting this ruling. I’m increasingly getting fed up with teachers unions – although I know from my son’s experience as a public school teacher that the unions are an easy scapegoat and that most people in the professon are doing a credible job in often very tough circumstances. They get blamed for lots of deficiencies in the educational system that they can’t be expected to control, given what’s handed to them, the social and family environments in some of the more difficult schools, and the “rules of the game”. But this is an example of supreme arrogance and a tin ear – especially when their own aggregate performance by most measures is nothing to brag about. A system that obviously doesn’t have all the right answers and that’s struggling to perform adequately on its own terms shouldn’t, at the very least, attempt to narrow the public’s options.
I have taken care of my children’s scrapes and cuts, helped them through childhood illnesses, cleaned up their vomit in the middle of the night, place them in cold baths to bring down dangerous fevers, given them the proper medications at the proper times, nursed them to health, and stayed up all night to watch over them. It’s all part of being a parent. I did it without anyone from the government showing up to help me or picking up the phone at 3:00 AM to answer my questions–and, I did it without having medical certification. How did they ever survive?
We also did homeschooling for years without teacher certification, and our kids excelled in college and my daughter graduated summa cum laude.
Further, teacher certication is a joke, and I’ve heard plenty of complaints about the process from good teachers who talked about education sessions where they had to sit on the floor in circles and pretend to be learning how to teach.
Judges and those who think that it takes a village need to learn that children don’t belong to the govenment but belong to and are the responsiblity of the parents. Who cares more about my kids–me or a government bureaucrat?
The next time that my kid throws up, I’m calling a judge to come clean it up, and, if he doesn’t, then I’ll tell him to keep his social engineering ideas to himself.
This ruling is stupid and dangerous. But, count on it coming up again and again until the leftists get their way. Count me as one parent who will never give in to them.
“The next time that my kid throws up, I’m calling a judge to come clean it up,”
Couldn’t agree more. Thanks for the excellent comments on this Woody and reg.
The wonderful, brilliant dedicated teachers in this country are heroic. (And the bad ones should be let go.) But it’s really irritating when the unions come down on the wrong side of these kinds of issues so predictably.
The CA Supremes are expect to reverse this thing. I hope they do.
Woody, good for you for doing the home schooling. My next door neighbor home schooled her kids for quite a while and and they are terrific (and very bright) kids. And, no, she has no credential.
BTW, I believe it does take a village (to use the now hopelessly corrupted phrase). But that means we all choose to care about all the kids around us as if they mattered to us, and has zero to do with government.
I’m glad that Reg’s family had a good experience and credentialling may not be the way the go but, really, Homeschooling – like vouchers – is a scam. In this case I note that a lot of those automatons that were hired out of Regent Law School (against the advice of Career Justice People) to cripple DOJ followed the same shabby “Cursus Honorum” as Monica Goodling – Homeschooling, Bible College, Regent Law. These are people with no real understanding of the world and might as well be Madrassa Kids.
BTW for all you advocates of Charter Schools. Recent studies show that the kids who go there perform no better than public school students on standardized tests. That has been true for years of Parochial School kids – Albert Shanker regularly cited the data in his AFT “Op-ADs”. Reading, and maths scores were similiar.
And Vouchers? Milwaukee has had a great experiment with them for years – thanks to the Republican Legislature of Wisconsin. Guess what? Most didn’t use it as the costs were too high even with the voucher and, surprise, surprise, educational achievements were no different thatn public school students.
Oh well, guess there are other factors: Like parental involvement, English as a first Language, home literacy, etc.
rlc: “Homeschooling – like vouchers – is a scam.”
I guess that’s for the parents to decide rather than you and judges. My observations and experiences say othewise.
