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Parenting

Discussion in '2005 Archive' started by gb93433, Jun 28, 2005.

  1. gb93433

    gb93433 Active Member
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    Quoted from The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century by Thomas L. Friedman, pages 303-304.

    Parenting

    No discussion of compassionate flatism would be complete without also discussing the need for improved parenting. Helping individuals adapt to a flat world is not only the job of governments and companies. It is also the job of parents. They too need to know in what world kids are growing up and what it will take for them to thrive. Put simply, we need a new generation of parents ready to administer tough love: There comes a time when you've got to put away the Game Boys, turn off the television set, put away the iPod, and get your kids down to work.

    The sense of entitlement, the sense that because we once dominated global commerce and geopolitics--and Olympic basketball--we always will, the sense that delayed gratification is a punishment worse than a spanking, the sense that our kids have to be swaddled in cotton wool so that nothing bad or disappointing, or stressful ever happens to them at school is, quite simply, a growing cancer on American society. And if we don't start to reverse it, our kids are going to be in for a huge and socially disruptive shock from the flat world. While a different approach by politicians is necessary, it is not sufficient.

    David Baltimore, the Nobel Prize-winning president of Caltech, knows what it takes to get your child ready to compete against the cream of the global crop. He told me that he is struck by the fact that almost all the students who make it to Caltech, one of the best scientific universities in the world, come from public schools, not from private schools that sometimes nurture a sense that just because you are there, you are special and entitled. "I look at the kids who come to Caltech, and they grew up in families that encouraged them to work hard and to put off a little bit of gratification for the future and to understand that they need to hone their skills to play an important role in the world," Baltimore said. "I give parents enormous credit for this, because these kids are all coming from public schools that people are calling failures. Public education is producing these remarkable students -so it can be done. Their parents have nurtured them to make sure that they realize their potential. I think we need a revolution in this country when it comes to parenting around education.”
     
  2. Karen

    Karen Active Member

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    The article certainly makes a lot of good points. But why does it surprise him that almost all the students come from public schools? Most students go to public schools. So statistically most of the students at such a public institution would come from public school.
    Parental involvement is certainly crucial.
    And it can make all the difference. But that occurs no matter what type of schooling the child has had.

    My oldest attends the U.S. News & World Report second-ranked private college in the western U.S.
    It is a Baptist school. It has a mix of public, private, and home-schooled kids. All are capable of doing well. All are capable of doing badly.

    My son came from a mixture of private schooling and home-schooling. He is friends at school with a number of kids home-schooled all the way who display every positive characteristic the article mentions.

    I work in the public school system. One of the best in my state. But I sure do come across a lot of students who would never make it at Caltech.
    I do hold to the view that it is not ALL about studying and working when you are young. I think homework should be limited at night, except for maybe the last one or two years of high school.
    The child has already spent seven or eight hours in school. He needs exercise, sleep, hobbies, time with family, friends, service opportunities. Oh yeah, LOL, church and personal Bible study,too. He needs time to goof off.
    I realize childhood is a recent cultural invention, in many ways. But a lot about it is a good thing.
    My kids have always benefitted from summer vacation about as much as the school year, but in different ways. Scout trips, camping with their dad, church mission trips, just hanging around.
    A lot of life IS about work. But there is a balance.

    Karen
     
  3. gb93433

    gb93433 Active Member
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    The author of that book shows what kind of people are losing jobs in America and why. He also shows how the loss of those jobs is making America more prosperous.

    We have known about the demand for highly skilled people for at least the past 25 years.

    That book should be required reading for every young person today.
     
  4. TexasSky

    TexasSky Guest

    I think educators and parents need the book more than children do.

    My boss and I are often amazed at the sense of "entitlement" we run across in college students. If they do not show up for class or complete an assignment, they expect administration to chastise the professor for not making special allowances for them. If they do not attend required functions related to their scholarships, they become angry at the scholarship coordinator for not fixing it. If they plagerize or cheat, they "don't see what the big deal is."

    We actually have taken it upon ourselves to teach responsiblity to them, because even the brightest and best show a total lack of it. They believe if they yell loud enough, long enough, at the right person, they'll get their way.

    I call it "the terrible two's-adult style."
     
  5. gb93433

    gb93433 Active Member
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    I think the point in the book was about parenting, directed at parents.

    I see the same thing. One of the professors had a parent call him and asked him if he could watch out for her 21 year old son. He told her that he was not the student’s baby sitter.

    What I often see is two kinds of students-–those who work hard and those who want to just graduate.

    Where I am at, plagiarism is cause for dismissal.

    In the same book by Friedman he mentions that in China between 1995 and 2002 productivity increased 17% annually while at the same time it lost 15 million manufacturing jobs compared to 2 million in the United States. However they are gaining them in services.

    For over 25 years we have known of the need for both unskilled and highly skilled workers in the U.S.
     
