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 ShumaGorath wrote:

 AustonT wrote:
[quote=ShumaGorath 478988 4815111 0b7fe329e12d29a839b8bb7f3618c383.png

Skilled labor implies training, a degree, or a certification program. Those are generally attained through college.

Yeah, no. We have gotten to the point where certification gained by trade school regulates who is able to work in those fields but tha is not what skilled labor means. No cabinet shop will hire a guy with a piece of paper over a guy with a GED and 15 years of experience. Skilled labor is labor that requires knowledge and experience generally gained through working and validated by a certification process.
Or: I'm not buying what you are selling.

So, certifications gained by trade schools regulate who is able to work in those fields and businesses want skilled laborers but are unwilling to hire based on training certifications or degrees, instead opting to go for people with industry experience. People get that industry experience by being hired. People can not be hired to get experience without certifications or degrees, but the industries don't hire based on certifications or degrees.

I don't think you're even in my store, that made no fething sense.

And le sigh.

 kronk wrote:

 Kilkrazy wrote:


Of course having things done for you automatically does not teach you how to do them.

Give a man a fire, and he's warm for the night.

Set a man on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.

She Who Must Be Obeyed laughed at that intensely.

 Tigerone wrote:
Reading scores on the SAT for the high school class of 2012 reached a four-decade low, putting a punctuation mark on a gradual decline in the ability of college-bound teens to read passages and answer questions about sentence structure, vocabulary and meaning on the college entrance exam.

Lower income people taking the test is a part of the "claimed" reson why.


My question is that kids now have more ways to gain information than ever before even on a lower income scale so why the drop off?

Meh. For me this means I'll just stand out more. 100th percentile on reading here. I don't know why the heck people think it is so damn hard. I'm a Junior this year.

 Polonius wrote:
Some of it may be declining abilities of high school graduates.

Much, much more of it is the broadening pool of people taking the SAT. There are huge chunks of the SAT taking population that probably wouldn't have graduated high school 40 years ago.

Pretty much this.

The rules of a language don't change much, but the language evolves constantly. Therefore, there is a disconnect betweent he "rules" and the usage. This disconnect leads to issues as what you "learn" to do, doesn't really get applied much in our modern world.

 Seaward wrote:
It's texting and the Internet.

Actually studies show a positive correlation between texting and other communication skills.

It really is just about broadening the base taking SATs. I mean, when only the best 20% take a text, and then some years later the top 50% take the test, what do people think is going to happen to results on the test?


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 Grey Templar wrote:
Then we have teachers that actually cannot teach the material efectively.

Personal example,

I had a Chem teacher. Very well qualified and he knew the material. He had his Doctorate and had worked alot in scientific circles. However, he simply was incompetent at teaching. This was because his speaking skills were utter s***, he would stammer and take long pauses between sentences. It was very difficult to learn the material the way he presented it. Its a darn good thing the textbook was very user friendly or I never would have learned the material and gotten a B in the class.

Now, the school would not be able to fire him as his difficulty could be considered a disability(not sure if he officially had one or not) but he was obviously a bad teacher for the position given his issues. In my world, inability to teach material for any reason should mean the teacher gets booted.

A large part of the problem there is that people don't think of teaching as a skilled profession, the idea that being able to communicate an idea in a range of ways to an audience of kids with many different preferred types of learning might be something you can do very well or very badly. This leads to those programs where promising young academics parachute into highschools for two years and deliver little value as they spend most of their time learning how to teach before leaving just as they get reasonable at the job. It leads to people being made maths and science teachers because they have maths and science degrees, but little knowledge of how to teach what they've learned.

In many cases the unions might be a problem, but the issue is so much greater than that so just shouting unions is unlikely to fix anything.


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 dogma wrote:
This actually gets at a fundamental problem in the way people are educated. We generally teach information, when we should be teaching methodology. Information is available all the time and everywhere, but what varies is the manner in which we engage with that information.

Excellent point.