Sunday, September 21, 2008

A Glimpse At What's Wrong With Our Schools

Today one of our young employees, a Bayside High School student, brought her History class homework to work with her. (Yes, that's a company regulations violation.) During a slow period, she took it out to work on it. Bored and having been my grade school class' consensus best History student, I went over trying to be friendly and hoping I might be able to help.

Her homework was to answer a series of questions on the Revolutionary War, or - as her textbook called it - The War of Independence. (Young folks supposed to stop thinking about staging revolutions?) In answering the questions, what she was doing was nothing more than plopping down verbatim quotes from her textbook onto paper. If the textbook had been online, she could have simply cut and paste.

I tried asking her a few questions myself. She could do nothing more than quote the textbook.

I hope I don't have to elaborate on what's so wrong with the above.

1 comment:

Michael Ragsdale said...

War of Independence!? Excuse me!?

In addition, not actually learning the material too (at least that's my impression)?