Yes, we are what we teach, and that can be magnificent!
Respectfully,
David A. Hancock
Introduction
Letters from a Mad Public School Teacher is intrepid, irascible, cantankerous, provocative, satirical, passionate, thought-provoking, bitingly witty, ironic, sarcastic, iconoclastic, and enhanced with demagoguery.
What is wrong with education? What can be done about it? You just found out. Now you know!
“In years to come, your students may forget what you taught them. But they will always remember how you made them feel.”
Also, the following elicited personal and professional reflection:
As a teacher, I have come to the conclusion that I am the decisive element in the classroom. It is my personal approach that creates the climate. It is my daily mood that makes the weather. As a teacher, I possess tremendous power to make a child’s life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration. I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis will be escalated or deescalated and a child humanized or de-humanized. (Haim Ginott)
American Students Can Hold Their Own with the Japanese
Let’s set the record straight before we compare Japanese education to American education.
First, we need to understand that the Japanese value harmony, obedience, and conformity (“Youths Ignore Future as the Japanese Worry,” Aug. 22). We value pluralism, independence, individualism, and creativity. Japan is a hierarchical society. We favor local control. The Japanese are a homogeneous population. We are heterogeneous.
Statistics show that the Japanese graduate 90 percent from high school compared to our 78 percent. However, more of our students go to college (60 percent to 30 percent). Higher education in Japan is generally conceded to be inferior to that in the United States. The college years are often referred to as a “four-year vacation.”
In the United States, students seem to come into their own at the college level. We may not move as fast, but we go further. The first Nobel Prizes were awarded in 1901. Since then, Japan has received only six. When we compare the hundreds of Nobel prizes won by Americans, we have a good index of the positive effects of our educational system. So let’s relax on the proficiency test scores.
Also, at the present time, France is experiencing a “brain drain” of talented young entrepreneurs who are feeling the country’s bureaucratized hierarchical, anti-innovation culture according to Global Trends 2005.
As David Elkind, professor of child development at Tufts University and author of The Hurried Child and All Grown Up and No Place to Go, states so well, “All our problems in American education arise because we are not sufficiently American, not because we are insufficiently Japanese. Our classrooms are not as individualized, and our curriculums are not as flexible, as our values of individualism and self-reliance demand. True educational reform will only come about when we make our education appropriate to children’s individual growth rates and levels of mental development.”
David A. Hancock
Chesterland
First letter to editor from Hancock (June 1990) after twenty-one years of teaching!
Politicians, Money Can’t Make Bored Kids Learn
To the editor:
Oh no, not again. More “edu-blather,” demagoguery, empty rhetoric, and ad infinitum from politicians, pundits, and “standardistos” about education reform legislation.
Some of the highlights stated were that states would be forced to set annual goals for schools to raise student achievement, would have to achieve proficiency in twelve years, and the worst schools would face staffing overhauls.
First, we can’t force an increase in student achievement, just as we can’t force humans to increase positive health habits when they choose not to. Second, we can’t force proficiency in twelve years. Can we force a cure for certain diseases? Third, how about student overhauls?
I have observed in my thirty-four years as a public school classroom teacher that it’s not ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) but rather ODD (oppositional defiant disorder) and ICCLA (insouciant couldn’t-care-less attitude) from the obstinate cantankerous recalcitrants.
This is something that private / parochial schools do not experience (usually) because if students exhibit behavioral disorders, they are transferred to their neighborhood public school. Remember, private and parochial schools practice first-degree segregation.
To all our critics, let us remember that “no curricular over-haul, no instructional innovation, no change in school organization, no toughening of standards, no rethinking of teacher training or compensation will succeed if students do not come to school interested in and committed to learning,” as stated by Laurence Goldberg.
However, it’s very difficult if the physical building has any savage inequalities (poor heating, no soap or toilet paper—the appalling Afghanistan cave atmosphere, etc.) or Saddam spider holes.
Before we know it, obstetricians are going to start placing a practice proficiency test in the neonate’s crib that will probably cause SIDS (sudden infant death syndrome).
Caution—this is a “no-spin zone” letter from the H factor.
David A. Hancock
Chesterland
Hancock is a science teacher at Monticello Middle School.
Public or private, among larger school districts, Cleveland has the highest rate in the state of students enrolled in private schools. An estimated 39 percent of the children living in the district who attend a private school in grades K–5 enrolled in private schools. Here is other Greater Cleveland
Highest Percentage in Private schools
Cleveland Hts.
-University Hts.
39%
Westlake
36%
Revere
32%
Mayfield
28%
North Royalton
25%
Lowest Percentage in Private Schools
Ravenna
3%
Solon
5%
Cloverleaf
6%
Twinsburg
7%
George W. Bush is No “Education” President
To the editor:
So President George W. Bush said that he will be our education president. I didn’t think too much about this until I read Is Our Children Learning? The Case Against GWB [sic] by Paul Begala.
GWB asked this question on January 11, 2000, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, from “Perspectives” (Newsweek, March 5, 2001): “You teach a child to read, and he or she will be able to pass a literacy test.” It’s quite evident that you do not need good grammar to be president.
Here are some other enlightening observations: “Higher education is not my priority” (San Antonio Express-News, March 22, 1998). “Dubya went to Andover, Yale, and Harvard as a beneficiary of affirmative action for the overprivileged
