  Take The Math And Science Courses Named Below. CURRENT SITUATION - FUTURE JOB NEEDS - THE HIGH SCHOOL CHALLENGE - PROPOSED SOLUTION - WHAT SHOULD I BECOME? Visit School Matters
We are blessed to live in a beautiful area, http://www.goknox.info, that happens to be quite resilient to economic downturns compared to others in the nation. In one area, education, we are not doing well with the exception of a handful of schools. Our nation is also not doing well. The down trend in education has been going on for four decades, and has not been turned around yet. We are facing a very dangerous future the way we are today, because education impacts everything. Our future totally depends on it. Let me explain to you where we are with facts, where future jobs and their requirements will be for today's children and young people, so that we can all think and do something about improving their education urgently. Schools, teachers, parents, all citizens - we all must work together to that end. I found on 11/10/08 a 2007 Time Magazine article showing great differences (http://www.time.com/time/2007/nochild/) in some states between the national standard test (NAEP) and the state tests (TCAP) for the same grade level on the same subject. For example the Tennessee report card (TCAP, http://edu.reportcard.state.tn.us/pls/apex/f?p=222:1:1434193972307997) shows the schools earning an 87% in math. However, the national test (NAEP) for exactly the same level of math (4th and 8th grade) shows Tennessee at 21%! Just look at some examples below. Your child looks good in the report card, the school looks good in the state report card, but your child’s knowledge is equal to a huge failure because the test was purposefully made weak to qualify for federal tax dollars. These are elementary school tests. So imagine your child or grandchild going to high school with this kind of primary school background. With tougher subjects, tougher math in high school, your child has to do a lot more reading and studying in all these more difficult subjects. Some kids are able do it. But many cannot. Who is responsible for this bad outcome to date? The State Department of Education and your county Board of Education, because they knew this problem for years and did not jump up to complain and have it corrected until 2008. They knew the problem and could have corrected the problem years ago. The schools and teachers are not at fault. They are afraid to speak up, obviously with reason unfortunately. This is a central management problem that Dr. McIntyre, the new Knox County, Tennessee superintendent may be able to solve. He is new, and his predecessors created this situation for decades. So I am cautiously optimistic about him. Cautiously, because our history is not good in this area.  In the above chart, you will see that some states' state test is close to the national test (NEAP) results. That's good. However, on the right half of the chart you see a big difference between the state tests and the national (NEAP) tests. This is very bad, and Tennessee is one of the worst. Testing should be fair to every school in the entire nation. It is the knowledge that matters for your child, not the grade. How did anyone ever get the idea in Tennessee to literally dumb down the state tests for our children just to show a higher grade (that is what dumbing down is)? Who does that help? It got more of our federal tax money for the school system, but it hurt our children, that’s for sure. They did not have to study much to get a high grade. The worst part is that not one person stood up in the education system to tell the public the truth. We need to evaluate the performance of all schools based on a national standard test that measures school performance at the same level in every state, and every school. Such a standard needs to be high enough to make our children competitive internationally, as more than 30 countries outperform us on the high school level. Realizing this problem, Tennessee is raising its standard somewhat to begin closing the gap between Tennessee and the rest of the states. We are close to the bottom of the pack now. Well, they would have a revolt of parents on their hand if they didn’t, now that some people are speaking up. The public can expect lower state test scores and graduation rates for our lower-performing children at first, and lower state report card results as we remedy the current problem and adjust the system to a higher standard of performance. More increases will be required in performance than the coming increase during the 2010 school year to reach our international competitors, but it is a good start. In the end, our children will rise to the higher expectations we have of them, just like adults rise to higher expectations. The good news is that the children will know more, their A.C.T. scores will start climbing. Higher A.C.T. scores will help on the job or entering a university. THERE WILL BE AN IMMEDIATE BENEFIT. Some children will complain more, causing more parents to complain, but if you want your children to be successful, support the teachers. Just think about why it is vital for your child that you the parent support hi/her teachers, whatever they do. Most parents do not do this today. Life will be getting much harder for the less educated in the future, in more technology-dependent times. Most of us parents do not know the subjects that our child must learn. Our children depend almost entirely on the teachers to learn. Support the teachers in front of your child if you want your child to become a successful adult. Discuss anything else in private with a teacher. I just feel that this would be the smart way to go, and I hope that you will see my point. However, nowadays we are dealing also with loser morals, worse behavior, and lack of a “go-getter” attitude in many of our children, as well as lack of respect for adults and teachers. Not like we adults had it 30 or more years ago. It is the parents who must teach them about this part, if you love them and you want them to grow up to be successful adults and not bums. You know what I am talking about. There is no gain without pain during these school years -- or during life. There never was. Older adults know that. The world is changing fast. I am 69 and it makes me dizzy sometimes. Forget how the world used to be when you were young. That’s gone forever. Knowledge is vital for the future -- especially math, science and engineering. We must help