Studies and statistics show that the “average” American child spends about 10 hours a day either having fun watching TV or playing video games or social networking on Facebook or sending endless text messages with a mobile phone.
The high school I taught at in Southern California for many years has a low state ranking and was one of those underperforming schools and still is five years after I retired.
One year, there was a story in the news about the school’s scores going down and one of my students with a failing grade mentioned this in class, which caused others to laugh with looks on their faces that said it was a teacher’s fault.
I said, “Walnut Valley High School has a state ranking that is a nine out of ten and our school is a three. If we swapped students from Nogales to Walnut move the teachers, that ranking would go with the students and Nogales would have a nine and Walnut a three.
“The score comes from the students—not the teachers. You started kindergarten in a different school. After seven years, you went to an Intermediate school. By the time you walked through my classroom door, you had been in school ten years and probably had fifty different teachers.”
They stopped laughing.
At the time, half the students I taught were failing my classes. The reason they were failing is that they didn’t read at home, do the homework or study for tests. I should know. I’m the one who recorded all those zeroes in the grade book.
I’m the one that called or attempted to call parents to get them involved.
Then when students fail, Washington D.C. blames and punishes teachers.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
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Study after study show that the “average” American parent talks to his or her child less than five minutes a day and that 80% of parents never attend a parent-teacher conferences during the thirteen years his or her child is in school.
The “No Child Left Behind Act” became law in 2001 and it was ignorance personified since nowhere in the Act were parents or students held responsible for anything.
Two presidents have pandered to the popular myth that bad teachers are the reason so many of America’s children are not learning what they should in school. George W. Bush was the first president and then there is Obama.
I’m writing this as a protest about Obama’s words concerning underperforming schools that should fire teachers. When schools do not perform, politicians have always looked for scapegoats and teachers make good targets.
Yes, there are poor teachers but no more than any profession. Most are hard working and dedicated. I should know. I taught for thirty years and my weeks were often one hundred hours of work, because I often worked at home correcting papers or planning lessons.
This reaction to fire teachers when students do not learn is wrong. Why not punish the students and the parents instead?
When I was a child and educators said I would never learn to read or write due to severe dyslexia, my mother taught me to read at home. Both of my parents were avid readers, and my parents were my role models—not my teachers.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.
The twelve year old girl’s father sat there looking at me as if I was something scrapped from the bottom of a slimy trashcan.
“Were you in the Marines?” I asked.
He looked suspicious and said yes.
I pulled out my old Marine Corp ID, which I still carried. The volcanic atmosphere vanished and the air-cooled. We spent the next half-hour talking about the Marines and Vietnam. Simper Fi was stronger than his daughter’s attempt to get rid of me with lies and deceit.
Before he left, he turned to her and said, “No more complaints. If Mr. Lofthouse tells you to do something, you do it.”
Just as I was starting to gain control, the regular teacher returned. She had released herself from the hospital and demanded her job back. A month later, she left after a second breakdown. I was called again. I asked for a written guarantee that the regular teacher wouldn’t be coming back. They couldn’t give it to me. I turned the job down.
This teacher had a bad case of PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder). The first thing I saw were Playboy centerfolds hanging from the ceiling. The walls were covered with blotches of paint and clay. Any art supplies that weren’t on the ceiling, walls or blackboard were smeared on the floor. The regular teacher often left the room to smoke cigarettes leaving the kids unsupervised.
I was offered a long-term position to the end of the school year. I accepted, and the VP gave me the room key and replaced the art supplies the kids had destroyed. I spent the weekend cleaning the mess.
After the first few days on the job, the kids started calling me “Sergeant”. That’s because I ran the class like a Marine Corps drill instructor but without the profanity and insults. The troublemakers hated me. No student liked the discipline, and one of the girls complained to her dad that I was mean and didn’t know anything about art. He demanded a parent conference.
After school the next day, the father walked in with his daughter right behind him. I could tell from his body language that his had convinced him that I had to go. That’s when I saw the United States Marine Corps tattoo on his right forearm.
