Texas Public Schools Now Majoraly Hispanic

[PanzerJaeger]

The value of a private education cannot be overestimated, and that value will only increase in the future.

[gaelic cowboy]

The value of a private education cannot be overestimated, and that value will only increase in the future.

The value of the old boys network it gives you is far more valuable I would say.

[a completely inoffensive name]

Public schools used to be great. Most still are, but they are being bleed slowly it seems.

[Centurion1]

The value of the old boys network it gives you is far more valuable I would say.

trust me going to a private school in the states does not equal an old boys network. they are as prolific as cod. Many are catholic and there are thousands of those. Sure you have schools like Exeter prep in NH or Sidwell friends or Bullis down in northern virginia and DC but many aren't what i imagine you are thinking about.

[PanzerJaeger]

The value of the old boys network it gives you is far more valuable I would say.

Possibly, but I was referring more the discipline it instills in children. I was educated by the meanest collection of old curmudgeon's I've ever encountered, Lasallian Brothers. They had no tolerance for indolence, rebelliousness, or failure; and they made sure my parents understood that before I was accepted into their school. It was their mission to educate their students, and everything else including sports, extracurricular activities, and personal freedom was secondary to that.

I wasn't much of a troublemaker, but I remember one particular example of their methods which would never fly in public school. In my sophomore year, I had a very high average in English - so high, in fact, that I calculated that I could skip the final paper and still come out of the class with a B. So, on the last day of before summer break, I was asked to stay after class to discuss my failure to turn in the paper. I casually explained my position and my contentment with a B in the class, expecting an expression of disappointment and to be let go. As Brother McLaren explained, however, the assignment wasn't about earning points towards a grade, but about me learning the material, and my school year wasn't over until I had learned it.

As all my friends were headed off to parties and freedom, I was accompanied to the library where I worked on that paper until just after midnight as Brother McLaren looked on. After that, as my paper wasn't in a format suitable to turn in, I was taken to the computer lab and forced to type it, which lasted until well after 1:00 AM. Finally, I had to wait around while he carefully read it over several times, grading first for content and then for grammar. His grade? A-, marked down to F for lateness.

I hated that place, but I'm so very glad my parents sent me there. It taught me life lessons that go far beyond grammar and arithmetic. College and work have been more than simple in comparison.

[a completely inoffensive name]

Possibly, but I was referring more the discipline it instills in children. I was educated by the meanest collection of old curmudgeon's I've ever encountered, Lasallian Brothers. They had no tolerance for indolence, rebelliousness, or failure; and they made sure my parents understood that before I was accepted into their school. It was their mission to educate their students, and everything else including sports, extracurricular activities, and personal freedom was secondary to that.

I wasn't much of a troublemaker, but I remember one particular example of their methods which would never fly in public school. In my sophomore year, I had a very high average in English - so high, in fact, that I calculated that I could skip the final paper and still come out of the class with a B. So, on the last day of before summer break, I was asked to stay after class to discuss my failure to turn in the paper. I casually explained my position and my contentment with a B in the class, expecting an expression of disappointment and to be let go. As Brother McLaren explained, however, the assignment wasn't about earning points towards a grade, but about me learning the material, and my school year wasn't over until I had learned it.

As all my friends were headed off to parties and freedom, I was accompanied to the library where I worked on that paper until just after midnight as Brother McLaren looked on. After that, as my paper wasn't in a format suitable to turn in, I was taken to the computer lab and forced to type it, which lasted until well after 1:00 AM. Finally, I had to wait around while he carefully read it over several times, grading first for content and then for grammar. His grade? A-, marked down to F for lateness.

I hated that place, but I'm so very glad my parents sent me there. It taught me life lessons that go far beyond grammar and arithmetic. College and work have been more than simple in comparison.

There are so many pluses and minuses there, I don't know where to begin.

[PanzerJaeger]

There are so many pluses and minuses there, I don't know where to begin.

At the end of the equation, however, was a kid who came into the school a spoiled brat and left with a healthy respect for education, hard work, and self discipline.

[LittleGrizzly]

Did it not occur to you that explaining you didn't need to do the assignment might go down badly*... I have done something like that only on a much smaller scale and I just pretended to forget the work... explaining to someone you decided not to do what they told you to is not going to go down well...

*Don't get me wrong I would have expected that, but even with lax teachers In a normal school I would have at least made up an excuse. I figure people are much more forgiving of stupidity than arrogance...

[a completely inoffensive name]

At the end of the equation, however, was a kid who came into the school a spoiled brat and left with a healthy respect for education, hard work, and self discipline.