push and encourage our children to do more school work than required. That is the only way to a good life for them. PARENTS AND CHILDREN HAVE A CHOICE TO MAKE: 1. Either work hard for 12-16 years in school getting As or Bs in every course, AND HAVE A GREAT LIFE FOR 60-70 YEARS having a lot of fun, a nice home, a nice car, great vacations and enough money for it all, or... 2. Just have fun for 12 years, getting Cs and lower grades, because fun (including bad behavior: http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D94PDMAO4&show_article=1) is more important than hard work at a young age. Barely get a high school diploma, and have the lowest paying jobs with a lot of unemployment and poverty for 60-70 years. And boys, believe me, the smart good looking girls will spot this and they want to settle down with a guy who will be successful. And the same is true for smart, good looking guys. A CHILD’S LIFE COULD BE VERY SUCCESSFUL, OR COULD BE MUCH WORSE THAN ANY OF US CAN IMAGINE TODAY. IT DEPENDS ON YOU, THE PARENT, WHICH PATH OF THE TWO YOUR CHILD TAKES. Before we go on to talk about what is really important in high school, I would like to give you a peek into the future to get an idea what new discoveries and jobs will be hot, and what jobs will disappear. I think that will be important for you parents to know before we discuss the high school topics. CURRENT SITUATION - FUTURE JOB NEEDS - THE HIGH SCHOOL CHALLENGE - PROPOSED SOLUTION - WHAT SHOULD I BECOME?
Today's High School Educational Output vs. Future Job Requirements Please look at this YouTube video. We are about to enter the age of EXPONENTIAL change. Look at it several times if needed, because it is important to understand it with the changes coming. This video and the following explanation is nothing to be concerned about if your children are doing very well in school. However...if they are not, and if they do not change, they will have an extremely difficult future. Before we go into how we are doing on the high school level, I thought it would be useful to peek into the future to see what the job requirements will be in the coming decades, and why our children must study harder. Just to give you a perspective about how fast technology is moving, about 40 years ago I worked with six computers, each was as big as half of a living room, was not fast enough to do anything useful, had only 4 KB of memory each, and cost $6 million. Each one of these big expensive monsters failed about every hour. Try to remember the huge change over 40 years. Today's $1,000 PC has 8,000,000,000 bytes or 8 GigaBytes (GB) of main memory (RAM), 1,000,000,000,000 bytes or one TeraBytes (TB) of hard disk (HD) space, a very fast processor, can do millions of different tasks. To give you a better idea, a four-drawer filing cabinet full of paper documents is about 500,000,000 – 1,000,000,000 bytes (500 megabytes or MB to 1 Gigabyte or GB) of information assuming scanned documents. One TeraByte (TB) of information on your hard disk is equal to about 1,000 – 2,000 four-drawer filing cabinets full of documents. The floor space rental alone for only four filing cabinets is much more expensive in a city than the PC itself. And you can get documents off of a PC in seconds, but not from filing cabinets. You can dictate to your PC using Dragon Speaking Naturally 10, find a document, send an email by voice about 4 times faster than before, counting correcting its 1-5% error rate. You will still need a filing cabinet for documents that require an original signature. Most people do not realize that this capability is here today, and are not using it. Yet it could save you tons of money and frustration. I do not have to tell you that this fantastic capability will eliminate secretarial jobs as they have been, and do it pretty fast. New technology always creates some great opportunities, it changes jobs, and it will also eliminate jobs. It always eliminates the jobs with the least amount of education. Please remember that. Why is math and science education vital for everyone? WHAT IS EDUCATION? This is very important to understand. A good athlete does many different types of exercises for years to develop and increase the right muscle cells, confidence and response in a contest in order to achieve a higher level of performance. Education is a very similar thing. It is the exercising of the mind with increasingly more difficult problems (harder courses in school) in order to increase the right brain cells, confidence and the ability to solve more and more difficult problems from grade one through college and then on the job throughout life. That is why students need to get good grades in everything and take courses like Calculus, Physics and Chemistry in high school - not because they will be necessarily using it on the job. If we look at the past 100 years, we see technology in every field accelerating faster and faster, not at an even pace. In the next ten years we will see more advancement than in the prior 100 years, and so on. Such exponential growth in all technologies will continue to accelerate. The following chart illustrates my point in computer technology very well. Remember the incredibly expensive computers that I was using 40 years ago compared to a PC of today? We will keep seeing such huge jumps in the future. The nations that dominate new technologies will win, because they will be able to produce the better products cheaper and faster – as we have noticed already in many products like cars, electronics, and many more.  