Continued in Part 4, Semper Fidelis—Always Faithful. The Few. The Proud
If you didn’t start reading this four part series with “It’s the Parents, Stupid“, click here
There’s more to the story of our daughter’s academic success than teaching her at home when one of her teachers was not doing an acceptable job. We also left the TV off Monday through Friday and provided a place for her to do her homework. Research shows that kids watchtoo much television. On weekends, we watched about two to four hours of TV—no more and we watched as a family. She has never had a TV in her room. No video games either. We also took her to the library once a week and checked out books. When she was done with her homework each school night, her only form of entertainment was to read, and she did.
In 1977, Covina Valley School District wanted a tough substitute to tame an unruly art class at Las Palmas Middle School. The art teacher at Lao Palmas had a breakdown and was in the hospital under a doctor’s care. The Las Palmas’s principal called the principal at Giano Intermediate.
At the time, Giano had a reputation as the toughest school in the San Gabriel Valley due to the local street gangs. The principal was Ralph Pagan, a Korean War Veteran. He’d been hired to tame Giano. I’d subbed at Giano many times the previous year, and Ralph recommended me for the job. I met the VP at Las Palmas after school one day, and he let me into the art room. What I saw shocked me.
His latest novel is Running with the Enemy. Blamed for a crime he did not commit while serving in Vietnam, his country considers him a traitor. Ethan Card is a loyal U.S. Marine desperate to prove his innocence or he will never go home again.
And the woman he loves and wants to save was trained to hate and kill Americans.
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I read this post on Jupdi Blogs and thought, “Bull Shit!” It’s too easy to blame American teachers when kids don’t learn. When our daughter was a senior in a public high school, she had maybe two bad teachers in the thirteen years she’s been in school.
I heard our daughter’s complaints, so I know.
She also had many good teachers. So, explain how she managed to earn nothing but As and a 4.66 GPA then be accepted to Stanford where she’s now a student.
She was also ranked in the top 4% for her graduating class and was guaranteed acceptance at the University of California, Davis. How did she do that?
It’s the parents, stupid, and the real problem is a culture that looks for scapegoats. It’s not a few bad teachers.
In every profession, there are workers that do a poor job and teaching is no different. When there is a poor teacher, instead of complaining, do what we did—teach your child at home or hire a tutor for that subject.
Three professions suffer from PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) — combat soldiers, public school teachers and airport flight controllers. The real problem is often the stress caused from parents with attitudes like the author of the post at Jupdi Blogs.
Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran,
who taught in the public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005).
His third book is Crazy is Normal, a classroom exposé, a memoir. “Lofthouse presents us with grungy classrooms, kids who don’t want to be in school, and the consequences of growing up in a hardscrabble world. While some parents support his efforts, many sabotage them—and isolated administrators make the work of Lofthouse and his peers even more difficult.” – Bruce Reeves
Lofthouse’s first novel was the award winning historical fiction My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. His second novel was the award winning thriller Running with the Enemy. His short story A Night at the “Well of Purity” was named a finalist of the 2007 Chicago Literary Awards. His wife is Anchee Min, the international, best-selling, award winning author of Red Azalea, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year (1992).
To follow this Blog via E-mail see upper right-hand column and click on “Sign me up!”
One of the raptors ratted me out, and Grendel called me to his office to sizzle me in his hot seat. He yelled at me for going against Sauron’s orders. He moved closer until I could smell the dead flesh of vulchers and cigarettes on his breath. He demanded that I admit guilt. I suspected the motive was grade inflation.
I stared at his jugular wondering how fast it would take to tear it out with my teeth. Like Beowulf, I wanted to destroy the monster. To my dismay, as my PTSD was getting ready to launch, the VP, who was there to witness this interrogation, stepped forward and stopped us.
I think she saw the hunger in my eyes.
After school, she came into the teacher’s lounge, as I was getting ready to leave campus. We were alone. She looked around with a tense expression and made sure the hall leading to the staff lounge was empty.
