[citation][nom]trialsking[/nom]Lectured before elementary children.......now I wonder how much of it they retained. Now that is laughable. I guess dey wil haf to do wif my inferor gramma to keep'em intertained. Step off your soap box and into a classroom, not the "lecture" circuit.[/citation]
Do you really want to get into this? Would you like to discuss how public schools have been in decline for decades in spite of getting huge budget increase? Or maybe you would like to discuss why NCLB is such an unfair requirement. That's probably one of the most ridiculous things I've heard, thus far. That's like hiring someone to build a nice gaming rig, and then they get upset when the buyer complains that it won't run Crysis. If you people were doing your jobs, then NCLB would be a simple formality. Instead, you whine and complain that you can't meet the absurd requirement of actually teaching our children to read, and saying you need more money. We've spent TRILLIONS of dollars on a bloated education system that can't even graduate a high enough percentage of students to earn a 'C' in the letter grading system!
You're right, I have only lectured; I'm not a professional teacher. That's why we hire people who are, ostensibly, professionals. If I hired a professional to work on my car, and they could only get it running 69% of the time, I would fire them. If I hired a professional to build a roof for my house, and that roof leaked 31% of the time, I would fire them (and then, I would sue them). If the "professionals" we hired to teach our children fail to graduate almost ONE THIRD of their students year, after year, after year... why do we not fire them? Do you really want to discuss this further? You people should just shut up and be thankful that your jobs are just another government entitlement.
As for me, I will give you a little background, so you know with whom you are being flippant. My wife and I both have graduate degress, and we own a home of over 3000 square feet (this is not meant as a boast, but a demonstration of the amount of property taxes, and taxes in general, we are paying). We also have six children. When my oldest child was of age, she started school at what is considered to be one of the best magnet schools in Albuquerque, Longfellow Elementary. On the first day of class, I was joking with my daughter's teacher, asking her if the students would get a lecture on Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. She replied that she didn't really know who Longfellow was (and, no, she was not joking). That was my first exposure to public school educators with my own children. Things only went downhill from there. By the time my daughter was only a couple of months into first grade, my wife and I had already arrived at the inescapable conclusion that these people were not competent to educate our children. My daughter left school for Christmas break and never returned. From that point on we have home-schooled our children. When my daughter was 12 years old, I gave her the GED practice exam; suffice it to say, she passed it easily.