Always remember that the major impact will be in ALL NEW technologies in combination, making each other incredibly powerful. COMPUTER TECHNOLOGY has been increasing at an incredible speed to date, and its increase will be accelerating even faster as you can see in the above picture. That means fast increase in speed and reduction in size of computers. Currently a $1,000 PC has the power of an insect brain. In about 2030 it will have the power of the smartest human brain and will most likely be close to a cubic inch in size. By 2050 a $1,000 PC will have the combined power of all human brains in the world at a small size that you can barely see. This has been predicted for a long time now as a very special period for humanity called SINGULARITY (http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0134.html?printable=1). The development of computing power will bring wonderful things, as well as great dangers, like any other technical development during the past, unless we become very highly educated in these new fields. All these developments will also increase demand for jobs with much higher levels of education (and huge salaries), and it will eliminate those jobs that require only a high school education or even a two-year college. If our children will not study today as if they were on the way to a PhD, they will not even be able to get a job to do house cleaning by 2030. I know that is far away, but to be well employed then, you will need about 20 years of education. That means first grade in 2010, high school starting in 2018, BS degree in science at a university by 2022, MS degree by 2024, and PhD by 2028 plus 2 more years to handle the unforeseen. All of it will have to be done with an A or B in every course from grade one! Your child will have to complete ALL math courses in high school, including introductory Calculus, plus Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Geography, Speech and English Composition, by high school graduation – preferably with honors courses. Some may think that my child could learn the computer, so he will have no problem learning these new gadgets. Unfortunately that will not be true. These developments will create more sophisticated new applications of new technologies, not games or word processing, and their use will require very high levels of knowledge, that starts with a doctors degree, a PhD. NANOTECHNOLOGY (http://www.kqed.org/quest/television/view/189?gclid=CIrGy7etzZcCFSEfDQodYHxZ7Q). In simple terms, nano technology is the technology that can build automatically anything on the atomic and molecular level, up to any material, device or machine with much higher precision than today, and much cheaper. Like carbon nano tubes formed from a single atomic layer of carbon, that have incredible strength (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_nanotube). This is being done in laboratories already. Nanotechnology will let us build micro machines that you may not even be able to see, doing many great things like fixing blocked heart arteries after injected, building other machines perfectly, copying themselves, identifying problems in men or machines and fixing them. Nanotechnology factories are only about 11 years away. One highly educated person will run them. They present many good things we could never imagine before, as well as many dangerous things for the nation that is unprepared (http://www.crnano.org/timeline.htm). I mean incredible dangers that we could never imagine before. Much more dangerous than atomic weapons. GENETIC ENGINEERING (http://www.scienceclarified.com/Ga-He/Genetic-Engineering.html) is already beginning to be an absolutely fantastic field to eradicate disease in any life form – or present incredible dangers in the wrong hands. You will soon see biological computing systems like our brain, and you will see a merger of nano technology, computer and software technology, and molecular biological capabilities to produce unimaginable results within only a couple of decades. ROBOTIC ENGINEERING has been around on a "primitive" level for a long time. Robots will impact virtually all jobs that are performed manually or with little education. In Robotics combined with Nanotechnology, you will see during your life time Nano Robots or "NANOBOTS" some of which you will not even be able to see, to be inhaled or to be injected, doing fantastic things that are good, as well as the worst things that you can imagine. Both sides including defense against the bad ones, will require many PhD level engineers. Artificial intelligence will reach human levels of intelligence by 2030, doing away with jobs that many people perform today with even a junior college education. Nanotechnology, genetic engineering and computer-related technological advances that are moving ahead at an incredible speed will accelerate this field to a very influential level impacting our lives (http://www.edinformatics.com/math_science/robotics/robotics1.htm, http://www.roboticstrends.com/). These things are only 10-20 years away. China, India, the USA and others are investing huge research dollars in these technologies. People with MS and PhD degrees in these areas will be in huge demand all over the world. You will see million dollar annual salaries for those who are very good in these fields. Especially those who will have expertise in several of these fields. AND MANY MORE FIELDS WILL ADVANCE VERY RAPIDLY AS A RESULT OF THE ABOVE TECHNOLOGIES. Future jobs will require much more highly educated people than today's jobs with a lot more excitement and much higher pay. Most jobs requiring only a high school education or even a two year college will disappear by 2030. Close to 85% of our high school graduates are not ready to get such an education today according to the ACT reports, unless they study harder and do a lot more homework, taking the more advanced courses in science and math getting A's or B's. All parents will have to be more supportive of teachers. After all, their children's future depend on the teachers. Parents, 99%+ of you could not teach your child better than a teacher. Please do not see this as an insult. Teachers have university training to learn how to teach. If you are an accountant, it does not necessarily follow that you could just jump in and teach. You may have an opinion about the teacher, but if you have not been a teacher yourself, it is somewhat like a great chef being critical about how a civil engineer designed a bridge. Without getting an A or B from a good or not-so-good teacher, your child's future with the above developments is going to be absolutely hopeless. You may not feel like it sometimes, but you have no choice but to support the teachers and make sure that your child grows up with good morals with education coming before play time every day, except Sundays perhaps. If you do not understand some of this article and its references on the Internet, PLEASE talk to university professors in Mathematics, Physics, Computer Science and Biology. Ask them if this is all true or just a story. You will find that this is a fact and it is right around the corner. If you decide not to do anything about it now for your child, their life will become increasingly more difficult than ever before, with bad jobs that no one wants, with more unemployment, more hunger and more homeless living until they die. PLEASE think seriously about this upcoming development. Your and your children's lives depend on it, and only a very good education will save them. It depends totally on their education and how far they went with it. We will start discussing high school education and its vital importance next. Teachers are your and your children's hope for the future. You must remember that. Most of you don't know enough to teach the subjects your children need. The teachers can do it. It is a smart thing to support all of them in front of your child, even those that YOU think are not so great. CURRENT SITUATION - FUTURE JOB NEEDS - THE HIGH SCHOOL CHALLENGE - PROPOSED SOLUTION - WHAT SHOULD I BECOME?
