"Too cool for school"

Just saw a cable commercial about how most of the Western countries (and others as well) now beat the United States with students in math and science. All I can think of is, what a shame... What a shame that this country spends a ton of money on each child, and we stink at teaching our children the two most important subjects. Those stupid teachers in Wisconsin could hardly teach their students how to read, yet want all the benefits. With the rest of us, we lose our jobs if we don't meet our goals, but not them...

Too, the kids these days don't think math and science are any "fun." They all want to be pop stars or rap stars. They want to stay in school until they are 25 or 30 years old. They want to win the lottery. But they don't want to go to a job for 40 hours a week.... As I've blogged before,

in my day kids would say finding a cure for cancer as one of the most respectable jobs, but you never hear that anymore...

Most kids these days are spoiled. They have entitlement issues. They have watched all the sitcoms, and think life's problems will be solved in 30 - 60 minutes. (It's why here in Texas we have illegal Mexicans who will do the work that no one else wants to do. Go to any restaurant here and see who the bottle washers are. They aren't the legals, I can tell you that.)

Who's fault is it? Well, the parents for not teaching them the right thing to do, but most of the parents work all day and are tired when they finally do see their children. It's also the teachers, who are also spoiled, and want to keep their cushy jobs but not give it their all. At the private school I just withdrew my 8th grader from, all of her teachers this year are very nice but they didn't teach. They have an A/B schedule, meaning that you have one set of classes on an A day, and the other set of classes of B days, each for an hour and a half. DD would come home complaining that they weren't teaching during that time, but just were talking about their personal lives for the first hour, and then they had free time the last 30 minutes. They didn't even assign much homework at all. DD even asked each of them, could they learn the subject, but each time the teachers got offended, yet still wouldn't teach and continued talking about their personal problems. And the coaches? They had their jock favorites, and were trying to be these kid's friends instead of coach/teacher. DD's home room coach/teacher was in her 20's and acted like she was a member of DD's bully's posse (who also happens to be their star girl jock.) But no one was teaching...

Now that she's in public school, she is enrolled in AP classes (advanced placement) but had to catch up. Seems the public schools at least put their best teachers in the AP classes, but the other classes have all others. Yes, it's no surprise to me that American kids are scoring poorly on math and science.

It's no one's priority...