Eighth grade standards for high school graduation - WHAT GIVES?

Education | Jen - 12:30pm May 27, 1999 PDT (# 10 of 14)

I think the parents' role is to communicate with the school district about the standards and the tests and to be informed about things like: How many school days are my kids spending in test preparation & test taking? What do the tests look like? What do you do with the scores?

I don't feel very good about standards. I work in the training field, and I am new to it. I used to wonder why some of the technical classes I took were so shallow. Now I understand that the instructors were "teaching to tests," specifically Microsoft and other certification tests that are so trendy. The tests (and I'm talking about user-level tests, not technical MSCE or CNE tests) seem to test for a broad understanding of the software, touching on many of the features but not requiring in-depth understanding of them (in my opinion, anyway). Everyone benefits by the system: Microsoft and other vendors who rake in licensing and certification fees, content developers who sell "certified" books and software, "certified" trainers, who hold the key to the tests, and employers, who have a measurement to use when hiring.

I'm not sure that it is a bad measurement, either. You would have to have decent knowledge of the software to pass the tests. The thing that saddens me is that so much time is spent on the shallow accumulation of rote knowledge that, in class anyway, there is little time left for exploration or real learning.

I wonder if primary and secondary classes are finding the same effect when standards tests become important. I recently read that in the Chicago Public Schools, teachers and students are starting to rebel against the number of tests they have to take (and the amount of time that is taken away from their classes)

And I'd like to know more about how the test are developed. I'm not saying that academic achievement can't be measured, but I wish I felt better about the guidelines being used. In my experience, people will grasp at anything in order to get quantifiable results. That's understandable, but it tends to establish a standard that may be of questionable value but is very difficult to replace with anything else.

What's Harvey Weinstein's story?

Movies | Patrick Hudson - 11:52am Jun 2, 1999 PDT (# 4 of 9)

Weinstein reminds me of Gap CEO Mickey Drexler, who has demonstrated near-perfect merchandising touch and good taste where before there was no clear strategic vision. Now America is 'blessed' with very nice movies and very nice casual clothing, but we all feel a sense of having lost something. We've lost the sense of uniqueness that used to come from liking certain little movies; how can you feel unique when the film you like is selling out at the shopping mall multiplex? These tastemakers are largely responsible for our collective sense of fin-de-siecle ennui; it feels like the 'end of history.' Something about all the pictures of all these near-billionaires wearing sloppy casual clothes makes me long for a time when the U.S. didn't feel so middle-aged and complacent. Maybe the new generation of children born to the baby boomers (about 4MM births a year for about a decade now) will liven things up.

A Family Values Question

Social Issues | John James - 08:46am Jun 4, 1999 PDT (# 28 of 37)

I have no answers but a case study or two.

My mother left my father soon after my younger brother was off to college. She literally, consciously held it together for the kids. I don't know for how long-10 years, maybe-she stayed after having decided that the marriage was empty.

There was no blatant abuse or alcoholism or financial calamity. I have to resort to psychobabble to describe their problems. They were "dysfunctional." My father "has issues," with control and with anger. But their staying together in itself didn't help him with those things. Was it my mother's job to force him to confront his problems?

I suppose I feel guilty, as if my brother and I were to blame for Mom enduring an unhappy marriage for so long. And I wonder what the benefit was. I know one big cost: a 10-year delay before they could move on to try and find better partners. Might it have been more honest, less hypocritical, and better for everybody all around for the split to have occurred sooner? I feel sure they would have worked hard at their parental obligations, even if they had lived apart.

I've been married eight years now, with some bumps along the way. I'm committed to making my marriage last, and I'm committed to being a good father to my two kids, and the two sentiments are related, but they're not identical.

A relative on my wife's side got his girlfriend pregnant, and they hurriedly married. He's 21, she's 19. Clearly, they're too young or immature or ill-matched or whatever, and I'm sure marriage would not have been in the picture had the pregnancy not occurred. Anyway, the marriage has been filled with strife from Day 1, and two days after delivering a beautiful baby girl, the mother has moved out. My wife's family suspects some scheming on the girl's part-that she stayed until the baby was born in order to strengthen her claim to child support. But assuming that everyone is acting in good faith: What do you make of their situation? A related question: What is the value in legitimacy, in "giving the child a name," even if the odds of a long-term marriage seem poor?