The High School Challenge I have written above about primary schools’ low performance in the two very important areas of reading and mathematics nationwide and especially in Tennessee, as well as our country’s drop in education compared to our international competitors. Reading and math are the most important subjects for high school preparation. We also took a very important peek into future technologies and their impact on the education of today's kids and their future success. There are some very exciting good things coming, or incredible dangers if we do not have enough very highly educated people for these new fields, but our international competitors do. We also talked about the fact that jobs requiring only a high school education and even a junior college diploma will not have much of a future beyond 2030. In 2008 OECD-PISA tests show our high school students 29th in science - 34th in math in the world. We used to be on top. As a result of this drop, we graduate more than 50% less scientists and engineers who are essential for our corporations' research and product development function to bring competitive products to the world market place. This is the most important measure directly impacting the competitiveness of our products. See http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2008/2008016.pdf, pages 6, 12 and others. See also http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/15/13/39725224.pdf. This one describes various international education systems. Within the USA, Tennessee is 40th in ACT scores and 39th in US Chamber scores. See http://www.act.org/news/data/07/states.html and http://www.uschamber.com/icw/reportcard/default. Check your own state, it may be different. The US Gov't mandated evaluations (NCLB) that must be done with the state tests within each state are not always valid. A 2007 Time Magazine article (http://www.time.com/time/2007/nochild/) shows great differences in some states between the national standard test and the state tests for the same grade level on the same subject. For example using the Tennessee standard test (TCAP) for 2008 the schools score an 87% in math. The national tests for exactly the same level of math shows Tennessee at 21%! Check this in your county as well. US News & World Report, Best High Schools Report 2009, Tennessee has 2 Gold, 2 Silver and 25 Bronze rated High schools, none of them in Knox County. You can check here your own state and county. As a result of a losing trend in education, we have lost several key industries to foreign competitors and we are losing more. Emerging technologies provide an opportunity for all nations to lose or dominate these industries, depending on how many MS and PhD level scientists and engineers they graduate and how much money they can afford to put into research and development (R&D). A study of 114 key US industries show that foreign products (imports) in 111 industries of the 114 are gaining in the US market 5% each year against US products (http://www.americaneconomicalert.org/view_art.asp?Prod_ID=2648") Let’s take a look what is going on in our high schools. In the United States, the ACT (formerly the American College Testing Program) is the standard test for college entrance exams by most universities and colleges. The ACT scores range from 1 to 36. Students with ACT scores below 20 will have a lesser chance of succeeding in the future, because future technological events will simply leave them behind. The consolidated OECD-PISA scores of the top ten countries in secondary education would average in the ACT mid-to-high twenties equivalent area. Unfortunately, the United States’ ACT average is 21.1. Within the United States, Tennessee ranked 40th in the 2008 ACT and 38th in the 2007 test. According to the ACT’s Report on College Readiness and the Impact of Course Rigor (http://www.act.org/news/data/08/pdf/states/Tennessee.pdf), 82% of Tennessee Class of 2008 graduates that took the ACT did not meet College Readiness Benchmark Scores. This means that 82% of last year’s high school graduating class in Tennessee was not ready for either doing college work or doing pretty much any type of work right out of high school that could lead to a career. How does Knox County rank in all of this? Let’s take a look at Knox County’s high school performance on the ACT in 2008. It is very positive that Knox County’s average ACT score of 21.9 is running higher than our national (21.1) or state (20.7) average. However, we are all significantly below many other countries whose products are selling better than ours, creating our negative trade balance and the high national debt that is destroying us. This past week, Dr. McIntyre presented the expense budget he wants for the coming 2010 school year. It is $374 million dollars. What I found unusual in my opinion and experience is that there are no goals presented that can be measured, such as ACT achievement at year end, and grade point average per school per month year-to-date for each school, anything that could tell us how our children’s education is improving after the many years of "dumbing" them down. How do we know in clear measurable terms if we started to improve after many decades or not? How do we know how individual schools are performing? Or are we just allowed to pay the tax dollars, but not have answers to such questions? How does the school system (KCS) know if they missed an important goal in one month so that they can take immediate action? If they know about such a thing, why can't we find out what that system is and why can't we be also informed? To me this is very similar to any one of us asking a company to upgrade our landscaping, or renovate our kitchen and give us a proposal. But there is only one company that we can go to called KCS. KCS has no competitors. So KCS gives us