Next Batch of TSA Screeners Being Prepared

Discussion in 'What's On Your Mind?' started by RB, May 16, 2012.

  1. RB

    RB Founding Member

    Looks like Florida is busy getting the next class of TSA Screener hires ready.

    This is truly a sad statement of our public education system and is likely just a continuation of education resulting in employees in positions like TSA that can't use any personal judgement or critical thinking when doing their jobs.
  2. Monica47

    Monica47 Original Member

    I worked for a corporation that basically did the same sort of thing. Darden who owns Red Lobster and Olive Garden restaurants plus others. I worked for them for 13 years. Many of us were professional servers able to take 6, 7 or more tables, provide excellent service because we were organized and able to multi-task very well. Had many repeat customers asking for us. Money was good. A new president took over and decided that every server, regardless of their skill set could now only have 3 tables at any one time. Why? Because they figured any idiot could handle 3 tables and so everyone had to work down to what the least skilled server could manage. Needless to say I quit that job and found another position where my skills were appreciated and rewarded by allowing me to be the best I could be.
    Lisa Simeone likes this.
  3. Sunny Goth

    Sunny Goth Original Member Coach

    And here's part of the problem:

    School boards in Palm Beach and St. Lucie counties have passed a resolution against what they say is an over-reliance on high-stakes testing. Board members say the exams reduce time devoted to teaching and put unhealthy stress on students.

    The resolution asks the state to develop a new assessment system that relies less on standardized testing and urges the federal government to reduce testing requirements in the No Child Left Behind Act.

    I come from a family of teachers - almost everyone in my family and extended family are teachers. I hear about the problems that the No Child Left Behind Act has created every time I show up for a family gathering. I've heard any number of them complain about the lack of time they can devote to actual teaching as opposed to 'teaching to the test'.

    When I think about 'teaching to the test' instead of just teaching, I think about my dad, who retired before NCLB came into effect. He taught remedial math to 7th and 8th grade students (think about that for a moment). His masters thesis was a program that he developed to teach these kids. And for a lot of them it worked. He runs into his former students fairly often (the town isn't that big) and more often than not they thank him and then tell him what they're doing now. Most of them are successful. I know that their successes can't all be pinned on my dad, they've done the work, after all, but clearly his former students attach some of their success to my dad since they go out of their way to approach him and thank him.

    I wonder if my dad would have the same successes if he had to teach to NCLB? My guess is no.
    Lisa Simeone likes this.
  4. nachtnebel

    nachtnebel Original Member

    Agree 100% with Sunny Goth. My SO teaches kids at a charter school in CA and hates those standards because they have drained substance and content from curriculums. Kids now tend to get only snippets of things developed for the tests. They are leaving with functional skills but ignorant unless they get lucky and find someone willing to end run the system and actually teach them something.
    Lisa Simeone likes this.
  5. Lisa Simeone

    Lisa Simeone Original Member

    Seconding Monica and Sunny Goth. I was a waitress for a summer in college, Monica, and 6 tables was standard. Three tables? A holiday.

    And SG and nachtnebel, I, too, know several teachers, all in public schools. This teaching-to-the-test thing has them tearing their hair out. They hate it.
  6. Elizabeth Conley

    Elizabeth Conley Original Member

    I was licenced to teach HS Math before I let it lapse. What was going on in VA's public schools was not education.

    This month my daughter has been studying Shakespeare for her Literature program. Grandma Conley got pretty excited, and started reminiscing about how all of the HS teachers in her Mousie Kentucky HS has related the material they were teaching in Mathematics, Science, History and even Physical Education to the Shakespeare project in her 11th grade Literature class. That's right, 60 years ago in rural Kentucky teachers were innovators who engaged their students in ways considered cutting-edge in modern public education.

    In my opinion "teaching the test" shut all that innovation, creativity and fun out of school. It also cut Composition out. Children aren't taught composition, because it doesn't show up on "bubble tests." That means that kids who need to produce an essay to graduate are in for a heck of a shock. They haven't been building their skills over the preceding decade of education. Many of them just don't make it.

    The standardized tests need to go. Teaching needs to become a respected profession again. Teachers need to be allowed to use their educations and God-given talents to teach their students.
    Lisa Simeone and Sunny Goth like this.
  7. Sunny Goth

    Sunny Goth Original Member Coach

    Yes, please!!!!!!!!
  8. TravelnMedic

    TravelnMedic Original Member

    3 table section I could do in my sleep, but if that was the limit it would be a hand gesture and heading for the door. I was a bartender through college, and I think everyone should work in a resturaunt for 6-12 months would give alot of people a bit of perspective and a lesson on proper tipping. I had a 20 stool bartop, 14 cocktail tables, service well, and carry out all to myself at lunch & another bartender and bar back Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights. It was crazy but made it look effortless and made good money.

    I have all the respect in the world for teachers, as they have a tough job as, but also have to deal with alot of bs from administrators and student(s) problems there parents should be dealing with. Standardized testing proves nothing but how well you take a test. Teaching to the test is stupid as it won't help in real life. I see it so many times of people who are incredibly intelligent yet socially/street retarded and inept.
  9. I don't disagree, and I have the utmost respect for serious, dedicated teachers who work or have worked within the system. But I'd like us to revisit the idea that the purpose of a system is what it does. The government school system spends absurd amounts of money to dumb down the nation's children. Do you really think that's not its purpose, its very design? Maybe NCLB is working exactly as intended, leaving no child behind in its drive to groom and indoctrinate compliant worker-citizens. Maybe Florida lowering the bar on its test scores is par for the course.