Then she leaned closer and whispered. “You were right.” And she quit a few weeks later to accept a position in another school district abandoning us to the beast.
Damn! Talk about the rats leaving the ship. Soon, teachers started clambering down the ropes to escape.
It was in the 1980s, when we were told to throw out the grammar books and stop teaching from them. I blame this on the self esteem movement—a blunder equal to the invasion of Iraq or the Vietnam War or Anzio in World War II or Richard Nixon’s involvement in the Watergate cover-up or John F. Kennedy allowing the Bay of Pigs Invasion that led to the Cuban Missile Crisis or Ronald Reagan and the Iran-Contra Affair or Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky.
“Throw out the books”, they said—and Hitler lit his match. But on the sly, we defied Sauron and Grendel. Most English teachers hid sets of Warriner’s English Grammar and Composition.
Every Friday, thirty minutes before class let out, I took out Warriner’s and went over the lesson for homework that weekend. It was always short and on Monday, the answers were posted on the board so the kids could check their work during roll before turning it in.
I thought I was being clever and had no idea that a storm was brewing.
His latest novel is Running with the Enemy. Blamed for a crime he did not commit while serving in Vietnam, his country considers him a traitor. Ethan Card is a loyal U.S. Marine desperate to prove his innocence or he will never go home again.
And the woman he loves and wants to save was trained to hate and kill Americans.
To follow this Blog via E-mail see upper right-hand column and click on “Sign me up!”
TheWhole Language approach to teaching English was another magic bullet in public education that misfired. California’s educational system suffered horribly from this blunder. The theory was that the more a child reads on their own, the more the child learns.
However, children watch – on average – several hours of TV daily, and more than forty percent are latch-key children. Most of these soda-drinking sugar heads would not read even with a loaded gun to their heads. But for the Whole Language program to work, the children had to read at last thirty minutes every night on their own.
Grendel’s boss was Sauron from Mordor (Grendel and Sauron are anonymous names that represent real administrators). This latest magic bullet—The Whole Language approach to teaching English—probably came from him since most magic bullets for public education come from micro-managers like him. You’ll hear more about Sauron in a few other posts. He even appears in my memoir as Mr. Insert.
Anyway, Grendel ordered the English teachers to stop teaching grammar, mechanics, vocabulary and spelling, and this led to some of us teaching stealth grammar until Grendel recruited students as spies to catch us.
Sauron lived up to the nom de plume I’ve given him. Anyone that worked in Rowland Unified School District at that time probably knows who I’m talking about. He may even have had a Palantir, one of the seeing stones from The Lord of the Rings, to keep an eye on his administrators and teachers making sure they were doing things the way he wanted. During my thirty years of teaching in that school district, I often heard from staff that nothing was done without Sauron’s approval. The principals probably had to ask permission to visit a bathroom.
Now here’s the thing—teachers are blamed for every alleged failure in public education, and many of these so-called failures are manufactured. They are based on lies and fraud. For instance, teachers are lazy, teachers are incompetent and so one. But how could the failure of Whole Language be blamed on the teachers? Teachers protested. They knew it wouldn’t work. They knew that teachers had to keep teaching grammar. A decade later, Whole Language was quietly dropped, and teachers were told to start teaching grammar again but most of the textbooks had been recycled against the common sense and warnings of teachers–who are seldom if ever listened to by those at the top who know it all.
_______________________
Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran,
who taught in the public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005).
Honorable Mention in Biography/Autobiography at 2014 Southern California Book Festival
His third book is Crazy is Normal, a classroom exposé, a memoir. “Lofthouse presents us with grungy classrooms, kids who don’t want to be in school, and the consequences of growing up in a hardscrabble world. While some parents support his efforts, many sabotage them—and isolated administrators make the work of Lofthouse and his peers even more difficult.” – Bruce Reeves
Lofthouse’s first novel was the award winning historical fiction My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. His second novel was the award winning thriller Running with the Enemy. His short story A Night at the “Well of Purity” was named a finalist of the 2007 Chicago Literary Awards. His wife is Anchee Min, the international, best-selling, award winning author of Red Azalea, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year (1992).
