B.C. by Mastroianni and Hart for September 30, 2013

My neices teacher emails the homework to the parents now. I was really confused when I asked if they had homework and they said “we don’t know”.

And I thought Instagram was this really fast drug dealer (cue – last week’s strip)

After suffering through my education years with many teachers who had very poor writing skills with chalk, this would come as a blessing in disguise for many students.

Blame school administration for poor student outcomes!!!! Why; because 2/3 of math and science teachers are NOT qualified to teach those subjects; but a teacher is a teacher is a teacher…. NOT! Also because of the terrible entry-level salaries; 80 – 90% of the new teachers come from the BOTTOM 1/3 of their graduating class! Pathetic…. absolutely pathetic…. And we wonder why: Hey squirrel…. oohh…. oooohhhh; shiny metal…. The 20 second attention-span…..

I wish there was a knob on the TV to turn up the intelligence. There’s a knob called “brightness”, but it doesn’t work. – Gallagher

Check out the banner at the top of the strip. Now there’s a pic I’d buy!

Volunteer in a classroom for a day and you will find out what teachers do. I never spend a day volunteering without being impressed by our teachers, no matter which grade level I volunteer at. BTW, I am not a teacher. I am simply an involved parent.

The only indoctrination I have noticed coming home from my kids’ school is pretty limited. It goes like this: protecting the environment is good, bullying is bad, stay safe on the internet, it is important to stay away from drugs, be nice, racism and sexism are bad, and the US is good. Oh, and recite the Pledge of Allegiance every day. If I as a parent happened to take issue with any of those ideas, I could easily counter them.

I agree with this. As an analyst, I crunch numbers looking for correlations. Even when adjusted for inflation, we are spending more on education now than we did back in the 1950’s. Yet most metrics of performance are declining.

So if spending more money leads to degraded performane, then maybe the solution is to spend less money on education.

Any successful business understands the concept of diminishing returns: for every extra dollar spend, you get less and less back. With education, we are in retrograde: for every extra dollar spent you lose more and more.

P.S. There are a number of teachers in my family. When I see the nonsense they have to put up with, I am convinced that you couldn’t pay me enough money to do that job.

Mr. Huston, we have a problem. (Sorry, couldn’t resist.)

@hariseldon59:Lesson: Never drink coffee while reading comments on this forum. My nose hurts like hell, and my computer needs a thorough cleanup.

Some of our schools have put on.their supply lists to parents – iPads and smartphones. With a notice that if a student has neither, than those that do are to share with those that have none..I wonder who the schools think are going to pay for the data plans?

In my opinion our largest problem is qualification. Our society uses a college degree, not experience, as qualification. We end up with teachers with no subject experience who were taught by teachers with no subject experience who were etc., etc. However, you can have 40 years experience in a subject, but can’t teach because of no teaching degree.

Most of the current public school ‘teachers’ can neither pronounce, spell, or define “indoctrination” let alone practice it. However, I appreciate your optimism!

the world is going down, down, down and yet somehow innovations and improvements keep right on coming.Makes one wonder if maybe it isn’t quite as bad as we’ve been told and believe.