I’m not an advocate of home schooling – because I think it’s a all over the map. What I recognize is that it can be an excellent choice for some people if they can give it the time and attention. For others it can be an attempt by the parents to shield them from the world. I’m not an advocate of abortion either, but I’m for people having that choice for whatever reason because I think it’s a deeply personal decision. There are several ideological derivatives for home schoolers – some are deeply religious, but there’s also a major strain associated with author and former teacher John Holt that has a theory I’d associate with traditionally “left” views of child development. I’m not up on this, but I’d characterize Holt’s and that of many “nonevangelical” home schoolers as closer to A.S. Neill of Summerhill and based on a critique of nearly all schools as bureaucratic and stifling. I didn’t choose this path for my child – probably mostly because it was too difficult for me as a parent and they had some excellent public school options when it came time to make a decision – but I’m glad people can, even if some do it for reasons I consider weird, such as religious orthodoxy. In genereal, the best way for “progressives” to deal with such issues is to make sure that the social space and services they are attempting to provide are providing people with a positive experience that obviously improves the quality of their lives. Creating soul-draining bureaucratic institutions – like too many public school systems – and then attempting to seal all of the exits isn’t “progressive” and it’s not “liberal.” It’s a variant of unbridled statism. I’m not a libertarian, but as a social democrat I respect the libertarian impulse in the sphere that we understand as deeply personal. In education, people should have more, not fewer choices. I believe that a strong system of public schools is vital to democracy, but I don’t want them to preclude choices. That’s why I’m for charter schools, alternative schools and magnet schools within the public school system. Not because I believe they’re always better than the “mainstream” schools, because they’re not. But because I don’t think anyone’s found the “magic formula” for education – in particular, no magic formula for educating each and every kid using the same philosophy or method, because needs differ and bureaucracies are very bad at dealing with real diversity.
And if public schools in major urban centers don’t markedly improve over the foreseeable future, I’d be willing to consider a voucher system for education – not unlike my belief in universal, single payer health insurance as a better solution than “socialized medicine” like the British National Health Service. The truth is that if the English “socialized medicine” system was doing as poor a job as, say, the LAUSD in terms of cost/benefit ratio, Britons would be screaming to have it dismantled. (Notably, not even Margaret Thatcher attempted such either because she didn’t oppose it or considered trashing it political suicide, so it’s obviously doing a decent job at a very low per capita cost, relative to most countries. Even the most right-wing party in England supports the NHS. But that’s because it does a decent job).
In lots of US cities, that’s not even remotely true of the public school system overall. The reasons are complex – more complex than most of their critic’s nostrums – but when I see generations of kids being pushed through the system with very poor results, I’m open to radical change – or at least radical experiments in change – even if it’s not on the agenda of the teachers unions. Charter schools may not solve the problems across the board, but they do offer the possibility of choices to parents who feel trapped by bad public schools. In SF where my kids attended elementary and middle school, there were a bunch of “alternative” schools within the public system. They had widely varying “philosophies” – ranging from very conventional and disciplined “3 R’s” to schools with an “ethnic” component, including a Japanese school (Bilingual – you didn’t have to be Japanese-American to go there, although lots of families were.) All of them were better than but a handful of the “generic” public schools – I believe because they were intentional communities. It didn’t matter much what your rationale was – as long as you had one that the school community was committed to. Obviously parental involvement in their child’s education was the bottom line that reinforced success. Our system of public education – and this is afield of the home school issue – needs to embrace choices, special needs and “small school” initiatives that reinforce intentional community and parental involvement when it comes to education. Cookie cutter bureaucracy – which seems a special forte of unions – isn’t a path to success.
My two cents in too many words.
Thanks for keeping it short.
But they don’t work. And that is what the evidence suggests. On all tests the results are comparable.
Sure homeschooling can vary. But I’ve been mighty unimpressed with the results I’ve seen and no other advanced society would put up with this lunacy for such a large percentage of its young.
“But they don’t work. And that is what the evidence suggests. On all tests the results are comparable.”
I guess I don’t think that aggregate data is the key to the value of charter schools and the like. I’m for school choice as an inherent good because it allows for varied approaches and is a “safety valve” for families that feel trapped. For every anecdote or statistical aggregate you can find that raises concerns about “bad choice” – or choice not being, in and of itself, an across-the-board solution to the problems of public schools – I can find statistical data and anecdotes that raise equal concerns about public schools. Since I think the problems the public schools face run deeper than solutions that any schools, in and of themselves, can provide I don’t like the idea of parents and kids who can’t afford private schools or expensive tutors being channeled onto a public school track with no way out if the situation proves untenable for their kid. I know it’s “only TV” but last season’s Wire was chilling – and if I were stuck in a situation where it was a choice between feeding my kid into that kind of environment or his being “truant”, I might well choose truancy. I think it’s wrong to seal the exits if the only public space you can provide has hellish aspects to it.
