What ever happened to studying the old fashioned way?

[GaryR]

They don't teach courses the way you or I learned them when we were in school, nor do kids have formalized study habits. When you or I were in school, study meant go to a quiet place with no distractions, a good reading light, and reading the assignment. Today, there are far too many distractions. The computer, the Game Boy, television, cell phones, text messages every 2 minutes, loud music, the Ipod, all of these things make clear thinking impossible. Additionally, they don't teach any courses today that require learning critical thinking. Gone are the hard math and science courses, replaced by learning feel-good nonsense, or why Mary has 2 mothers, or why we should waste 1 second worrying about drowning Polar Bears, or why we must worry about a 0.1 degree rise (or fall, I forget now) of global temperatures over 100 years, or the latest Obama song. I heard a news article on the radio this morning where we were dropping precipitously in math and science in this country. I can't remember the exact numbers off the top of my head, but it was something like 22nd in the world in math, and 27th in science, something like that. These are pathetic statistics. If you go over to the Mathematics Yahoo Answers board, you'll see kids in there every single night, posting their homework for others to solve for them. They can't even work the simplest math problems, stuff you studied the first week in Algebra I. I see kids posting questions on the Geography board asking such innane homework questions as, "which ocean are the Hawaiian Islands located?" They are too damned lazy to even open an atlas and look up the name of the ocean; they'd rather post it online for someone else to do their homework. If we continue this trend, we will deteriorate down to about 100th in the world in math and science without any difficulty at all. Thank you, No Child Left Behind ("no child succeeds"), and teacher's unions (the most incompetent teachers must be retained). And, parents need to wake up quickly and start demanding performance from their little darlings, and quit worrying about making them "feel good." They don't need Ipods; they need their butts kicked for being lazy.