NYT Attacks Putin’s School Book Ban While Ignoring Our Wretched School System That Common Core Is Actively Destroying

Like any hypocrite, the US loves to find every possible mote in Russia’s eye while ignoring huge red wood trees planted firmly in US eyes.  Here is this week’s sad example:  Putin’s Friend Profits in Purge of Schoolbooks – NYTimes.com:

Then there was the case of the colorful math textbooks published by a decorated educator, Lyudmila G. Peterson, cashiered for using characters from popular foreign children’s stories. Illustrating math problems with the likes of Snow White, Eeyore and Owl, in one expert’s decisive opinion, was “hardly designed to instill a sense of patriotism” in young Russian minds.
Articles in this series are examining how President Vladimir V. Putin’s system of personalized state-sponsored capitalism allows him to wield power at home and abroad.
By the time the school year began this fall, the number of approved textbooks for Russia’s 14 million schoolchildren had been slashed by more than half. The summary winnowing by the Ministry of Education and Science upset lesson plans, threatened the livelihoods of nearly two-dozen small publishers and left principals, teachers and parents puzzled and angry.

It took me exactly one minute to figure out why that popular text book was removed: Disney!  The pictures used were a rip on Disney’s cartoons and Disney is very big on suing even tiny day care centers who use these without permission much less a major text book!  More than one reader of the Time’s silly article noticed this fact too which proves it wasn’t all that difficult to see the real story which somehow eluded both the reporter and editor of the NYT.  Here is one publication that figured this out very swiftly:  I am shocked, shocked to find Putin cancelled school books using Disney characters … – The Unz Review

Which means this is a faux outrage story designed to demonize Russia.  Then there is Common Core which is hated by both parents and children but beloved of Microsoft and its very rich bosses who give very generously to politicians who pushed through this garbage on our children.  It is increasingly obvious that this methodology is wrecking our wretched schools even further.  The elites and any smart middle class people know that sending children to Montessori Schools means they will do really well which happens to be the schools where Bill Gates and a surprising number of Silicon Valley executives went to, themselves.

It baffles me why our schools don’t all get reformed and are run with the Montessori method!  I homeschooled my own children for a while using this method.  It works wonderfully. Below is a video from Europe showing a classic Montessori school for little ones:

Note how the children interact heavily with each other and move about from one activity to another and are often on their feet instead of planted in chairs.  They explore the world and learn social skills.  There is no battle between teacher and kinder over who has the most power of control.  No temper tantrums, either.  What is really sad is how minority children in the US coming from often chaotic and socially disrupted family homes are expected to sit still and obey teachers when they can’t sit still at all or obey anyone.  All that remains is a race to the bottom for them.

Then there is math.  Math is scary to children when it is presented as bizarre, mysterious and explained with weird verbiage that is cooked up by bureaucrats and university graduates who learn the ‘school speak’ so beloved of professors who want to sound ‘smart’.  Common Core uses this for small children which means they can’t figure out what the hell the teachers are telling them and poor teachers have to figure out some way of using commonly understood language to explain ridiculous verbiage which infests Common Core concepts.

In general, our simian brains find is very stressful to comprehend math which is a civilization concept created by people in the Middle East and India especially India, to explain commerce and taxes.  Yes, math was invented and numbers created to figure out business deals and percentage taxes!  It is very much an adult thing.  It taps into parts of the brain that didn’t fully evolve to embrace this sort of logic and emotions combined with the need to be logical leads to stress which is why so many humans struggled hard to make math easier, to find short cuts for reckoning numbers, etc.  Math fear video:

We must ask why Bill Gates who hires many Asians who excel in math, pushed so hard for Common Core which cripples US non-Asians so thoroughly:  Then there is Bill Gates who gives huge sums to politicians:  Common Core math can be a mystery, and parents are going to school to understand it – The Washington Post

Rochester is one of many school districts across the country teaching parents the new Common Core math in addition to their children. From New York to California, school districts are holding special math sessions for parents and caregivers, sending home “cheat sheets” and offering homework hotlines answered by math teachers, all in an effort to explain and demystify the new approach.

 

“The kids who come to us are a clean slate,” said Jennifer Patanella, an instructional coach with the Rochester public schools. “It’s the adults who have to be retrained.”…

 

In the past, math was learned as a series of memorized facts, formulas and shortcuts or tricks. The result, experts say, is that U.S. students struggle with math. Nearly two out of every three U.S. fourth-graders and eighth-graders were not proficient on recent national math tests. The Common Core standards differ from that previous approach in that they emphasize the concepts behind mathematical operations and stress that there are multiple ways to arrive at the same answer.

I NEVER struggled with math due to having all the information about how to calculate firmly affixed in my brain!  Neither did my ancestors who, since the mid-19th century, were all either teachers, professors or scientists.  All of them learned the old fashioned way and used various tools like the slide rule as assists in calculating astronomical numbers, since a number of my ancestors were astronomers.  I remember Univac at the University of Chicago back in the early 1950’s because that giant calculating machine complex was one of the few buildings air conditioned back then.  Computers have taken over many of the logic/math functions that so irritate our emotions.