That's only because you are above average in intelligence. Sooner or later, smart people realize that the benefits of hard work outweigh the tedium of actually working hard. If it wasn't for that stimulus, you would have learned it later on at some point in your life.

Discipline is all well and good but you have admitted that personality and freedom was squashed at the expense of "learning" as if the two are incompatible. The fact is, the reasoning of your teacher just doesn't hold up. You excelled at your class, and it is very clear that you were a very smart kid. You took the initiative to calculate the cost-benefit of the increased grade at the expensive of personal happiness. You choose personal happiness rather than reaching an arbitrary grade which is meaningless in the long run. Your teacher knew you knew the material. You knew you knew the material. Your work until that point shows you knew the material. No one gets an A from day 1 until day 179 and then flunks the final on day 180 (assuming that you had the same # of school days as I did in high school).

It really wasn't about him doing his job making sure you "knew the material". It was a check on independent thinking, specifically, the idea that your happiness comes above the authority of your boss. This is not surprising considering your description of your education.

If I was your teacher, I would have perhaps given you a bit more information you might have neglected to incorporate in your cost-benefit analysis, such as the long term consequences of your happiness if this B perhaps limits the choices of uni's you get accepted into. This dude decided to isolate you, force you to work, then punish you for insubordination under guise of making sure that the A student in his class was indeed an A student.

I'm glad you got a useful lesson about hard work out of it, I just hope you didn't lose some other characteristic that might perhaps be more valuable in the long run. Overall, I would say it was quite poor teaching, imo.

[PanzerJaeger]

ACIN, I owe you a proper, detailed, and point by point response. Ironically, my school work and work-work are keeping me unusually busy, so all I can offer is a condensed version.

In my completely amateur opinion on schooling, children, especially teenagers, first need discipline and structure before they can excel as independent, free-thinking adults. That same basic formula applies to virtually every acquired skill in life, be it arithmetic, reasoning, or fencing. You need to be disciplined in proper form before you can freestyle.

It is very true that plenty of kids make it through public schools ready for life's challenges, and indeed public schools vary widely in quality around the country and even around different areas of the same municipalities, but I would argue that they accomplish that largely in spite of their schooling and not because of it. As you noted, intelligent people will overcome a poor educational environment and push themselves to excel.

The most obvious example is the comparison between most Asian school systems and our own. They instill a level of discipline in their students that simply isn't found in our own public schools, and the results are reflected in our yearly embarrassment when the global standardized tests are published. (Of course, such discipline starts in the home - and that is a huge problem that our public schools don't have much control over.)

Anyway, the point to this now rambling post is to say that I went into the school spoiled, undisciplined, lazy, not particularly smart, and yes Centurion, a prick. Search for some of my earlier posts in here to see what I mean. The Brother's thousand big and small tortures (and my little story was nothing compared to some of their 'corrective measures') seemed intolerable at the time, but they changed me for the better in countless ways. I'm not sure I could have gotten the same results in a public school.

[lars573]

Possibly, but I was referring more the discipline it instills in children. I was educated by the meanest collection of old curmudgeon's I've ever encountered, Lasallian Brothers. They had no tolerance for indolence, rebelliousness, or failure; and they made sure my parents understood that before I was accepted into their school. It was their mission to educate their students, and everything else including sports, extracurricular activities, and personal freedom was secondary to that.

I wasn't much of a troublemaker, but I remember one particular example of their methods which would never fly in public school. In my sophomore year, I had a very high average in English - so high, in fact, that I calculated that I could skip the final paper and still come out of the class with a B. So, on the last day of before summer break, I was asked to stay after class to discuss my failure to turn in the paper. I casually explained my position and my contentment with a B in the class, expecting an expression of disappointment and to be let go. As Brother McLaren explained, however, the assignment wasn't about earning points towards a grade, but about me learning the material, and my school year wasn't over until I had learned it.

As all my friends were headed off to parties and freedom, I was accompanied to the library where I worked on that paper until just after midnight as Brother McLaren looked on. After that, as my paper wasn't in a format suitable to turn in, I was taken to the computer lab and forced to type it, which lasted until well after 1:00 AM. Finally, I had to wait around while he carefully read it over several times, grading first for content and then for grammar. His grade? A-, marked down to F for lateness.

I hated that place, but I'm so very glad my parents sent me there. It taught me life lessons that go far beyond grammar and arithmetic. College and work have been more than simple in comparison.

I wouldn't have lasted 5 minutes in that chamber of child abuse.

[Centurion1]

i cant imagine going up to my teachers and saying,

"i just didnt want to do it"

[lars573]

Umm I did do that, twice in the same class.