How about exchanging homes for one year? Psychologists and sociologists would really be interested in this paradigm research investigation.
Teachers cannot make students learn and achieve or parents parent. Stop the blaming and complaining now. The most famous ten two-letter words are: “If it is to be, it is up to me.” As Mark Twain said, “Common sense is not so common.”
The epilogue of Teacher and Child by Dr. Haim G. Ginott states, “Dear colleagues: I am a survivor of a concentration camp. My eyes saw what no person should witness. Gas chambers built by learned engineers, children poisoned by educated physicians, infants killed by trained nurses, women and babies shot and burned by high school and college graduates. So, I am suspicious of education. My request is: Help your students become human. Your efforts must never produce learned monsters, skilled psychopaths, educated Eichmanns.
“Reading, writing, arithmetic are important only if they serve to make our children more humane.”
“You can get all As and still flunk life” (Marian Wright Edelman).
“The worst sin? The mutilation of a child’s spirit” (Erik Erikson).
David A. Hancock
Chesterland
If We Had Proficiencies in Phys-Ed, Youth Will Fail
To the editor:
This letter is regarding all the demagoguery, hysteria, nonsensical nonsense, and empty rhetoric from the standardistos (noneducators, i.e., politicians).
They know nothing about teaching and learning in a classroom or about the failure rate on proficiency tests—Ohio seniors: math, 46 percent; science, 42 percent; citizenship, 38 percent; reading, 31 percent; and writing, 18 percent—or that 60 percent is the minimum state performance standard to pass. (A 75 percent is needed to pass in grades 4, 6, and 9.)
Doesn’t this seem like lowering standards during the senior year? A study has shown that 47 percent of seniors took a science course and 60 percent took a math course in their senior year.
The United States spends $423 million on proficiency-standardized testing. The only state that doesn’t administer these tests (zero dollars) is Iowa, even though many states administer the Iowa Test of Basic Skills. How’s that for a paradoxical paradox?
This high failure rate could be a direct result of the very poor physical and general health condition of 60-plus percent of our students. After 33 years as a classroom teacher in health education / science, I believe we would have a 75 percent plus failure rate if we had a health / physical condition proficiency test.
Why? I observe many students eating donuts and Doritos at around 8 a.m.; exhibiting symptoms of chronic fatigue syndrome during school hours; plopping their heads down on their desks; eating pizza, french fries, and ice cream for lunch; and walking very slowly and struggling to go up stairs.
They are too lazy to get up and walk from point X to Y in the classroom. (“Mr. Hancock, would you please bring me a pencil?”) They sit during physical education class; go to the nurse the period before PE to fake an illness; exhibit effects of alcohol, tobacco and/or drug use, sleep deprivation, obesity; and intentionally fail PE during the regular school year in order to participate during summer school for credit.
Many do not want to dress or get wet (swimming avoidance). I see unplanned pregnancy because 90 percent of students do not know when conception can occur. (I correct this factual error during the first day of class.)
Illinois is the only state that requires daily PE classes of all students K–12. Our children are the most obese of any society in the world, and after smoking, physical inactivity is the single largest health risk factor. Obesity-related diseases cost the US economy more than $100 billion per year. Statistics show that 25 percent of students, grades 4–12, attend no PE classes at all during the school week.
The superintendent of Atlanta Public Schools, Benjamin O. Canada, defends the elimination of recess because “we are intent on improving academic performance and you don’t do that by having kids hanging on monkey bars.”
The ancient ideal of a sound mind in a sound body was rooted in the view that the truly educated person has learned to manage his/her life physically, mentally, and morally. Training and maintaining the body is part of getting one’s overall self into shape. It molds good habits and attitudes and helps discipline the intellect.
Parents should remember to ask their children what they do during recess and PE when they discuss his/her day at school. Better yet, assign homework (just in case the PE teacher didn’t) and go for a brisk walk or bike ride. Let’s get moving.
David Hancock
Chesterland
Hancock is a science teacher at Monticello Middle School in Cleveland Heights. He was a longtime teacher at Heights High School.
LETTERS
COMPUTERS IN CLASSROOM NOT ANSWER TO EDUCATION
To the editor:
This fixation with computers in the classroom is a cheap and quick fix. The problem is, it’s not a fix at all, states David Shenk in his book Data Smog: Surviving the Information Glut. Shenk calls putting a computer in every classroom like putting an electric power plant in every home. Planned computer obsolescence reaps billions of dollars every year for programmers, manufacturers, marketers, and PR professionals.
To those who don’t have a vested interest in coming up with an instant solution to our educational challenges or selling a lot of computer equipment, computers in the classroom do not look like such a terrific idea.
“Perhaps the saddest occasion for me is to be taken to a computerized classroom and be shown children joyfully using computers,” Alan Kay, one of the legendary pioneers of personal computing, testified to Congress in 1995. They are happy, teachers are happy, the administrators are happy, and the parents are happy.
Yet in most classrooms, on closer examination, Kay said, “The children are doing nothing interesting or growth-inducing at all.”
“I used to think that technology
