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I purchased the book within a week of the publish date. You will have no regrets! An excellent job in laying out the problems and deficiencies, both within the education system and within society, that has made the art of teaching evolve into the "job" of teaching. In other words, instead of expanding the students' minds and adding to their knowledge, today's teachers are relegated to providing the minimum required by the system, with little time to dedicate to teaching the extra knowledge that our children should really be learning. It Ain't Your Fault. Jim Blockey is a serious author who discusses the problems with public education today.
Practical, if unpopular, solutions for schools and families are offered in this must read book.
A great conservative point of view. Lets you know what is really being taught to our kids by the school district. See all 10 reviews.
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ComiXology Thousands of Digital Comics. Our children are, of course, the most precious things in our lives and we will naturally fight to protect and provide for them. Independence, and the desire for it, however, comes to us all sooner or later and you would do well to recognise the signs. Or maybe following recipe or model-making instructions to a tee?
Try setting a few tasks. Left to his own devices, you'd be surprised how well your year-old can remember to pack his homework or get his own breakfast. Even seemingly basic routine chores will help foster his sense of worth and help him cope with life at senior school. In the years to come, he'll probably be more grateful than if you were still spoon-feeding everything to him at this age.
I'm sure that XBox keeps your nine-year-old nice and quiet at home. But his last piece of writing featured SAS operations against Colombian drug cartels and was slightly disturbing.
So too was the report from the four six-year-olds who were worried about being the bait in a make-believe drive-by shooting in the playground. I appreciate I can't control what you let your kid see at home, but until they can tell the difference between CGI and reality, would you mind if I just forwarded the complaints from the parents of those six-year-olds on to you? Ticking off a child for low-level disruption occurs at least daily for most teachers; it's part of the job.
Irritating as it is, it does actually help to establish or regularly reinforce boundaries and it rarely leads to escalation. That is, until your son goes into what I call "John Terry-mode" following said ticking-off: That's why he ended up getting the "hairdryer" treatment, and losing his lunchtime.
The media might hold the likes of Terry up as heroes and let them get away with such histrionics every Saturday afternoon, but it's painful to watch eight-year-olds mimicking that sort of behaviour even in the playground. I'm not going to tolerate it in my classroom. Unfortunately, the odd lost playtime at school isn't going to go far in making this problem go away, so if there's any chance of you handing out a few red cards or match bans at home it'd probably enforce the point a lot more clearly. I will then anticipate having to explain that, in my experience, girls' friendship issues do tend to drag on a bit whereas their male counterparts will just have a straightforward shouting match or worse and then get on with things.
But when said mother then goes on to explain that her eight-year-old daughter's misery is due to the fact that she hasn't got a boyfriend, my klaxon goes off. Kiss-chase is all good fun, but it really is about as serious as playground romances tend to get at this age.
Children are under enough pressure at primary school these days as it is, without having to worry about whether they're impressing Johnny SuperDry, or Billy Twelve-Mates. Let your child be a child. Today, the education levels of teachers are perceived to be much the same as most of the community, in large part because so many members of society have finished high school, and even gone beyond. Accordingly, teachers are no longer looked up to because of their education. Which leads to the next reason—parents do not truly understand what teachers do in the classroom.
You show up five days a week for six hours a day, talk for a while, and go home early. It looks, from the outside, as if teachers have a cushy gig. Of course, if most parents were to try teaching for a couple of weeks, their perspectives might change—but the chances of that happening are pretty slim. Politics can also be a reason why teachers receive less respect. Before the boomers, education was a political backwater. Politicians at more senior levels of government had little interest in education, and little reason to pay attention to it.
Once the boomers had kids in the system, all of that changed. Unfortunately, this attention did not prove to be benign. This has led to curricula and even daily lessons being dictated by bureaucrats in provincial ministries and as a result, the unique needs of the students has been disregarded.
Most of these bureaucrats are long on ideas and theory, but very short on actual experience. Too frequently they follow the foolish direction of ignorant people.
Worse, when things are perceived to be wrong with the education system, scapegoats have to be found to deflect the blame from the elected officials who were so eager to grab the reins. Unfortunately, teachers make a convenient target. Again, never mind that the teachers are doing what the ministries of education are directing them to do. And a number of premiers of all political stripes have done just that, often deliberately picking fights with teachers to score political points, and to show how tough they are. Next, parents and their attitudes have changed.
If you got into trouble in class when I went to school, not only were you disciplined by the teacher or worse, the principal , you got it double at home.