A Naysayer, Yet Again
I teach at a fabulous school. It's "college prep" in name, but in reality, it's just a relatively small school with generally hardworking kids. And the teachers are a little up in arms, because some of the kids have decided that college might not be for them.
Truth be told, I don't know if they're looking at dropout rate (which is still terribly high), overall cost (which is horrific), unpayable debt for graduates (which should be bigger news than it is), or if they're merely being lazy bones. But the fact is, I'm behind them in the idea of either postponing or deleting college.
El Borak's blog says it better than I ever could, but it comes down to this: "There is a problem with the "education is a path out of poverty" mindset... Education is a path out of poverty, but only because work is a path out of poverty. Education can make your work, and the products of your work, more valuable. But they only do so if the skills and knowledge you have are worth money to someone else in the first place."
In other words, a trade school cert in carpentry or an electrician's cert or a nurses' aide cert are just as valuable as a BA in anthropology, if not more so.
But that is heresy in my school. So, I quietly sit back and listen to the other teachers bemoan the lack of potential poets in our graduating class.
~~~~~
Meanwhile, have you ever wondered why Hawaii is there? I mean, it's a set of volcanic islands, true, but it is NOT on a plate boundary. And everything I learned about geology (which is not a whole lot) is, if not wrong, horribly incomplete.
I am not alone in this.
Plate tectonic theory is only 100 years old. Wegner proposed it to much laughter and ridicule. It wasn't majorly accepted until the 1950's. But it still misses whole scads of geologic features, like Hawaii. So, there's another theory out there which accounts for all of this extra "stuff" and it is beautiful. It totally makes sense - plate tectonics is horizontal motion of the mantle, this new theory embraces vertical motion of matter throughout the layers of the earth. It's summed up best in this picture:
And if you're interested, this is where the article explaining it resides. Enjoy!
Truth be told, I don't know if they're looking at dropout rate (which is still terribly high), overall cost (which is horrific), unpayable debt for graduates (which should be bigger news than it is), or if they're merely being lazy bones. But the fact is, I'm behind them in the idea of either postponing or deleting college.
El Borak's blog says it better than I ever could, but it comes down to this: "There is a problem with the "education is a path out of poverty" mindset... Education is a path out of poverty, but only because work is a path out of poverty. Education can make your work, and the products of your work, more valuable. But they only do so if the skills and knowledge you have are worth money to someone else in the first place."
In other words, a trade school cert in carpentry or an electrician's cert or a nurses' aide cert are just as valuable as a BA in anthropology, if not more so.
But that is heresy in my school. So, I quietly sit back and listen to the other teachers bemoan the lack of potential poets in our graduating class.
~~~~~
Meanwhile, have you ever wondered why Hawaii is there? I mean, it's a set of volcanic islands, true, but it is NOT on a plate boundary. And everything I learned about geology (which is not a whole lot) is, if not wrong, horribly incomplete.
I am not alone in this.
Plate tectonic theory is only 100 years old. Wegner proposed it to much laughter and ridicule. It wasn't majorly accepted until the 1950's. But it still misses whole scads of geologic features, like Hawaii. So, there's another theory out there which accounts for all of this extra "stuff" and it is beautiful. It totally makes sense - plate tectonics is horizontal motion of the mantle, this new theory embraces vertical motion of matter throughout the layers of the earth. It's summed up best in this picture:
And if you're interested, this is where the article explaining it resides. Enjoy!
posted by birdwoman | 8:51 AM
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