All of that said, I also believe the primary terrain for reform is finding creative ways to improve the mainstream system of public education. More money directed to smart, effective models is key, but it’s going to require something more strategic than just increasing funding of the existing bureaucracies. Unfortunately, I don’t see the teachers unions providing the leadership on this. They seem to be as “progressive” in putting forward strategies to improve the educational system as the UAW was on issues related to fuel economy. This is “natural” but let’s be honest about the limitations of unions when it comes to addressing social problems. Their lens is going to be focused first and foremost on job security for the members, not broader implications of public policy.
Woody, I have more thorough and extensive opinion on this I’d be more than happy to submit to GM’s Corner. I was going to post it at Beautiful Horizons but Randy can’t afford the bandwidth.
Bandwidth is not the issue here; server space is.
I need to get a better grasp of the technical aspect of the intertubes.
reg, I started to do a post on the homeschool issue myself but just didn’t have time. I’d be happy to put it up your version, but G.M. didn’t even like a post that I put up saying something nice about Republicans. (It didn’t matter to me, anyway.) Run it by him at the email address shown on the site, gmroper at yahoo dot com, or post it as a comment on an older post and I’ll pull it up from there to go over with G.M. Bandwidth and server space mean nothing to us when we have an oportunity to put up something from you.
California judges are on a roll…. Anti-war judge rejects foster teen’s bid to join military
I believe that people in general, including the Court, fails to understand the difference between “Homeschooling” and “Independent Studies.”
Homeschooling is okay in my book – as long as the kid is brought in yearly to be tested and evaluated.
I am completely opposed to the “Independent Studies” programs. Many years back this type of schooling was strictly used for the Hollywood movie kids. This type of schooling was not created to award L.A’s worst behaved gang bangers. I can start telling you how many gang members I’ve heard bitch and cry that they want to be in Independent Studies. Why? So they can run amok in the all over the city and be unsupervised. Endless stories I can tell you where a gang related murder involved a juvenile on “Independent Studies.”
I have friends who are homeschooling, but they are using standards that might be considered more European than American. They are teaching their kids academics, but there is considerable emphasis on teaching real job skills and on apprenticships. If a kid wants to be an electrician, there’s no sense in continuing to force him to take foreign languages or perverted world history. That might not pass the evaluations of some, but it passes that of the kid’s parents, and that makes sense and is good enough for me.
Regarding independent studies…kids learn in different ways. In high school, I used to wish that the teacher would shut up and let me read the book and work problems on my own, which is how I learned best.
Now i see the problem Woody – you were ADD back in those days.
Who’d have ever thought that I’d ever agree with reg on anything, but he’s right that while homeschooling “is all over the map,” in many cases it is the right choice: for special/ different learners, gifted kids, families who travel… The best ones do have either curricula the parents buy that is at least comparable to state standards, or digital; and there’s access to credentialed teachers, and monitoring of students’ work quarterly, where you show some work samples and progress; and annual grade-appropriate testing.
Maybe the woman who prompted the ruling was unqualified, but she hadn’t even a h. s. degree, and maybe her kids were justified in the accusations against her, maybe not — but that sounds like a matter that would have gone on even if the kids were in school and spent evenings and weekends at home. If that were a reason to end homeschooling, then the public schools should definitely be abolished.
This week just in L A, we hear of an Asst. Principal at Markham Middle who dragged a 13-year old student into his car, took her home and raped her; a teacher in Van Nuys who sexually assaulted several similarly very young girls; etc. etc. Plus the shootings, assaults and bullying that’s so common, even the best private schools suffer from it. Today’s L A Times features kids bullied at top private schools in La Jolla and even at Harvard-Westlake, and says that while 1/3 of all kids report serious bullying, that figure may actually be much higher.
