okay Michelle um could you give me a few ideas on what you think is wrong with our public school system
um i don't think that the parents back the teachers enough any more like with discipline and and such and i think that the um because of that the teachers are starting to lose
oh i don't know lose interest like you know before like they would really try and help you i think and i can see the difference from when i was in high school and my little brothers and sisters are in it now
where the teachers like they can't discipline you whenever you are you know so they just don't even care any more
yeah i'm not sure if that's if that's a condition of of the lack of interest of the parents or if that's a condition of the
administrators in the school systems
um i've got a brother-in-law that was was teaching in Connecticut down by the Navy base and they have a a a
um-hum
fairly a transient population you know they're um only stationed there for a short period of time so
most of the kids never get to finish high school uh there one or two years and then they have to be they're shipped off some place else and he teaches uh he teaches English and he teaches uh shop
um-hum
and it got to a point where he said that the administrators were coming to him just about every year having him downgrade his English exams because too many students were failing them
oh that's not good
yeah so in that particular school system um that was that was one of the problems and
i guess one of the reasons the administrators uh were were putting so much pressure on him was uh the parents were going to them saying you know my Johnny or my Mary is smarter than that and blah blah blah and they can't fail and so
oh you know and that's really bad because that's really hurting them in the long run because up here at college now um we are so far behind the foreign students
that's right
they are so far more advanced than we are and a lot of them even know their English grammar better than i do and they can't speak it as well but i mean to write it is probably better than the way i write it
um yeah because they uh they care it's something that they want to learn um
um-hum
i'm sure you're you're more uh fluent in other things the things that you're interested in than some other people too uh
i've been out of school for a long time so you know when i went to school i it was in a rural area and they had like two grades in the same class
so when you're i think it was uh first and second third and fourth were in the same classroom so when you went through the first grade
and you graduated you went to the second grade you just moved to the second half of the class on the other side of the room i found looking back at it now that
um-hum yeah
when i was in the second grade i knew just about everything that was there i had learned it from the first grade and the same thing with the fourth i had learned it so it's the amount of teaching you get i think uh
um you're like a sponge when you're young you absorb just about everything that they can throw at you
um-hum
um
today
well you're you're closer to it now than i am um
did you go to high school in Pennsylvania
yes i did
okay so that's you're you're native then
to Pennsylvania so how was your high school did they have with the split out like some people were going to college so they took certain courses and some people were shop
uh-huh
okay yeah we had um college advanced courses and if you were going to college you could take them or if you didn't want to go to college you didn't have to take them but they were optional you know they were there if anyone wanted to take them just because you were going
if you if you wanted to take them and you weren't going to college you still could they didn't limit it to just the people who wanted to college could take them um our math i think we were very strong in our math we were taking tests and our math
okay
okay
was um placing like third and fourth in like the nation where you had to send them in
oh that was good yeah
and our and our you know for our level and stuff like that you know they had the placing we're placing third or fourth but our English i feel was way below
i don't know if i'm just more math oriented but like even on my SAT's i scored two hundred more points on my math than i did in my English and to have that big of a spread is unreal
yeah
yeah um
and we were just the opposite up here um i took the same algebra class two years in a row same book same teacher and that's only because of our school system but as far as English um
um-hum
we had a professor that taught English which was very unusual for our school system so our English was
probably better than
than most of the other school systems in in the state
um-hum
um
up here now we're finding that more and more parents of are pulling their children out of the school systems and they are tutoring them at home
really
yeah i work with uh a couple of the people that i work with you know share the same office are doing that they've pulled their children out and they get a much rounder education
um and why that is i don't know i think it's too much administration at the top
um-hum
also i don't know the level of the teachers today are they dedicated like they used to be years ago or is it just a it's just a job so they can get the summers off
i don't think they are
um-hum
how about college
i'm very disappointed with professors at college they're only required to be in their office five hours out of the entire week
some of them only have two or three classes
and at the most they probably spend five hours in their classes and five hours that they're required to be in their office that's ten hours a week they're probably making more
i know they're making more than my father and he you know he's making like forty five thousand and a lot of them have like other part like i know a lot of the business majors and computer
hum
professors they have other jobs like some of them may be accountants and they do accounting you know and this is just to me it seems like it's a hobby to them and i don't and i've even expressed to some of my professors i don't think it's right
as i think they should be spending more time and too they they teach the same class year after year well i know one professor he comes up from Pittsburgh you know and he hasn't changed his tests
or even his you know presenting material in years you can get the notes off someone else and never go to class and just go for your midterm and final and as long as you study those notes from two years ago you're still going to do fine in his class
that's incredible that's incredible
and i i i don't think it i don't think it's right at all just like you're not even teaching any more you don't care you're getting paid whether we show up or not i mean uh i i just i'm very disappointed with the
so when he files his lesson plans for the year he just he just drags out the old ones and just files them and nobody even looks at them and all that is fine and
yeah uh-huh yeah he just has the same outlines year after year
so he's getting away with it so is it is it his fault or is it his boss
or the people that he has to respond to report to
i i don't know because you know we fill out a student evaluation form every semester you fill one out on your professors and i know
and who does that
me and along with other students we we have the same complaints year after year and nothing seems to be getting done so i don't know if they even
who does that go to though who does that evaluation form
it's supposed to one's supposed to go to the professor himself and um another is supposed to go to like the administration
i don't know if they're just doing it to satisfy the students so they think that we're doing something
that's what it sounds like
or th ey're usually really using it but i know we complain about the same thing year after year you know
do they do they ever publish any results um
no
how about the student newspaper
um what about it
would it be wise to put an article in there say you know we're doing these evaluations and every year we're we're making the same evaluations but yet the administration's not looking at the evaluations
oh well you know they've even done stuff like that our teachers are now telling us that these do you know apply they please fill them out properly you know we are really are using them they tell us that but we don't see any you know
yeah
what do you think uh can be done
i have no clue what you mean i don't know what else we can do
as far as um well one other's things probably is i don't know if it happens down there but every time the contracts teachers' contracts come up it's just before school season starts and they all go on strike
so they close the schools down until they get what they want
um-hum
what's the matter with the uh students doing the same thing say hey uh we're we want a quality education and we're not getting it let's go on strike you know then see what you're going to do it'll create a lot of headlines that's for sure
yeah my high school had a walk out two years ago