their proposal that tells us how much the work will cost, but tells us nothing about what they will accomplish for our hard earned money. They want our (the School Board’s) agreement about the money now, but they will provide a plan of action in 2-3 months, which may or may not include what they will actually accomplish so that we can tell after the project is finished if they have done the job well, or poorly. We HAVE to pay (tax dollars), but we are kept blind about what the expected results will be. No company could survive if they did this. And I am sure that some on the Knox County Board of Education would disagree with my example, but this is exactly what they are doing after dumbing our kids down for decades. Education is a service business. Public education is a monopoly. They are the only game in town, even if they did a terrible job. We MUST do something about KCS not being accountable for agreeing to at minimum reasonable monthly goals, and presenting actual results monthly to show us in each school how well they have performed to educate our children. We pay for their expenses from our hard-earned dollars. I think that we deserve at least that much from them. Their primary purpose as an organization is to educate our children. We want measurable evidence, based on monthly results that they have stopped "dumbing down" our children, and started to “smart them up” instead. That’s all I am asking for, and I hope that you are with me. Is that too much to ask for after what happened, and we, the citizens paid the bill for many decades?  The chart above shows the ten-year history of ACT scores for each of our high schools. I think it is time to ask some hard nosed questions about why some have done well, and why some are doing consistently poorly. Ponder this chart a bit so that you can remember most of the major points in it. Next you might wonder how much money we spent in each of these high schools per student or per ACT score point achieved. I am sorry that I was given this information only for 2008, but even one year is useful. I created the chart below from that information.  The chart above shows a Relative Return on Investment (ROI) picture of how much money is spent in Knox County, Tennessee per high school per student for each ACT point actually achieved by that high school. Look at the huge difference in dollars spent per student to achieve each ACT point that the school achieved in 2008. We also show how that creates an Return on Investment (ROI) picture relative to the high school with the best high school ROI, which is assumed to be at 100% of ROI Performance. I have asked for ADA$/student since May of 2008 five times but could not get it, so my figures are based on salaries plus benefits per student per school for 2008 provided by my representative on the Board of Education. I may refine this formula a bit after I get the ADA$/student, but it is a fair question to see in numbers how much we get in results for every dollar we spend per student in any given school. The result is the consolidated ACT score for each high school, the best measure of performance according to our colleges and universities. These figures raise some obvious questions like:
We are also over spending in low performing high schools without results that justify it in my opinion. And I have been asking for answers to this question for several months. Why is Tennessee one of the lowest in funding for education? Is Tennessee 40th in ACT achievement because it is one of the lowest states in funding? This year we are paying the Knox County School system $370,000,000, and this has been done for about four decades (with lesser amounts each year), in every school system in the nation. Not as bad as in Tennessee, but they all "dumbed down" our children relative to our international competitors. And they still want more money! I am not against more money if they suddenly start increasing our scholastic results. Not promising it. Delivering it. You can tell that I am a bit angry about what I have found. For me this is nothing less than defrauding the public (not on purpose) by taking our money, delivering poor results, and not having the courage to stand up to this day and tell us what has been happening and what he or she is going to do about meeting international competition. NOT ONE PERSON. Food for thought: It may not be a bad idea if the school system did pay attention to how much money they are spending and for what results at each school. Like it or not, what we should be optimizing is the maximum number of high school grads who go on to a university to save the next generation – and ourselves. There will always be some children or even some schools that will not do better, no matter what you do. Is that where the money should go or should we help a few more kids who are willing and have the ability to succeed? Are slogans like making all kids successful for the future realistic? It is certainly something that every parent would love to hear, but it may be more a political slogan than reality. The United States ranks 34th in high school math and 29th in high school science. Finland is first, Alberta, Canada is second, Hong Kong is third. All nations are studying Finland about what they are doing and how they are doing it (at a lower expense than the USA, when they are first and we are 34th.). Although I brought this subject up with the Board of Education twice, and the fact that we must think GLOBALLY about being competitive, absolutely nothing has been done about seriously studying those who have found ways to deliver extraordinary success. I hope that maybe as a result of this publicity, The Knox County Board of Education will do some serious studying of what methods we could adopt from the winners, so that we will not continue the status quo year after year as in the past. Only 18% of the Knox County high school senior classes being college ready is nothing less than incredibly damaging for the next generation. There are a few schools that are truly doing excellent work. When we are spending $370 million of our hard earned tax dollars in a year to support almost 8,000 employees at KCS, we deserve internationally competitive results in the education for our children county wide. Not an 18% college readiness, but 80%. Is that an unreasonable request? I do not think that anyone in the school system is doing this on purpose. However, that cannot be an acceptable comment after decades of poor results.