And this is the good private and best public schools: what about the gang- and drug-infested public schools? Where the majority of kids don’t even care about learning, and make fun of the “smart nerds” who do.
Then, the piles of rote busywork homework that deaden a kid’s mind and spirit to learn. And the list goes on…
There are many reasons to homeschool and under the conditions I describe, when the kids also do activities like music and sports (which most parents who take the time to homeschool schedule), ric is totally wrong about their not being at least up to par with these esteemed public schools. In California, relatively few parents actually homeschool for religious reasons, although if you consider keeping tweens out of schools where 8th-9th graders are already obsessed with sex and do drugs “reactionary,” so be it.
Top colleges and universities look favorably on homeschooled kids and find that they’re often much more self-motivated. The attributes they develop, like being able to complete and master the work — rather than being consumed with busywork and discipline issues from other kids — are exactly what they need to excel in college, especially big universities where there are hundreds of kids in into courses and grades depend on occasional papers and tests, not daily homework. Good independent/ homeschooling programs exactly resemble and prepare students for this.
California colleges or universities dont look at home schooling very favorably. They are mostly put aside and looked at last.
After reading Reg’s and Woody’s comments, I will tell my story and opinion on home schooling. I have worked with a few people who home school their own kids and do a very good job, because these parent’s first priority is their children. But when Woody mentioned the kids who are more intereseted in real job skills and apprenticeships, a big light flashed before my eyes. I will tell why there are many kids who need to be in a “real†school with a good vocational programs.
As I have already mentioned I am an electronics engineer, I knew that I was destined to work in electronics or another technical field by the age of 12 years old. I took metal shop, wood-shop, drafting and electronics classes starting in junior high school. (There are few tools I can’t use.) These are “hands-on†vocational classes NO home school could have offered me. This is why I always say we need more vocational classes in schools for our young men.
I will tell you about my high-school electronics teacher (Mr. George Bohn) who was probably the biggest influence in my professional life and also in the lives of some close friends. I went to college with 4 other persons from my small high school electronics class, and some were also college roommates. I have worked with 6 people from my high school electronics class. When 8 of us from my high school electronics class decided to celebrate and thank our High School electronics teacher for his birthday, the number quickly grew to over 30 former students. We initially were going to have a gathering at a house, but we had to move to a hotel conference room, because of the size of the gathering. It was an amazing evening; one by one we all shared our stories about how one teacher (Mr. George Bohn) influenced our lives and careers. After that evening I had the opportunity to know more of my electronics teacher former students, there were many technicians, engineers and electrical contracting firm owners among his former students.
In summary home schooling is good for some kids, but it can’t fulfill the dreams of many young kids.
I dont know if you guys have ever encountered a low income white family where the house smells like dead dog and cat shit, 30 year old newspapers stack up ceiling high, and a bare footed unemployed mother wearing a nightgown at 3pm in the afternoon, and dont forget the cigaratte in her mouth. Do you think a lady like this would require her kids to go to school everyday?
Can someone say city of Bellflower?
L.A. Res, that’s a wonderful story about your teacher, and that can be repeated by people all over the country. However, you’re limiting your imagination when you think that homeschoolers can’t duplicate your learning experiences.
A friend taught his child about homebuilding by letting him work with friends who are buidling contractors and who taught the young man the profession from start to finish and with real world experiences–while getting paid. The mom taught the academics from a home school program in the morning and the kid learned real job skills in the afternoon. Christian values and lessons accompanied the lessons.
Homeschoolers don’t limit their exposure to what the mom and dad can do. They bring in extended family, friends, and help groups. My mom has tutored kids in Latin, we belonged to a home school group that shared resources, our kids joined up with others to learn from a trained and respected biologist, a NASA scientist taught about physics and space, we used a well-respected program also used by diplomats and missionaries, we got four times as much teaching done in the same time as public schools, and the values of the parents were emphasized rather than the lack of values in public schools.
