The Brain Games
March 14th 2008 01:40
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Fifty-four teams competed over the weekend in 10 events ranging from art, math, and music to speeches, interviews and essays. Each team includes up to nine members representing three grade-point average (GPA) levels A, B and C students.
Known as the Academic Decathlon this took place in Sacramento.
So who needs the Olympics, but I don't think I would have liked to have taken part though, things have changed so much since I went to school, I would have bombed out in art, music and essays, I feel sure, I really like only the pure Academics such as Maths, Science, Languages with English coming a poor second and art and music having never got on the list.
I'm sure those figures were skewed in view of the extra curricula activities available to so many now and dare I say it the softening of formal schooling.
And just to throw in a word about maths, not that we could expect higher maths from everyone, do we excuse the dyslexic from formal schooling, no we don't, so should we excuse the maths incapable from maths, the answer, in my opinion is an unequivocal NO.
Four years of maths, would mean four years of easy maths and some do take four years to learn even the easy stuff.
Better teaching and more competent teachers would go half way to solving the problem.
Education is all about developing the brain, not letting it off, and with respect to languages English is mandatory for many whether their first language or not.
The easy excuse, is not the definitive answer.
Schooling was meant to require some effort, or at least that's how it was when I went to school.
Compulsory not optional was the name of the game. More education means more choices and more opportunities and the best place to start is at school.
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