CURRENT SITUATION - FUTURE JOB NEEDS - THE HIGH SCHOOL CHALLENGE - PROPOSED SOLUTION - WHAT SHOULD I BECOME?
SUGGESTION FOR A SHORT-TERM SOLUTION WITH LITTLE OR NO ADDITIONAL MONEY There is no doubt in my mind that we have to increase the amount of money per student we spend on education. Today's economy is not a good time to do that. However, the federal contribution to our education is too small. With education being among the top three priorities for President Obama, and rightly so based on what you see above, I trust that we will get significant help there. However, the money will come with conditions attached. To meet these conditions, Boards of Education better get used to the fact that educational investment and results will have to be managed in a very business-like manner. The spending without any regard to what academic results we get will be ending - as it should have a long time ago. More money alone will not solve all of our challenges.
1. SCHOOLS: TEACHERS AND STUDENTS, HIGHLY INTERACTIVE MINIMUM 30-MINUTE DISCUSSIONS PER WEEK, FROM GRADE ONE THROUGH HIGH SCHOOL, ABOUT THE FOLLOWING SUBJECTS.  Possibility
thinking.
What is possible for you as a student? What is really impossible for
you? What is success? Does success require good work and trying a hundred times if we do not succeed first? People rarely succeed on the first try. We can learn from not succeeding so that we win the next time. (we may need 2-4 sessions discussing this
depending on progress). Talk to school kids as if you could actually see what they could become. What
is right and wrong
behavior and why? With parents, teachers, sex, taking or
damaging what does not belong to you, hurting other people and taking
drugs. Remember to treat others as you want to be treated. What
IS education?
Training of the mind, like an athlete has to train his/her muscles. ONE
ACTUALLY INCREASES BRAIN CELLS. THE OTHER ACTUALLY INCREASES MUSCLE
CELLS. Why
is education so
important? Future jobs require it more and more, good future income, quality of life depends on it. Why
is a HS diploma
absolutely vital? One cannot get good jobs OR higher
education without it. One cannot even get into any US Army, Navy or Air Force training program. IMPORTANT: if
a high school student takes all the following: Algebra 1 and 2, Geometry, Trigonometry, Calculus 1, Physics,
Chemistry, Biology, Geography and English Composition with As or Bs,
even if not required for a diploma, the student WILL SUCCEED in going through a science,
engineering or any other curriculum at a university and have 60-70 years of a great life. The student could also get a much better job out of high school, or be admitted into the most advanced university programs through our military services, paid for by the military in total.
TAKING THESE COURSES WITH GOOD GRADES TO REVERSE THE DOWNWARD TREND IN EDUCATION IS
VITAL. The
exciting jobs that
await the kids after a university education in science and engineering
are exploding (this is worth many discussions). This could really turn
the kids on! For example thousands of different vocations are coming as
part of nano technology, with thousands of well educated people needed
in each! We cannot even satisfy the need with foreign graduates today.
Our science and engineering grads are down more than 50%, while other
countries went up. This is actually a great opportunity for those who
study hard in high school!
