Four Wasted Years



Four years of high school spent with calculators in their hands,  four years of letting a machine do work their brains should have been doing has left kids unprepared for college.  Four years where the only thing that mattered to administrators was getting an A on a progress report did nothing for education.

The math teachers at Packemin have been pushed to use graphing calculators with all our students, particularly the lowest level ones.  Teachers have been told, over and over, to teach the kids how to solve equations using the calculator.  They have been threatened with "U" ratings for not using this device.  An ISS teacher told me that her former school forbid her from teaching simultaneous equations without a calculator.  Kids have gotten so calculator dependent that even simple operations like 12/1 are not being done by hand anymore.  A really sad part of all of this is that the calculators are not easy to use.  The time spent learning to do certain operations on the Casio or TI 84 could be better spent learning to do the work by hand.

I am not anti-calculator by a long shot, but when I see bright kids fall apart because they forgot basic arithmetic, I want to cry.  We've thrown away a generation.  How many more can we afford to lose?

Joke



Bayside H.S. is on the list of schools who got A's.  I couldn't believe my eyes and read the article twice, to make sure I was seeing it  right.

Bayside is an A school if you consider a school that does away with a "Smart Program" without parent consultation a good school.  The parents and many several staff members believe this was done on purpose.  Perhaps the powers that be are looking to close Bayside down and are just building up ammunition.  Most of the money Bayside has to spend is being spent on the lower 1/3 of the school and the kids in the middle and top are being left to their own devices. Kids, with holes in their program (why should there be holes?) are shoved into any available class, sometimes even given two gym classes to fill the day. How can  Bayside HS be an A school when the school has no regards for the needs of its middle students?

These ratings are a joke.  Just ask the kids or their parents.  Who needs comedies in the movies and on television when we have these progress reports to keep us entertained?

I'll end here with a quote from someone with first hand information about that school.

Now, these youngsters [new teachers], who seem competent and idealistic, are stuck with this horrible fake system and still have real kids like mine to educate. I’m glad my son has only 2 more years. I feel his academic opportunities are lessened because of Bayside HS and the cuts and where they were made. The A is so fake because the intent is to make this school eventually fail by budget starvation. .. Please do a post/expose of all this diminishing of opportunities for middle class kids. I’m all for it….this A is just so much bullshit.

Look Inside



Progress reports are bogus.  Everyone, even our education mayor must know that and still they continue.  Schools sit on pins and needles waiting for these useless documents to come out, knowing all that matters is that A.  We wonder why our students only care about what is on the test but they only need to look at us and follow the example we are setting, putting such a high value on a meaningless score.

Last year, my "A" school, Packemin, got a B rating.  Supposedly, a couple of ISS students didn't do as well as they were supposed to do and that is what brought us down.  The school then school found a way to get the numbers up and this year, Packemin got the A.

Packemin has and will always be an A school.  The kids are good and so is the staff (except for a few admins and I won't go into that here.)  At any time teachers, guidance counselors, paras, school aides, security guards and cafeteria workers can be found talking to students, helping them work through anything that might be bothering them or just lending an ear.  The school is full of teachers like the one  who spend an inordinate amount of hours working without compensation with the Robotics team, making our team one of the top in the country and giving kids an extraordinary education.  The same can be said about our JROTC instructors and countless other unnamed heroes who work above and beyond without any sort of recognition.

It is time to end these progress reports.  They show nothing and should mean nothing.  It's not the wrapping of the package, but what is inside that counts.