To follow this Blog via E-mail see upper right-hand column and click on “Sign me up!”
There are many ways to measure the success or failure of public education in the United States, and one way is to compare functional Illiteracy in the United States to similar English speaking countries and Mexico, because culture plays an important role in children’s attitude toward education and literacy.
It’s arguable that the four MOST similar countries/cultures in the world, when compared to the United States, are Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom, because they share an Anglo Saxon heritage, culture, and the same language. In addition, almost 80% of the U.S. population is white alone (in 2013, 77.7% were white), and the more than 13% who are African American, who have been in the U.S. for several generations, due to slavery, are no longer linked to an African cultural heritage. If you doubt that, consider that 78% of African Americans are Protestants and 5% are Catholics and—forced—immigration from Africa stopped and/or slowed drastically after the Civil War in 1865. What this means is that African Americans with roots that reach back 150 years or more are culturally American. If interested in this topic, I suggest you read a study out of Yale: African vs. African-American: a shared complexion does not guarantee racial solidarity
The United Nations defines illiteracy as the inability to read and write a simple sentence in any language, and it’s arguable that English is one of the most difficult languages to learn—if not the most difficult—if it is your second language. To understand this, I suggest you read 10 Reasons Why English is a Hard Language
Huan Japes, deputy chief executive of English UK, a trade body for language colleges, says a rule of thumb is 360 hours—120 hours for each of three stages—to get to the standard the government expects benefit claimants to reach. …
Dr Elaine Boyd, head of English language at Trinity College London, says, “If someone is really highly motivated, they can learn really quickly. It’s common for children under the age of 11 to be very immersed and be fluent in about six months.” …
Philida Schellekens, a language consultant, says that when she researched English language learning in Australia a decade ago the figure of 1,765 hours was used. That could mean four years of classes. It signifies the standard needed to do a clerical job in an office.
InEnglish Spelling Confuses Everyone, Professor Julius Nyikos, a linguistics expert born and raised in Hungary, learned numerous languages in his elementary school, high school, and university training. He came to the US in 1949 and, after a few years of studying English, was able to continue his profession as a linguist that he began in Europe. He spent many years as a professor at Washington & Jefferson College in Pennsylvania studying the languages of the world. In his scholarly article for the 1987 Linguistics Association of Canada and the United States Forum, titled “A Linguistic Perspective of Functional Illiteracy,” he made the statement, “It would be both ludicrous and tragic if it took lawsuits to jolt us into the realization that neither the teachers, nor the schools should be faulted as much as our orthography [spelling], which is incomparably more intricate than that of any other language (emphasis added). If English is not the absolute worst alphabetic spelling in the world, it is certainly among the most illogical, inconsistent, and confusing. This is due to the developmental history of the present.”
Literacy is the ability to read and write. In modern context, the word means reading and writing in a level adequate for written communication and generally a level that enables one to successfully function at certain levels of a society.
The standards of what level constitutes “literacy” vary between societies.
In the United States alone, one in seven persons (i.e., over 40 million people) can barely read a job offer or utility bill, which arguably makes them functionally illiterate in a developed country such as the US.
In 2003 the National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL), conducted by the US Department of Education, found that fourteen percent of American adults scored at this “below basic” level in prose literacy. More than half of these persons did not have a high-school diploma or GED. Thirty-nine percent of persons at this level were Hispanic; twenty percent were Black; and thirty-seven percent were White.
Now, to compare the five countries listed in the post to the United States.
First – Mexico: The OECD reports that 7.2 years is the average years of schooling of adults in Mexico.
Second – Canada: In 2012, Indicators of Well-being in Canada reported that 22% of adult Canadians had less than a high school education in addition to 16.5% reading at Level 1 or Below Level 1. Canada has five literacy levels. Canada’s Below Level 1 and Level 1 are equal to Below Basic in the United States. 83.9% of Canadians read at levels 2, 3, and 4/5. If Canada measures literacy the same as the United Kingdom, then 48.5% are ranked at Level 2 and below and are functionally illiterate.
