Re: [Phys-l] Students' READING abilities

["John Clement" <clement@hal-pc.org>]

Hmm, these statements below conflict.  One does not know what other factors
were at work in the parochial school, or the home life.  Also what factors
were at work in the public schools or their home life.  One can find
anecdotal evidence to support all kinds of conjectures.  Actual studies work
much better.  The large scale metastudy found that private schools in
general produce better output because they have better input, and when you
correct for SES, private schools in general do no better than public
schools.  Now of course we have NO data or evidence for Catholic schools in
previous eras.  Shayer & Adey found the same thing in England.  Output could
be predicted by input and all of the schools they studied fell on the same
line.  This is something that people simply do not want to believe.
Anecdotal evidence at best points toward an effect that might exist.

I went to a parochial school and was a failure, but flew in public school,
and went beyond the knowledge of my HS science teacher.  My children had bad
experiences in parochial school, but did much better in public school.  In
particular the parochial school could not handle LD children, and the
teachers kept on insisting my daughter do things that were impossible for
her.  She is dyslexic, ADD, and has poor fine motor control so her beautiful
writing takes 4x longer than everyone else.  My son is also ADD.  But with
our tutoring, and fighting for her rights, she is now a professional
chemist.  So here are some counter examples.

As to leading scientists being erudite outside of their fields remember the
Nobel Laureate who claimed vitamin C could cure all kinds of things.  But
the clinical evidence only supported that at most it might make some cold
symptoms less severe or more tolerable.  You venture outside of your
expertise at your own peril.

John M. Clement
Houston, TX

Statement 2:
>  	As physicists we should know better than to argue individual
>  cases in support of any general principles.

Statement 1:
> Hi all-
>  	I think that there is much truth to be learned from Bob's
> experience.
>  	Further evidence in support - leeading physicists are
> astonishingly erudite on many subjects outside of physics.
>  			Regards,
>  				Jack
>
> On Tue, 24 Feb 2009, LaMontagne, Bob wrote:
>
> > If students today have such difficulty reading, shouldn't our efforts be
> > directed at improving this important life skill rather than something
> > like physics which they probably won't use more than a couple of times
> > throughout their life?
> >
> > I am not being flip here. My grammar school education was in a small 4
> > room Catholic parochial school. Throughout the entire 8 years we never
> > had a lesson on science of any kind - never mind physics. But we did get
> > mind numbing hours of drill in reading, diagramming sentences,
> > arithmetic, elementary algebra, music, and (of course) Catechism. Some
> > of us ,like me, went on to public high school. Science and math there
> > came incredibly easy for us. Our group ran the science club, the ham
> > radio club, and two of us were Westinghouse Science Talent search state
> > winners. Our advantage was our strong reading and math skills. We
> > learned science - we weren't taught it.