  6. Karen

    Karen Active Member

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    I think the point in the book was about parenting, directed at parents.

    I see the same thing. One of the professors had a parent call him and asked him if he could watch out for her 21 year old son. He told her that he was not the student’s baby sitter.
    .......
    </font>[/QUOTE]Depends on what you have in mind here. No, he is not the babysitter. But I thank God for the godly professors at my son's university who take a personal interest in and help their students beyond the actual class.
    Often there are 15 students or less in my son's classes. Better than the 200-500 in some of my undergraduate classes.
    Part of the educational problem is the nature of very large educational institutions which too easily become very impersonal.
    As well as too many undergraduate classes taught by graduate students who have little or no teaching experience. The problems you address have a multitude of causes.

    Karen
     
  7. TexasSky

    TexasSky Guest

    Where I am at, plagiarism is cause for dismissal.

    Here too, however - we're finding that because of this, many professors are not reporting it to administration. They feel it is "too harsh."

    We've made the same observations regarding students who want to learn and students who want a paper so they can get a job.

    All of my college's classes are taught by full professors, but we are specifically designed to educate the gifted students. That is not to say all of the University classes are. There are colleges within the University which rely too much on TA's and GA's.
     
  8. Joseph_Botwinick

    Joseph_Botwinick <img src=/532.jpg>Banned

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    I think there is a third group of people. When I was in college, I started out very wide eyed and idealistic, and truly wanted to learn everything I could. By my 3rd to 4th year, I was more ready to get my piece of paper and get a job.

    Joseph Botwinick
     
  9. TexasSky

    TexasSky Guest

    Joseph,

    Would that put you in the "disillusioned" group? [​IMG]
     
  10. faithgirl46

    faithgirl46 Active Member
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    I agree with you 100%. The kids think that they deserve good grades even if theyturn in an assignment half done. I wouldn't eat a half baked meal, and if I was a teacher, I wouldn't give a student a passing grade.
     
  11. faithgirl46

    faithgirl46 Active Member
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    I agree with you 100%. The kids think that they deserve good grades even if they turn in an assignment half done. I wouldn't eat a half baked meal, and if I was a teacher, I wouldn't give a student a passing grade. </font>[/QUOTE]for turning in an assginment that they did half way.
     
  12. faithgirl46

    faithgirl46 Active Member
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    I don't have kids, but I have friends who have kids. My honorary Nephew, Chris liked POkeman. His mom didn't. I refused to let him watch pokeman since I didn't feel it was a good influence on him. He was too interested in Pokeman.
     
  13. Joseph_Botwinick

    Joseph_Botwinick <img src=/532.jpg>Banned

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    I think I was more burnt out than anything. It is not hard to do when they required 165 for a BA degree, and many of the classes I was required to take were only worth one credit hour. Plus, I was also engaged my last year of college and looking forward to getting on with my life.

    Joseph Botwinick
     
  14. gb93433

    gb93433 Active Member
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    What do they do with the associate and assistant professors?
     
  15. gb93433

    gb93433 Active Member
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    Every parent wants their child to learn a lot and at the same time get a lot of help to succeed. You cannot help a poorly prepared student to be well prepared when he is below where the class begins. I see that a lot when students come from poor high schools or lesser community colleges.

    Sometime look at some pictures or read about how large the classes were in the high schools across America in the early 1900's. My classes when I was a student in elementary school were 34 to 37 students. In the early 1900's some were double that size. At the university I went to some of the classes were about 1000. I would much rather have a professor in a class of 200 or more who is good than one in a class of ten who is poor.

    One school I attended, ran eight hours each day, six days a week. Usually we were there about 10 hours each day. Students came from all over the world to study there. The man who founded the school is one of the best in the world. The class he taught was 22 students. It didn't matter how much education we had beforehand because compared to where he would lead us, we knew nothing.

    Years ago I taught high school and junior college. The students who had me in high school and then took me for classes at the junior college got quite a surprise when they found out they had ot work a lot harder at the junior college.

    By the time a student gets to the university he should be grown up enough to seek out help. That is the way real life is. If the student is not ready for the university then it may be better for the person to stay out for one year and work or go to a community college instead.
     
  16. TexasSky

    TexasSky Guest

    GB,

    Actually, we will have an Associate Professor starting in the Fall. Many of our faculty are actually "borrowed" from other colleges within the University system. We have faculty apply for permission to teach with us and our students may actually be enrolled in another "college," such as Engineering, and ours.
     
  17. TexasSky

    TexasSky Guest

    I can't imagine a class of 1,000. Even the monster classes in the other college within our University system are only 350 to 500.

    The largest class we offer in our college (not University, the college within the University) has 25 students in it, and we consider that "too many".

    We like to give a lot of discussion and individual attention to our group. The kids have to put in a lot of extra work, but about 9 out of 10 come back saying they were their favorite classes.
     
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