Third – United Kingdom: The Telegraph reported that one in five Brits is functionally illiterate—that’s 20% that read below level 2, the common definition of functional illiteracy, and the OECD reports that the UK is ranked 22nd for literacy and 21st for numeracy out of 24 countries. BBC.com
Fourth – Australia: Uses the same five level literacy skill level rating system as the UK and Canada, and in 2006, almost 46.4% of adults read at Level 2 or below and were functionally illiterate. abs.gov.au
Fifth – New Zealand: The distribution of literacy skills within the New Zealand population is similar to that of Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom. Analysis of New Zealand Data from the International Adult Literacy Survey reports that 45% of adult New Zealanders were in Levels 1 and 2 for prose literacy.EducationCounts.govt.nz 5731 andEducationCounts.govt.nz 5495
Sixth – United States: 14% or 30 million were ranked below basic on the 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL), and 49% of adults who ranked below basic had less than/some high school but did not graduate from high school or earn a GED/high school equivalency. The United States has four literacy levels compared to five for the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. 87 percent of American’s read at basic or above. 65 percent read Intermediate and above. As reported by the OECD, one in six adults (16.6%) in the United States scored below level 2, in literacy. nces.ed.gov
In Conclusion, in case you are wondering why I included Mexico in this comparison, the PEW Research Hispanic Trends Project reports that “The number of Hispanic students in the U.S. public schools nearly doubled from 1990 to 2006, accounting for 60% of the total growth in public school enrollments over that period. There are now approximately 10-million Hispanic students in the nation’s public kindergartens and its elementary and high schools; they make up about one-in-five public school students in the United States. Most if not all of these students come from the poorest population in Mexico, and they bring with them the same attitudes toward education that they held before they came to the United States.
Ranking functional literacy in English speaking countries and Mexico
1st Place: In the United Kingdom, 80% read at Level 3 or above.
What explains the UK having such a low functional illiteracy rate? The Guardian.com reports that the “UK publishes more books per capita than any other country.” Does this translate into the UK being a more literate society? If this is the reason, it might be a cultural difference between the other major English speaking countries with similar cultural heritages.
2nd Place: In the United States, 65% read Intermediate Level or above.
3rd Place: In New Zealand, 55% of adults read at level 3 or above
4th Place: In Australia, 53.6% of adults read at level 3 or above
5th Place: In Canada, 51.5% of adults read at level 3 or above
6th Place: In Mexico, 64% of adults do not have a high school degree or its equivalent, and the The World Bank estimates that in 2012, 52.3-percent of Mexicans lived in poverty in their home country compared to 15-percent of the U.S. population who live in poverty—and 25.6% or about 12 million are Hispanic, and 35-percent or 6 million of the 16 million children who live in poverty in the U.S. were also Hispanic. In fact, over half of Mexican youth at age 15 are functionally illiterate and cannot solve simple equations or explain basic scientific phenomenon. WorldFund.org
In addition, theNew York Times reports that many of these children from Latin America are boys between ages 15 and 17 when they arrive in the United States, and they come from some of the poorest regions in those countries. Do you think these children arrived in the U.S. functionally literate in their own language?
_______________________
Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran,
who taught in the public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005).
His third book isCrazy is Normal, a classroom exposé, a memoir.“Lofthouse presents us with grungy classrooms, kids who don’t want to be in school, and the consequences of growing up in a hardscrabble world. While some parents support his efforts, many sabotage them—and isolated administrators make the work of Lofthouse and his peers even more difficult.” – Bruce Reeves
Lofthouse’s first novel was the award winning historical fiction My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. His second novel was the award winning thriller Running with the Enemy. His short story A Night at the “Well of Purity” was named a finalist of the 2007 Chicago Literary Awards. His wife is Anchee Min, the international, best-selling, award winning author of Red Azalea, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year (1992).
To follow this Blog via E-mail see upper right-hand column and click on “Sign me up!”
Crazy Normal - the Classroom Exposé 