I have found that even the so-called worst homeschooling parents still turn out successful students and self-sufficient citizens. There’s no social promotion in home schools.
At times I think about my government high school, which was ranked as the highest academically in a large region. However, I was taught biology by a coach who used class time to analyze game films and to talk about his WWII experiences, a math teacher who was expected to teach the new math even though she didn’t know the old math because she lied on her resume about having a math degree, a mechanical drawing teacher wo told us to do whatever we wanted while he shot the bull and had an affair with a cheerleader, a history teacher who was a life-long Democrat and whose lessons mainly consisted of talking about the greatness of Thomas Jefferson, a physics teacher who showed us boring black-and-white films by some nervous physics geek who couldn’t teach himself, a foreign language teacher who thought that her mother was reincarnated as a rubber tree plant that she kept in the room, etc., etc. Still, we had the top grades in the state because we learned what we could from them and learned what we needed by ourselves.
We didn’t hold special celebrations for these teachers…well, except for the WWII football coach, whose teams always won championships. He taught us that winning was important.
Woody’s description of his high school explains a lot.
(Sorry, I couldn’t pass up a cheap shot.)
Everyone seems to ignore what “Poplock” saaid about CSUC and UC admission practices, which I bet are also found at Stanford, USC, the Claremont Colleges etc. Fact is, in other countries wheteher you choose a State-Supported school or a private or Church-supported school you will study the same core curriiculum and be tested on that. In France for a “Bac”; in Germany for an “Arbeit” and in the UK for “O” and “A” levels. And those cerificates – plus the marks on the exams – determine en trance in Universities or Technical Schools or training and apprentice programs.
Naturally we think we know better than everyone else.
Woody, the kid was under the age of consent – 18. The judge, acting “in loco Parentis” refused to sign the papers. All he has to do is wait a year and he too can be one of the few and the proud!
What’s wrong? Don’t believe the parents know best?
rlc, if that judge were his parent, a sane judge would rule her incompetent to care for him.
reg: Woody’s description of his high school explains a lot.
Yeah, about the problems with government schools.
So any parent who refuses to sign for their kid to enter the military at 17 is incompetent?
Well at least Woody won’t be showing up at “PromiseKeepers” or the sermons of John Haggee who is a dominionist. Glad to know that you and the ACLU agree on something!
When I said that top universities are receptive to homeschoolers, I didn’t mean the Cal State system. In recent years I’ve come across quite a few articles in var%ious mag’s about this trend, and just now I tracked down an old issue of Stanford Magazine, from Nov/Dec. 2000, which talks about this rising trend there (Stanford had an admissions director who blazed a national trail in this area, actively seeking out top homeschoolers), as well as at Harvard and MIT. Harvard got a lot of media attention when it admitted three brothers from a farming community n Calif. in the early 80’s, giving credence to the trend.
In 2000, of 35 homeschooled applicants to Stanford, 9 were admitted and several of those were in their top 1-2% of the applicant pool when it came to passionate, self-motivated learning above and beyond the normal “smart kid.” Since then the numbers must surely have risen (I just don’t have time to keep working on this.) I’m sure these kids are self-selecting: the cream of the crop, who homeschool because they’re passionate and motivated to learn, not do piles of busywork.
As for socialization, “the big S,” the article calls it, they cite various “experts” who attest that homeschooled kids are generally more mature, because they model themselves after adults, not peer pressure. Which can be not only negative socialization (and bullying), but in LAUSD, dangerous and gang and drug-infested, too. Successful homeschoolers typically have a variety of other activities and busy lives for socialization.
Stanford and the other universities do encourage taking a community college course or two, and two recommendations from professors or community leaders they volunteer with, etc. All applicants have to take the SAT’s, and if they take the subject-specific tests, that helps, too. Not having grades is no more a hurdle than getting A’s from a small rural high school no one’s heard of or a big-city school with a bad rep, an admissions person is quoted saying: they’re all pretty much discounted.
State colleges are a lot more tied to performance in public schools — UC and CalState require being in the top 10% or 1/3, respectively, OR a very high SAT score of 1400 and above. Georgia Tech requires 8 community college classes.