    Dig this 1916 quote from Rockefeller, who spend more on the establishment of compulsory schooling than the government:

    "We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or men of science. We have not to raise up from among them authors, educators, poets, or men of letters, We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians, nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen -- of whom we have an ample supply. The task we set before ourselves is very simple... we will organize children... and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way."
    -- from John Taylor Gatto's Weapons of Mass Instruction (p. 8)

    I crib all these ideas from Gatto, and highly recommend his works.
    Lisa Simeone likes this.
  10. Caradoc

    Caradoc Original Member

    I agree to an extent, but I firmly believe that there should be absolute minimums to which a student should be held before being allowed to "graduate."

    Things like "What is 21 divided by 7?" "Identify the subject, object, verb, and adverb in this sentence," "Why shouldn't you offer medical advice to complete strangers in contradiction to what their doctor told them?" and other "bonehead basics."
    Lisa Simeone and phoebepontiac like this.
  11. Elizabeth Conley

    Elizabeth Conley Original Member

    Underlined material no longer taught or tested in any public school system known to yours truly. I sh-hit thee not!
  12. I just finished up a year of teaching a low level remedial college writing course in which I had to teach people basic subject/verb structure. I didn't even get to objects and adverbs, that would have blown their minds. That's for a higher level.

    ETA: Some of my students had GED's or had developmental delays or whatnot, but I'd say the majority were products of the public school system. One guy had really sharp ideas, but could barely put a sentence together. When I went over basic sentence structures he had an epiphany. He said he wondered why they didn't teach him that stuff in high school.
  13. Caradoc

    Caradoc Original Member

    One of my favorite college professors (for "Introduction to Cinema," no less!) put Strunk and White's "The Elements of Style" on the required books list for the class.

    One "student" was stupid enough to show up to class and ask, "Why is that book on the list? This is about cinema, not writing."

    The professor dropped him from the class without comment other than "If you think any class you take in college isn't about writing or other forms of communication, you're wrong. And that includes Algebra 101 - it's just a different language."

    I have a feeling my daughter will be the cause of many, many phone calls from the principal or teacher. I plan to teach her that there's absolutely nothing disrespectful about pointing out inconsistencies or fallacies as long as it's done in a respectful fashion... and even so there are times when "respect" is superfluous to pointing out that someone is simply wrong.
  14. Doober

    Doober Original Member

    200 kids from 50 high schools across NYC took the SAT's this past weekend. Allegedly they were sitting too close together so all their scores have been invalidated and they have to take the test again.

    From the comments:

    I am so glad that I don't have kids in school. Caradoc, I'm with you. I remember advising one of my son's teachers that she had misspellings on a paper she sent home. She was not a happy person as I also advised the principal.
  15. Mike

    Mike Founding Member Coach

    I think the focused on testing is misplaced. What's made education (both K-12 and college) so expensive and so hopelessly bureaucratic the last 50 years is federal involvement. Shut down the federal education juggernaut and the states will manage to fix this themselves in due time.
    phoebepontiac likes this.
  16. Sunny Goth

    Sunny Goth Original Member Coach

    I doubt it - particularly for states that have large deficits. California is facing a $16 billion deficit right now. The governor has already said that if voters don't vote for his budget then even more money will be cut from schools. School budgets have been cut year after year in recent years -- there's almost nothing left to cut. So no, at least in the case of California, I don't think the states will fix it. In "due time" may be decades, which leaves a lot of kids out in the cold.
    Lisa Simeone likes this.
  17. Mike

    Mike Founding Member Coach

    Should the feds rebouble their efforts? :D

    One of the biggest budget problems is federal mandates. Get the feds out of the loop & and the schools can manage with much smaller budgests.
  18. Sunny Goth

    Sunny Goth Original Member Coach

    Sorry, not buying it.

    $16 billion deficit.

    Everything is being cut - to the bone. There is no money. Even if you cut federal mandates (such as NCLB), it would be only a drop in the bucket. And by federal mandates I hope you don't mean not providing a public education to special needs kids. One of my cousins is a special ed teacher and man, I don't know how she does it.
  19. nachtnebel

    nachtnebel Original Member

    Public education is getting it in the neck in CA because that's where the pols can inflict the most pain on the most people in order to get them to vote for a tax increase. That is all that is. As for Mike's point, he is making a simple application of the principle of subsidiarity, which has been grossly abused by the federals and the state, to the point where the state dictates what the local school can and cannot provide for food and drink. The federal government has no business meddling in schools at all. The state has no business meddling in local schools to the extent it does.

    There are boatloads and boatlands of people in CA who receive many benefits without working for them. There are boatloads of people profiting from state largesse in the form of being paid to be on one of the huge number of CA boards or other forms of patronage. All of this in the context of cratering property tax receipts and sales tax receipts in our state with no end in sight. The $16 billion shortfall in CA is going to get far, far worse because the state refuses to make structural changes on the expenditures side and seeks to remedy things on the tax side. New Jersey has already proved that this does not work--in this extremis further taxes this year only cannabalize next year's receipt. There is no more money. None. There is only confiscation left.
  20. Doober

    Doober Original Member

    Are property taxes in CA still based on the assessment of a property at time of purchase and then "frozen?"

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