Raspberry column

[Bryllars at concentric.net]

re: Rasberry and your comment

My personal comment on The System and its inabilities
is the thought that so few teachers know how to bridge the gap you
indicate might be there.

Until one can figure out how teachers with middle class aspirations and
not all that much knowledge or understanding
can do this kind of thing
it makes little sense to blame the system as such
  - as though changes in the proceedures could overcome
the problem.
Or can this be done in a classroom at all?

Or is the classroom the system?

What substitutes for the classroom in transmitting the cultural skills
   of education do we really have.

This takes us back to Paul Goodman and others -
      Do we have time or the imagination.
Do we propose two "school" systems?
Who decides who goes in which -
                 a close friend of mind with Genius skills
spent most of his school (as opposed to college) days
in the subnormal class because he was to bright for the
teachers or the system.
Even in college he was guided to the business course.
Before becoming a full professor at Univ Pennsylvania
and the Yale
and author of widely best sellling books.

Quietness is not the same as verbal inability
and what we are left with is our inability to understand,
communicate with, or measure
the potential of young students.

Karl Reisman
Bryllars at concentric.net



At 01:09 PM 8/31/03, you wrote:
>[Please note: I'm cross-posting this to both Linganth and Anthro-L.]
>
>I encountered this column by William Raspberry in the Florida Time-Union
>this morning; apparently it appeared in the Washington Post a few days ago
>(we're always behind in Florida).
>
>http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A40302-2003Aug24.html
>
>The column reports on a book,



>*Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American
>Children*, by Hart and Risley, published in 1995. The principle findings,
>as reported by Raspberry, are:
>* Verbal stimulation (roughly the number of words a young child hears at
>home) may be the most important predictor of the child's future academic,
>economic and social success.
>
>* The difference in the amount of verbal stimulation received by children
>of poor families and those of the middle class is so huge as to be
>essentially unbridgeable.
>
>It seems that these differences are being invoked as a main factor in the
>poor school performance of children from lower class and working class
>homes. My initial gut-level reaction (without having read the book) is one
>of cynicism: that this *sounds like* another round of blaming the victims
>for being part of a system that is not prepared to deal with the (normal?)
>diversity that one expects in a society of this size. But I wonder what
>others might have to say about this, if anything?
>
>(I'm tempted to write a letter to the editor, but the Times-Union never
>published my last one on the bilingual ed/official English thing, so it's
>probably not worth the effort.)
>
>
>
>--
>Ronald Kephart
>Associate Professor
>Sociology, Anthropology, & Criminal Justice
>University of North Florida
>http://www.unf.edu/~rkephart