Elite private schools have always had a more individual approach to accepting students, and are a good match for the exceptional student whose “passion for learning” is clear.
That’s true. Yale admitted GWB for an undergrad course in history and Harvard saw fir to find a place in the B-school for shrub. Meanwhile, the state-supported U. of Texas passed on admitting him to their (nationally ranked) law school. Guess they were corrupted by all that socialist indoctrination.
Reg, in all seriousness… send it to me at gmroper@yahoo.com and I’ll put it up with a disclaimer…
rlc, it’s not the “what” but the “why” which makes that judge unfit.
The decision wasn’t based upon what was best for the kid but based upon the judge’s hate for our nation and its military. Parents love their kids and make decisions for them based upon what is in their best interests despite their personal preferences.
I have a seventeen year old son, and I don’t have the power of a court to tell him where he should attend college or what major he should select. I can advise him, but at that age they are going to do what they want to do. A wise judge would not have interfered with the young man’s sincere goals, which had many positives to offer him.
Guys (GMR & Woody) – I was joking – after Woody’s comment thanking me for keeping it short. Excuse me while I go out and buy a pair of ice skates so I can enjoy the Big Freeze they’re having down in Hell. I’ve had GMRoper ask me to post commentary on his website and “WBC” fail to call me a drooling Guevarist with crap for brains and actually agree with me, all in one WitnessLA thread. Actually, I feel faint.
Poor Woody, his High School must have really sucked. My math teacher was a math and physics major. My math/physics teacher kept our interest by giving us real world applications to math and physics. We would head over to the Auto Shop class and learn about, horsepower, torque, thrust, acceleration, drive ratio, slip and etc. on some cool muscle cars. There was no way I could have otherwise been exposed to all the machines and test equipment my high school had. Unfortunately in today’s economy most high schools don’t have the budget for these types of vocational programs. Even the vocational apprenticeship programs offered by many unions have disappeared just like the unions themselves.
The other thing I notice among the young engineers I work with, is their lack of “hands-on†experience or a broad base knowledge of math and engineering. I work on large automated machinery and most of the “old†electronics engineers, know more about machines and mechanics than the young mechanical engineers.
L.A. Res, my high school did have other redeeming values, but we had our share of bad teachers as do all government schools. Unfortunately, at that time, the emphasis was on literature, history, and “finer things” other than science and math, until the ramping-up in those fields was complete after Sputnik changed priorities. Still, we had our share of National Merit Scholarship winners, military academy appointees, and ninety-eight perecent of my graduating class who went on to college. I give our parents more credit than the system.
Your school that you described is what we termed “vocational schools” for those who couldn’t handle college preparatory courses.
reg, I knew you were kidding.
“after Sputnik changed priorities”
You have a lot to thank Kruschev for…
Believe it or not Woody my High School was not a vocational school, but a general, run of the mill High School. It was more likely that in my era there was more state money and an emphasis in educating young men for “typical male†jobs.
The two valedictorians (both female) from my High School attended the same college as I did. One girl was a Home-Economics major and the other girl was a History major. (I’m sure they are still unemployed). Three of us from my small electronics class (approx 18) all majored in Engineering at the same college. Thinking back I don’t remember any females in my High School physics and science classes. Even in college, I only remember two females in the engineering classes. And fast forward to today, there are still very few female engineers.
Your school had some crappy teachers – “as all government schools” – and we know that would never occur at private or parochial schools so all the literature on same (“Such, such were the Joys” – Orwell, “David Copperfield” – Dickens, “The rector of Justin” – Auchincloss, “The Spire” – Golding, “Catcher in the Rye” – Salinger. “A Seperate Peace”, “The Blacking Factory” – Sheed). Butn even so “handicapped your school sent 98% of the graduates on to higher education, and had National Merit Scholars (depending on when you attended admission to the Service Academies could have been very easy or very hard).
So, given those numbers what’s the problem? Your school obviously worked well for you and your classmates.
Even if it didn’t teach you critical thinking or the ability to comprehend or present a coherent argument . . . I’ll take that back – you were cheated!
