Comment by gxs | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gxs | Hacker News Reader

I went to an inner city Los Angeles high school. You wouldn't believe some of the individuals that can pass as qualified teachers. People that they themselves were never taught correctly, and went straight into teaching after college. This of course is the double whammy - poorly academically prepared people, with little real world experience - so they fail students on both counts.

And yet...the most annoying part of this experience was the attitude of the other students. I despised my high school mostly because absolutely nobody cared. I think it's hard for people from better areas grasp this. People really do tell the teacher to fuck off. People really do just talk amongst each other, listening to music, while the teacher tries to talk over them. And because no one puts in any level of effort whatsoever, you can get an A by simply just showing up.

I don't doubt we need better teachers. I don't doubt it at all. All I'm saying is we need better teachers at the youngest grade school levels to reach children while they are still, I guess reachable. And more importantly, we need a better way of educating parents to get their kids to care.

Then, we can really start holding teachers accountable.

Teaching sounds like one of the hardest jobs in the world. You get it from the kids, from the parents, from your superiors, from the government, from the media. I think I have at least a vague feeling for that spark of humanity that drives most good teachers, but I'm just astonished that it's enough for such a rare event to keep them doing what they do day-in day-out.

For the most needy inner city kids, I think boarding schools might be appropriate even at an early age. Their home environment and neighborhood is so shattered that what they need most is a stable day-to-day existence shielded from drugs, gangs, and criminal behavior. If they don't get that, by the teen years, they're stuck in feudalistic "ghetto thinking," start getting into increasingly serious trouble, and just aren't able to take school and its discipline games seriously anymore.

Of course, fixing the quality of instruction should probably come first.

"Their home environment and neighborhood is so shattered that what they need most is a stable day-to-day existence shielded from drugs, gangs, and criminal behavior."

You do realize you're talking out of your ass right? 99% of inner-city youths don't do drugs, aren't in gangs, and aren't involved in criminal behavior. Nice way to stereotype them though.

You don't have to partake in any of that to be adversely affected by it.

99% of inner-city youths don't do drugs...

If true, this means inner city youth do drugs about 50x less than youth in general. (Not asserting any precision in the numbers, just throwing out orders of magnitude.)

http://www.teendrugabuse.us/teendrugstatistics.html

The families of many of those students you refer to are just as shattered as their neighborhoods and that may be what makes it easy for them to be susceptible to influence from the neighborhoods. They wouldn't particularly care if boarding schools could help their kids or not, even if they could have access to boarding schools.

Following this thought, the importance of education(what life would be as compared to without) needs to be understood by that society, but the ones who need to listen probably wouldn't care to listen to preaching about education's merits.

"The families of many of those students you refer to are just as shattered as their neighborhoods and that may be what makes it easy for them to be susceptible to influence from the neighborhoods."

I find the stereotypes here frankly appalling. Have you guys even lived in the ghetto, or even taught in one? Inner city students are just as motivated and understand the importance of education as any other kid living in middle suburbia. They've known that since it was ingrained in them as kindergartners. It's not a people problem. It's a systems problem.

Have you? My school was by no means "inner city" but I did grow up in a very low-income area.

The fact of the matter is that the majority of students did not care as much. There was that group of students who I basically knew from elementary school to high school, the core group of students who really put in an effort and tried harder.

Bad system and bad students are not mutually exclusive. There was definitely students who I know tried but did not do well because they required more help and couldn't get it.

My high school was in the bottom 25% of NY State. We had kids carrying metal and glass. It's not ghetto, but it was low end.

I'd agree with the statement that most of the students there were not particularly motivated. But who knows, maybe kids become more motivated when you go from the bottom 25% to the bottom 10%.

I may not have had to deal with as bad of a school as you did, but from what I have experienced in school life in the past, I have come to the conclusion that the #1 problem is students, with #2 being parents, maybe #3 being the way the (US at least) public school system is designed, and then somewhere at #4 or below would be teachers. Not saying that every teacher is great or without flaw. Just that many are good, many are decent, and many are -- well -- mostly insignificant compared to the impact of the students themselves, their parents, the system, etc.

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