Free
possibilities for education,
any university (with high scores one can get scholarships. I know two
boys who had a totally free ride at Harvard) and the military options
are great as well – free if you have good test results in the
military, which will be easy if you take the above courses with good
grades in high school. Every child and adult has days when you feel down and disappointed. I learned a very useful tool that could help anyone. I found that negative thoughts were almost always (always in my case) incorrect. You brain can make up things that are not correct based on what one learned during childhood. If you heard and saw a lot of bad things, it will tend to be negative. If you saw only good things, it will be positive. Both can be unrealistic. The question is how can we fix that? And the solution I found is surprisingly simple. When I felt bad, I wrote down immediately what I felt and why, and dated it. Then I looked at it 4-7 days later, and I saw that I was not right, I was seeing negative things where there were no negatives. I looked at my original note when the results came (actually talking to someone to find out if my feelings were correct or waiting for results that I thought would be bad.), and found that my original negative thoughts were not correct at all. Then for months when a negative thought came, I could say that I tested you my dear brain and you were incorrect 10 out of 10. After six months or so of using this method, the negative thoughts did not even come up. I grew up during WWII in Europe and saw bombings, even blown apart bodies and many other bad things as a young child. I suspect that is where the negative feelings came from.2. EDUCATE PARENTS AND GRAND PARENTS: The
long-term decline of
US secondary education and resulting national problems for our children (see
above) Teach
kids right from
wrong. The children must get a “moral
compass” that most do not have today. Involve faith based
organizations in this, and very seriously. The children need to know
and keep the proper balance between appropriate responsible fun and
what they must do very well today for their future success (get good
grades in school). They are children. They do not make good decisions.
Parents must enforce things in this area.
About
the need to trust and support the
schools in all actions with the children, with special emphasis on low
income families and single parents. Your child's future depends on the teachers
significantly at minimum. If your child complains about the school or
any teacher, and if his/her grades are not A's or B's, take the teacher's
side because the child's future depends on his/her education, and that
depends on the teachers. If you have a complaint about the school or
a teacher, talk to the teacher privately to get his/her side first.
You the parent could be wrong. Never talk negatively about the school
or any teacher with your child. That just makes the child's attitude
bad toward the teachers. His/her education depends entirely on them. It
is your job to make sure that the child walks into the school every
single day with a respectful and positive attitude toward those people
on whom the child's education depends - THE TEACHERS. As in every job, some teachers are better
than others, like some bosses are better than others. That's life.
How good a job you do, does not depend totally on how good your boss is,
and similarly, your child's performance does not depend totally on how
good his/her teacher is. Anyone can do a great job, or get an A, with a
bad boss or a bad teacher. Many of you adults have done it.
CURRENT SITUATION - FUTURE JOB NEEDS - THE HIGH SCHOOL CHALLENGE - PROPOSED SOLUTION - WHAT SHOULD I BECOME?
IN WHAT PROFESSION WILL I BE THE HAPPIEST AND DO VERY WELL? I met so many people during my life who were not happy in their jobs. It is really sad, because all of us can be very successful, but only in a job that we love to do. But it all starts with the best grades you get in education at the beginning, taking the hardest courses to expand your mind, and then go on to a university. With a good education and a job that you are looking forward to every morning, you will be a very satisfied and happy individual. So please remember my advice. We develop INTERESTS in jobs from early childhood on. Interest surveys are not very useful for career decisions, because they are the results of what parents, teachers and other kids or adults tell the child, the movies and various TV programs he/she sees, or books he/she reads. Such interests are based on external influences and have nothing to do with the various abilities, activities collectively measured as PREFERENCES that are developed within each person before age 18. If you decide about a career based on the INTERESTS that you developed as a high school student, you could easily discover once you are in the job for a few years that you really do not like the actual profession that you picked. A short internship will not help you, because you will not experience the demands and responsibilities of the job. That will not happen if you make a career choice based on properly measured PREFERENCES at age 18. However, in a fair percentage of cases, but not in the majority of cases I found that INTERESTS and PREFERENCES coincide. The PREFERENCES we develop for the things we like to do as children keep changing until we become 18 years old. From age 18 it will remain the same for life. When one loves his/her job, it means that the day-to-day characteristics of the job match one's PREFERENCES very well. If a very accurate test existed that could determine what jobs would suit one's PREFERENCES best, one could have a very important part of the answer to this question. And such a test would work as well for the 18 year-old as it would work for an older person, because your PREFERENCES do not change after 18 years of age. Another important factor to determine the best job fit is one's personality type and how one interacts with other people in a job environment. There is an excellent test available for that also. The third and last component to determine is how intelligent one is and how hard one is willing to work in school to get top grades. Success in all jobs require hard work, which is easy if you love your job. It will be your high school grades, your ACT scores that will be the best indicator for this. By age 18 this part will be behind you, and this is one