Examinator, you should have had your son try environmental science mate. They let you into those, if you can sigh your own name.

Gee, expecting to get into anything practical like electronics, wow.

Just where are they going to get people to teach that, China?

Conflicting demands have been placed on the
school system, ranging from teaching about
drugs and sex to correcting past social
injustices, and these new functions may well
interfere with the school's traditional tasks.

The quality of teaching is poor in many schools.
The average high school teacher earns less than
the average plumber, and the profession doesn't
attract the most able people. Overall, high
school graduates who intend to go into teaching
score far lower on Test scores than the average
college-bound student.

Fads and frills, that is new and inadequately
tested teaching fads, have disrupted the learning
process in the past. The introduction of the much
vaunted "new math," for example, was followed by a
sharp decline in math skills. The so called "open
classroom" with its various "learning centers,"
easily degenerated into a shambles.

Therefore its no surprise that any trendy,
elective curricula may leave many students short
on fundamentals. Exactly how to reverse this process
is not immediately obvious, for despite decades of
research, educators have achieved no real consensus
on how to improve academic performance - other than
to demand more work from students.

Perhaps if curricula were to be reformed in a
"back to basics" direction - with one national
curriculum for all, and towards a thorough grounding in
essential reading, writing, mathematical and science
skills, as well as improving teacher salaries and
requring teachers to be evaluated through periodic
tests of their skills and knowledge, things may
improve...

All four of us in the family have science qualifications.

BTW I said *micro* electronics ...I know they didn't have that in your day but it's big deal today. It's like electronics only well, more micro.

BTW he has quals in Vcat 2 and computer programing/project management.

No2 son has Quals in drafting (structural, stress, engineering)

No2 daughter is 4/5 of double degrees in science possibly masters.
(smart arse ...definitely her mother's genes, the smart bit are mine of course....boy am I gonna cop it now.

Eldest daughter is a high School teacher (her mother's fault:-) )

Some times your curmudgeonly attitudes are tediously out dated. You simply don't know what you're talking about.

Foxy
>>The introduction of the much vaunted "new math," <<
The mathematician Rolf Nevanlinna, liked to tell the following story: In the sixties he was invited to an American family where they had an eight year old daughter. When he asked her what they were learning in maths at school, she replied “empty sets”. And when he wanted to know what were empty sets, she explained “green cows”. This was apparently the only way an eight year old could understand a statement like “the set of green cows is empty”.

I usually agree 99% with what you write; this time it is 120% :-)).

Your right of course Exy, the OP for one of our esteemede SEQ universities environmental science courses last year was actually 16. Much higher, than 17, but still well below the average OP.

Mate, some of us go to school, learn a bit, then live with that, thinking we are very cleaver.

Some of us finish uni, say "is that really all", then go learn 5 times as much, in the real world.

If ever you have the misfortune to deal with the dill E science graduates at Water Resources, even you will agree with me. Some of these silly little girls should stay clear of the water. When you don't know which way is up, you could drown.

I was pretty impressed when those "scientists" at AIMS announced their momentous discovery. You know, about all coral releasing their spore simultaneously, one night. It was only 15 years after a professional reef fisherman, [who left school at 13], had told me all about it.

When I took a heat exchanger we were mass producing to the engineering department at QUT, to have its capacity certified, [it helps when exporting to Japan, to have a Uni letter head in there] they thought their test rig was broken. It had 14 times more heat transfer capacity than anything they had seen.

Yes, that's right, designed by a wheat farmer who left school at 15.

Get out of that uni mate, the real smarts are long gone, or never went there

Foxy, you are dead right, with your back to basics.

Two of my kids started school in a little 3 teacher school in the sticks. We had a very nice, but funny old duck teaching one & two.

She used all the old methods, perhaps because she didn't take to fads, or perhaps because she could not handle them.

It matters not, what matters is that those 2 flew through school, up to the start of senior high, on the grounding she gave them. Little effort was required of us.

The youngest, & smartest one, started in the big smoke, in a trendy school, with young, very bright, & bushy tailed teachers, applying all the latest theory, most diligently.

As it was a few months before we realised she was learning nothing, it took almost 2 years of home schooling, to get her up to where she was handling it, like the other two, & up to speed.