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... it's the culture that's the problem, I think. I wasn't born there, but my old man was stationed at Keesler AFB in Biloxi when I was 6, and I went all the way to my high school graduation in one school system. Quite a feat for a military kid, but I digress!
A lot of kids in the South aren't encouraged by their families or their peers to succeed in school. Now, don't get me wrong. Every schoolkid hates being known as a "nerd" or a "geek", but it's possible to get good grades and be reasonably popular. Thing is, most kids pick the latter and eschew the former entirely. The South has a strong bias towards athletics, and so you wind up with the football players who go to class and sleep, and the teachers (who are complicit in the whole affair) give them a C anyway, just so they can keep playing ball and bring glory to the school.
As an example of this kind of mentality (and the best pwnage I ever saw directed at my high school principal), I overheard a discussion between said principal and the AP US history teacher. Until my class took the test, no one had yet passed it. For those who've never taken it, it's rough. Anyway, the principal was giving my teacher a lot of lookout below about the test, how the class would be scrapped if someone didn't pass, because the school wasn't getting a return on its investment. She calmly replied that since the football team hadn't won a game in three years, she fully expected that there wouldn't be a team next year. I thought the principal was gonna have a stroke. It was brilliant. :evilgrin:
On top of that, most parents take a lackadaisical approach to their kid's education, at best. A lot of them just plain don't give a rip if Tommy passes in math or not. My dad, after he retired, taught history at my high school in my junior and senior years, and he constantly ranted about how parents didn't get involved, couldn't be bothered, didn't care. What really torqued him was when parents refused to be parents. As an example, one of his students was just pretty much ignoring the class, and flunking as a result. When my old man talked to her father, he expressed dismay and bewilderment, wondering how in the world he could get his daughter to take school seriously. He'd just bought her a brand new car. My dad suggested taking the keys away. Her dad replied with, "Gosh, that'd make her mad, though!"
I was very fortunate in that my school system did have a lot of wonderful teachers for the advanced/AP classes, and those were the ones I dealt with. They didn't take any crap, they made damn sure we knew what college would be like, and they also made damn sure we were learning. To this day, ten years later, I look back on those years fondly, and I still keep in touch with some of my teachers via email. They still speak glowingly of my graduating class, noting how hyper-competitive we were when it came to grades.
In the end, the best teacher in the world won't get through to a kid if the kid's parents and his culture or peer group are telling him it's uncool or pointless to succeed in school. Most of the kids in my high school had no plans of going on to college, yet they still thought they'd wind up driving a Mercedes and living in the ritziest part of town. But until our youths' culture changes, and until their parents drive home the importance of education, the teachers and the schools can only do so much. You can give a kid a book, but you can't make him read it.
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