LA Res, keeping women out of math and science fields wouldn’t be accepted in these days of Title IX and Lawrence Summers. See Should Title IX Affect Math & Science Careers As It Has Sports?, which references an editorial and was written by some genius. Here’s how the referenced editorial starts, and it sounds like your old class.
My wife majored in home-ec, but guess who is asked to run the Roomba vacuum, unload the dishwasher, and brush the dog. If I have to do the hard work, she has to pay the bills.
rlc, you can bet that I was cheated. I was going into a science career, but my dishonest math teacher (who talked endlessly about her kids named Rocky and Candy–no kidding) left me with very poor preparation to major in that in college.
I went to a public high school in the northeast, and it was far superior to most L A private schools, but that was then and there. In my senior year, three of my five teachers had graduated from Princeton or Yale, two with MA’s from a combo, and they inspired with passion and wit. We had a choice of German as well as French and Spanish, an indoor pool (but PE for high school girls who have to get drenched and dry and pretty within the course of 40 mins. is hell!).
Your waxing rhapsodic about shop class reminds me of the one other thing I hated about those days: forcing girls into the sexist cooking and sewing classes (this persisted until the 80’s and I had the bad luck to just miss escaping it). We spent school time learning to make omelettes (wearing neatly ironed aprons, deductions for wrinkles), sewing horrible aprons and skirts we’d never wear, and learning how to hostess at tea parties. Both my omelette and apron were held up as a bad example by the teacher, a clone of Maggie Smith as British schoolmarm: “Girls, never, ever make something like this!” I engaged in the one act of cheating ever after that, hiring another girl to sew for me, but she proved even worse than me. Serving punch, I got so nervous I dropped some ice cubes and lemons down her shirt. I burst out laughing when Miss Isabella modeled the most flattering way to walk in high heels (and showed off her calves).
Meanwhile I was an Honors student in everything else, even calculus, because the teacher was so vivid. (I preferred all that literature and history, Woody, and was on the debate team, surprise…)
Of course, these days, with chefs and designers being hot, maybe some kids of both sexes would enjoy cooking & sewing classes, but they certainly shouldn’t be forced on everyone. I have made sure that I never, ever have a sewing machine in my home so that no one can force me to sew anything — but I can make a mean omelette. No help from “Miss Isabella” or tax dollars. (My sister, the engineer, insisted on taking woodshop and enjoyed it tremendously. Her bookshelves proved far more useful and lasting than my zig-zag aprons.)
I had to Google “Roomba Vacuum”, that damn thing runs by itself, just like the dishwasher which washes the dishes; Woody must be one of those lazy republicans.
I remember my older sister “cheating” on her sewing assignments. Our god-mother was a professional seamstress who had a large industrial sewing machine in her house. I’m sure my sister received an “A” in sewing. My god-mother even made cheer-leading outfits, for my sister and her squad. I remember I had a lot of interest in “sewingâ€Â, when the cheer-leaders came over to my god-mother’s house.
Here’s my niece and her son’s “unschool” blog – one family’s journey in education/life. I love keeping up with their activities. Gives you a sense of how rich “homeschooling” can be.
http://www.unschooleducation.blogspot.com/
Woody are you saying if you were homeschooled you would have had a teacher competent in math or science that would have allowed you totake Math 55 – or the even hard Math 1 – 2 series at Caltech?
Speaking of science, the other thing I would have missed in home school was the dissecting of frogs and the screaming and fainting of young girls during the process.
rlc, if I wanted to take Math 55, I would have been prepared better at home than in my government school. One thing is that I wouldn’t have been bounced back and forth between the new and old maths because they couldn’t decide which was better.
WBC, your sister did better in shop than did I. We couldn’t build anything unless the boards were perfectly square. By the time I would plane one down to that, it would have become too short. Fortunately, my family had a handyman named Major who did all the work around our house. However, I make a mean peanut butter and jelly sandwhich and watch Paula Deen on the cooking channel.
Ms. Fremon,
The LaWeekly’s last two articles on gang related issues are pieces of journalistic crapola.
Where do they get these one sided sorry ass reporters?