Klarinet Archive - Posting 000127.txt from 2006/04

From: "Dee Flint" <deeflint01@-----.net>
Subj: Re: [kl] Business aspects of music performance & education
Date: Sat, 15 Apr 2006 16:58:46 -0400


----- Original Message -----
From: "Karl Krelove" <karlkrelove@-----.net>
To: <klarinet@-----.org>
Sent: Saturday, April 15, 2006 9:46 AM
Subject: RE: [kl] Business aspects of music performance & education

>
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Dee Flint [mailto:deeflint01@-----.net]
>>
>> My parents and grandparents had far better math and English
>> skills than
>> today's high school graduates yet one of my grandfathers did
>> not go past the
>> 8th grade (typical for many of the day).
>>
> I have better math and English skills than most of today's high school
> graduates. Somehow I also managed to be educated in history, science,
> music,
> art and any number of other areas not even represented by specific classes
> in the schedule.
>

Because you were in school at a time when teachers demanded that you perform
in math and English. Perhaps your school was like mine. For example, if a
student turned in an essay in art class with poor grammar and spelling, he
got an F on the paper or was required to redo it. Today, a teacher cannot
do that. They are only allowed to grade the content (if they can figure it
out). So the students are allowed to "slide" on their English skills. This
sends a message to the kids that good language skills aren't needed outside
language class. Perhaps your school, like mine, expected your English and
basic math skills to have been pretty well covered by the time you got out
of middle school (or junior high or whatever it was called at the time).
Thus leaving a lot more time to cover other subjects through the high school
years.

> The point in the whole thing is that everyone sees a problem, but NCLB, if
> carried out unmodified to its logical conclusion, will cause far more
> damage
> than improvement to the public schools in the US. In the end it will not
> have solved the problem of declining *skills* for a number of reasons, not
> the least of which is that the assessment of those skills rests on testing
> programs that are neither uniform from state to state nor necessarily
> valid
> for measuring the skills we want to improve.
>
> Improving the outcome of education in the US has become an urgent problem
> with a variety of root causes, but NCLB is a punitive, destructive and,
> without modification, ultimately fatal solution. In the process American
> schools will have been progressively and unneedfully dehumanized.
>
> Enough for now - I could go on a great deal more, but most of this has
> been
> well covered in the national media, and I have very little hope of
> convincing anyone of the folly of NCLB with the poor writing skills I was
> able to develop on the way to becoming a musician.
>
> Karl
>

No it's not your writing skills. The people that you would be trying to
convince will look at your cogent and well written arguments and then
compare this with the problems they experience on a daily basis. It is the
simple and basic fact that employers can't read the job applications. It is
the simple and basic fact that too many employers have had to send their
employees to remedial math and English classes. It is the simple fact that
many internet bulletin boards, etc demonstrate on a daily basis that huge
numbers of people write so badly that the reader has no idea what they are
talking about or what they are trying to say. You don't have a ghost of a
chance of convincing people under the current circumstances.

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