Reply #69: I'm reluctant to say [View All]

[OzarkDem]

Most of the years my kids were in school were during the Clinton years, when educators had the freedom and encouragement to do things. The teachers in our area (two different school districts) didn't even understand cognitive development. The Clinton years were the years when teachers and administrators got caught up in every ridiculous educational fad that came down the pike.

I recall my oldest son going through the whole year of third grade with a young enthusisastic teacher with her masters working on her PhD dissertation. Her lesson plans were clever, but he never did a single page of math exercises the entire year. She just didn't bother to teach math to the kids, other than teaching them how to make change in some silly project. The poor kids had to spend the next year trying to catch up on their basic math skills, then were quickly dumped into algebra. It was insane. Yet she ended up getting her work published in a teaching journal - which told me a lot about the quality of peer review in educational journals.