Schoolwork Summer 2012

Good job, Rayven. Now that you've rained on my parade, just one question do I have for you. Did the student in front of you steal the Winnie the Pooh assignment? :) ;) :)

Good heavens. Can you imagine me being forced to do a Winnie the Pooh project? Hehehe. Anyway, Indiana schools are embarrassing. It's bugged me the whole time I've lived here. It's also why I homeschooled my daughter for 2 years then put her into a montessori school. My husband lived in Wisconsin for most of his childhood, but he had a 3 year stint in Indiana in elementary school. When he got back to Wisconsin, his reading and math levels hadn't changed at all. Ridiculous. For the amount of money spent on education, it baffles me how we continue to do such a huge disservice to ourselves by not actually teaching people anything.

I can indeed imagine you having to do a Winnie the Pooh assignment. You may not like it, but you'd do it if it was an assignment. ;) But seriously, the numbers above are just mind-boggling, and sad. I hate it when they put teachers on the line for this, especially good teachers. Don't get me started. On a lighter note, just so you know, Eeyore is now following you. You may not receive this as an ALERT, but trust me. He is following you. ;)

Eeyore is my favorite ;)

Mine, too. Just love his peppy personality. :) The above is also very eye-catching. Everyone seems to like stats these days, and you spell things out pretty clearly. Six green factoids trumped by a single red one. The Earth as background only adds to all the dire numbers.

I got full points for this project from the instructor. There's a few little things I've patched up for the revisit, but all in all, I was pretty happy with this project.

Excellent news!

The secondary school education system in the U.S. has always been academically inferior to many other nations but it does seem to have gotten worse in some areas over time. The problem is exacerbated as many secondary school students are ill equipped to deal with undergraduate and graduate studies. The proliferation of universities and colleges that are essentially run as profit and diploma mills has dramatically lowered the average standards for admission so any student can get into one of them as long as they can pay the high tuition (often financed by grossly over leveraged student education loans) resulting in poor quality graduates flooding the saturated employment markets, often forced to live in quasi-indentured servitude to tremendous student loan debt for the next 20 to 40 years of their lives. This is the America we live in now.

In my college, my program chair has to constantly battle with the administration to prevent them from "dumbing down" our major. Even at more prestigious schools, they're lowering standards instead of dealing with the actual problem: students aren't prepared for college. The universities now put more emphasis on having high graduation and retention rates than the quality of their curriculum. Part of this stems from new federal regulations on financial aid. While I appreciate the spirit of trying to retain and graduate students, what's in place now is only hurting those of us who have or will have degrees because that diploma is going to be next to meaningless, no matter how good we actually are or how hard we've worked.