How dumb are our kids?

[baldwin]

"Stoopid teachers =stoopid students. Our educators live in a make believe world. They declare themselves successful and run around patting themselves on the backs. Then ask for more money to teach the same kids."
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Now that's an intelligent comment that makes me have doubts about your own teachers. You can't generalize about educators any more than PETA members do about fishermen as lazy, uneducated rednecks who sit around on a beach all day on a lawnchair with a cooler of beer, not catching anything. If you want to look intelligent, put a little more thought into your answers.
Yes, there are lazy kids, there are incompetent teachers, and there are incompetent parents who don't teach their kids to value education and a work ethic. You can't really pin the blame on one factor alone.
But...we do have a lot of very ambitious, intelligent kids with a great work ethic. I have high school students doing recombinant DNA technology and putting genes for fluorescent proteins into bacteria, then isolating and purifying those proteins. Add these to high school juniors taking courses at Yale University, and getting good grades. I do, though, see that a lot of kids seem to be lacking measurement skills and writing skills. I wonder if education today really puts enough emphasis on learning the basics well, rather than learning a mile wide and an inch deep.