cB News____issue #1, read all about it Options

[cBNewsStaff]

Members, please do not post any comments in this thread. Any questions/comments/suggestion must be PMed to one of our editors listed in the Editors' Note for your convenience and ours. We will answer your comments accordingly. Again, please do not post any comment in this thread, it will be deleted and you will receive a verbal warning or a raise in your warning level, even face suspension.

Editors’ Notes

This is the first issue of the cB Newletter. The idea of a cB newsletter spawned from and quickly took over a thread entitled “news and announcements” (sorry Justin) in the new feedback subforum. We currently have eight active staff members to bring you cB news and editorials as well as news related to your lives outside of cB.

If you haven’t read our interview about the CreateBlog’s illusive creator--Micron, the review about Transylvania, or Advice Abby’s latest responses, read them and other articles now in our first CreateBlog News publication.

Staff who participated in this issue:
Editors: MarchHare2UrAlice (James), CrackedRearView (Justin), Suddenly She (Ruth), ChasingLife87 (Meli), uninspiredfae (Fae)
Reporters: sadolakced acid (Mr. Acid... erm, Justin), CrackedRearView (Justin), Despise (Brie), Ichigofan (Carolina), allthatglitterss (Grace)
Runner: mzkandi (Kiera)

If you would like to contribute to cB news or join its staff, contact Fae (uninspiredfae) or James (MarchHare2UrAlice)

[cBNewsStaff]

Education System Losing its Luster
Justin Abbott
June 2005

1957 was an important year. Gloria Estefan, Spike Lee, and Osama bin Laden took their first breaths. Arthur Laurents’ West Side Story made its debut on Broadway, the Civil Rights crisis reached a record high with the barring of black students from Central High in Little Rock, and the Russians launched Sputnik 1. This 184-lb satellite was the cause of mass hysteria and irrational paranoia in the United States for decades to come.

Such paranoia led to the opportunities given to people like Donna Hobbs of the Blue Valley Unified School District in Overland Park, Kansas. First attendant for prom queen in 1957 and valedictorian of the senior class of ’58, Mrs. Hobbs now teaches English in the Kansas education system. “It was a different time then,” she said, “girls were discouraged from doing anything other than flaunting around in cheerleader uniforms.” Hobbs, a 30-year veteran of the education system has nothing but praise for her generation, however. “Not to say that the cheerleader uniforms weren’t fabulous, but I did want a little more out of myself. It seems like after the Russians launched that ‘shooting star’, as all the backwoods Kansas farmers called it, I was set to go educationally.”

School districts across the nation began requiring students to take courses on trigonometry and calculus, physics courses, advanced literature courses, and even Latin and other foreign languages, a completely novel curricular requirement to American students. Hobbs recalls being required to read, unlike the seniors of years before, Voltaire’s Candide, and Joyce’s Dubliners, which aren’t necessarily your basic Dr. Seuss. The demoralizing point behind this is that it took paranoia to incite an interest in higher education for America’s youth.

Perhaps the paranoia should have persisted. One look at the Blue Valley School District’s literature curriculum nearly brings Hobbs to tears. “Our seniors only have to read Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis, and Albert Camus’ The Stranger, write a term paper, and listen up in class, and they have an A in an Advanced Placement Literature class. It disgusts me.” The same applies in math, civics, psychology, and most science classes, all of which rarely make it through the entire curriculum, and even less of the text book.

Another uncomforting notion comes when we see that this is only one example in a vast pool of examples. What will it take to get students reading Voltaire and Joyce once more? When will students leave high school knowing the practical functions of trigonometry and calculus? We certainly haven’t had a drought in the way of tragedy.

Perhaps another Cold War might do the trick.