reason why you should do the best possible job in high school. It is highly unlikely that huge success will smile upon you if you had average or lower high school grades and ACT scores. I can tell you that based on my experience evaluating more than 500 people for career evaluation, career change, hiring professionals for my teams, and young kids who were unsure about their future, I found the Strong Interest Inventory (http://www.paladinexec.com/assessments_tools/career/) an outstanding and very accurate tool in 100% of my cases. I even used it on my son. This test was established in 1927 by a psychologist whose name was Dr. Strong. Its long history for career advice and matching has many years of success behind it, and I would very highly recommend it. When one knows that this test is extremely accurate, their morale goes up just by taking it and find out exactly where they could be successful. This link is only one of many sources for these tests. You can Google for other sources. The psychological evaluation for people interaction is the second most important test. It is the Myers-Briggs Personality Assessment (http://www.paladinexec.com/assessments_tools/career/). These two tests should be taken within weeks of each other to get close to 100% guidance for what vocational environment one will be best suited. You could Google these tests and find many other sources for it. I would also suggest that if someone is trying to convince you to take another test, still take these, because selecting the right career is a vitally important task. It would also be very useful to consult with a vocational psychologist both before you take these tests and after you have your results from theses two tests. Rest assured that if you follow these recommendations you will get a 100% accurate answer to the question of what career will make you the happiest and most successful in life. You may be in school for 12-20 years depending on what you want to study. The higher degree you get the more secure your future job environment will be. The above tests will also ensure that your working (50-60) years will be your happiest years. Many schools will put emphasis on you developing career interests. That's not a bad thing, but you can have the career choice decision made perfectly at age 18 or even thereafter. The best thing you can do for your future in both primary and secondary school is to work hard in each and every course to get as many A's as you can. Take advanced version of a course whenever it is available. Take the harder math and science and English courses whenever it is available. The hard work that you invest your time in will pay off so incredibly later by ending you up with more advanced job choices, jobs that require more smart brains but they are much more fun also, and they also get the best pay. This is the way you can get a job that you will love every day, and it will provide you with enough money to have everything you need and want. Associate with kids like you would like to become. Even if you are not there yet. Not with kids where you are the smartest by far. They will drag you down. Be very smart with the choice of friends, because we all become like the people with whom we associate and spend time. THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NO DOUBT THAT EVERYONE WHO CAN GET A's OR B's IN ALL PRIMARY SCHOOL AND HIGH SCHOOL COURSES THAT INCLUDE THE RECOMMENDED MATH, SCIENCE AND ENGLISH CLASSES, WILL BE A GREAT SUCCESS IN LIFE IF THEY FOLLOW THE ABOVE ADVICE.
There are parents who do not understand the need for education. The Knoxville Chamber of Commerce (Jennifer E.) is working on a presentation to the public covering this area. This is also very important although we will not reach as many students through the parents as the first method above. However, it is also vital to get as much parental support as we can for this effort, and this is the best method that could achieve that with the right message.  "I am doing yoga exercises now. In China even I had to take calculus in High School, and I can get a job without knowing anything. Because I am so incredibly cute. You people are not as cute as I am so you better study hard and become a scientist or engineer or something. Look into my eyes when I am talking to you!" The point is that very few children have a talent that may ensure a good financial future just by itself. Today they can depend only on their education for income.
NOTE A CONTRAST IN THE COUNTRIES
WITH WHICH WE COMPETE: Professors
and teachers are the most respected
professions in the top thirty countries, followed by medical doctors. All parents support the teachers without questions because
they know that their child's future depends
on them. Disrespectful behavior toward professors or teachers
is not tolerated by parents or the schools, and it results in expulsion from the schools. How does this
sound to you Marvin? "Well, I did not have much education. And some of the things above are difficult for me to understand. But I can see that my children and grand children could be in real trouble without education today. Times are different. I would like my children and grandchildren to have the best education. Just imagine. I would be so proud if I could say, "my son the engineer", or "my daughter the doctor", or "my grandson is a scientist at that big space place...NASA". They would make good money and could buy me a case of beer sometimes. They could have a nice house I could never have. They could even buy me one of them big flat televisions so I can watch VOLS football at home on a big screen. Man! THAT would be wonderful."
If you have any helpful thoughts to solve the education problem, email me. I am working on this topic already with a great sense of urgency. Complaining is not good enough. We need facts and we need actions. This situation is a huge problem for us, and we need Knox County to solve it. And THEY need our help. Encourage students from grade one through twelve to study hard and to take the above recommended courses and pass them with an A or B. Wake up America! And put some effort into EDUCATION! Why do you think I am playing this saxophone 24/7??!!   Vic Spencer Farragut, TN vicspencer@gmail.com “Things may come to those who wait...but only the things left by those who hustle.” (Abraham Lincoln) Updated 4/5/09, started 5/15/08 -- Copyright(c) 2008-2009 V. Spencer This is a work in progress.  |