Common Core is making me stupider. – MomDot: examples of the New Microsoft Math abound here.  Amazingly horrible methodology trying to teach small children how to reason and do calculations.  Do computers do it this way?  Of course not!

Part of the Republican surge in this election is due to Common Core because there is a rising, general revolt of parents furious with their children weeping while doing insane sorts of homework.  The other issues are obvious to me: Obama’s refusal to stop ebola due to his African roots, Ferguson which is all about blacks demanding whites no longer stop them from running riot (it is obvious to nearly everyone that the officer will not be charged with anything due to him acting in self-defense which means blacks will probably riot or go on a white hunting craze, attacking innocent people again like with the Florida self defense case!) and illegal aliens issues.  The average voter is quite angry about the flood of illegal aliens.  Business loves this same flood.

This flood is wrecking our school system because, like black children, it appears that Hispanic children seem unable to do well in school and are driving whole states down into the basement in school rankings.  Here is the state where I went to school the most in my own childhood, Arizona:

Look at the numbers!  Note how Asians are nearly 100% ‘basic’ and 60% ‘proficient’ and the majority of the ‘advanced’.  How do they do this?  I know the answer, there are Asians married into my own family and it is the same answer as to why Jews did so very well before the creation of Israel (which has dumbed this group down badly as all fascist systems do): they expect their children to work very hard.  They have full confidence their children will master math and hire math tutors if the child struggles.  I did this, too.  Math tutors are great.  My children remember their tutors fondly.

Hispanic children are barely above black children in rankings and do even worse in advanced math.  Language is not the problem here because Asian immigrants do better than whites who are born here, too.  Indeed, the push over the last twenty years to reduce all language training to only Spanish in our schools has done great damage to our nation and the spread of Spanish in our businesses is weakening Spanish speaking students, not making them stronger and eventually will fatally divide this nation and even destroy it.  The only reason Canada isn’t split in two is due to the French sector being too small relative to the English sector.  But the desire to split is very high in Montreal.

The tsunami of illegal aliens has turned the California schools, and I went to school there, too, long ago, into a basket case.  Like Arizona, whites and Asians have double the scores of blacks and Hispanics in maths.  But Asians do extremely well in advanced maths, overwhelmingly better than anyone else.  Much more than double the number of whites and the blacks and Hispanics barely make any showing in advanced maths, one tenth of the numbers compared to Asians!  But as we see in the above map, California is now at the very bottom of the ranking of states for math ability!

This is obvious: the majority of students are now Hispanics.  Blacks and Hispanics are now nearly 60% of the students and whites/Asians are only 40%.  The woeful performance of the no-longer minority but now majority of students has dragged down the entire state so it is alongside Mississippi, New Mexico, Alabama and Louisiana.  All of which have a majority of ‘minority’ students whereas the highest ranked states uniformly have large numbers of European white students.

Last is the state where I went to school first when I lived at Yerkes Observatory:

This state is one of the top six in the nation.  My children went to school in New Jersey which is also in the top six.  Due to fears of racism charges, the entire government system is hyper aware of the fact that Asian students excel in math and white students are very highly ranked, too, while states with a majority of ‘minority’ students do very poorly.  Instead, there is denial of reality as they pretend there is some system change that will magically turn ill-prepared, utterly disinterested in learning math students into good scholars via some sort of wand waving.

So instead of copying any Asian country, our rulers meddle with traditional learning systems to find some sort of way of getting superior students while refusing to understand why minority students stubbornly cannot learn.  And here is the hard truth:  Study ties hard work to Asian students’ higher grades. 

The authors of the study, University of Michigan’s Yu Xie and Amy Hsin of Queens College, City University of New York, examined two national surveys of students in kindergarten through high school, focusing on data for 4,246 white students and 989 Asian students. The authors compared measures of academic achievement such as students’ grades with teachers’ responses to questions as to whether their students showed a willingness to work. Hsin and Xie found that the differences in how hard students worked, according to their teachers, accounted for much of the Asian group’s better performance in the classroom compared to whites.

DUH!  I got a scholarship to go to college at age 16 not by goofing off but by working my ass off to master all sorts of skills.  This includes playing multiple musical instruments and learning how to read musical scores, mastering three languages, German being the most advanced, but also Russian and some Latin.  I read many, many books, including history books and amusingly, books about statistics which my grandfather gave me.

My reward for all this in school was to be ferociously attacked by students who didn’t want to do any work at all and resented anyone who did work hard.  So those of us who were doing much better and skipping grades, etc. were tormented including physical threats and attacks.  Ask any nerdy kid about this matter and all will have multiple horror stories to tell.  When the majority of students are at least making an effort to learn something, anything, nerdy kids can survive.  Put them in a school filled with students who are incapable due to family/culture reasons of learning hardly anything and the nerdy kids literally are driven to suicide or are murdered or become mentally destroyed by their peers who openly hate them.

Fixing this is extremely hard since our entire popular culture is bent on tormenting, killing or persecuting nerdy children!  This is ridiculous.  We can’t expect intellectual superiority in the world if our entire culture is all about being thugs, creeps and criminals!  But then…this describes our psychopathic leaders, doesn’t it?