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07.25.05 || Topics of InterestIn my daily commute I have lots of time to myself to ponder worldly happenings. An assistant to get me thinking about what is going around me is the radio. With morning talk radio discussing news topics, political views, and all the other daily jargon it makes one think. One of the ones that struck me was the news that they are trying to make it to where schools cannot give students an F anymore. They say this is demoralizing, or demeaning, and that they must give the student a “deferred success”. Basically they are saying that every student doesn’t learn a topic or subject the first time, so they don’t want to say that they ‘failed’. When in fact they could possibly learn it the second time, and saying someone failed hurts their self esteem, so they would have deferred success. I think this is just more political correctness that is getting way overboard. It’s similar to the topic that in kid’s baseball there is no winner, that way there isn’t a loser.
This political correctness is out of hand and hurting us as a country, not only in the school system, but also in war. There is no political correctness when it comes to terrorists, yet our country thinks we can ‘talk it out’. That’s a bunch of crap, its kill or be killed, therefore we must kill first, simple as that. Our school system is only going downhill, we aren’t trying to challenge kids to learn, we’re just basically patting them on the back for not doing a thing. If there is no winner in the baseball game, you have nothing to play for. Sorry if your kid loses, but it should inspire the losers to work harder, not complain more.
Alright enough about that topic, another topic far from the previous is what is going on with the Chicago land radio stations? It seems like we can’t have any more stations that play a certain genre of music, they must play ‘everything’. The first one I found was the previous Spanish station, previously Energy 92.7 & 92.5, and now “The Nine” with their format as “We Play Everything”. They have 92.7, 92.5, and 99.9 and play like they say, everything. From oldies to new rock, pretty much all over the map.
The next instance I heard of this was the rock/alternative station 101.1, Q101. Now they are “On Shuffle” saying that they play everything alternative, now including older stuff and also some of what I would consider not so rock. It seems they are following the trend that radio stations cannot play just the ‘alternative’ genre they must play everything.
The latest one I heard of is 104.3, Oldies 104.3. I can’t say I really listened to them before, but I thought they played more oldies. I've found that they played 60’s and 70’s, and people are talking that they miss that, and now they are “Jack 104.3”, “Playing What We Want”.
The moral here is where is commercial radio going? Is there not going to be anymore genre radio stations? There must be someone somewhere with more knowledge than me that is telling these stations to change format if they want to keep their audience in Chicago, but I would rather have genre stations, because I don’t want to go from System of a Down to John Mayer back to back.
Comments
No F's? That's weak. Encouragement is important, sure, but children also need to know that there are penalties for poor work.
Then again, our society is constantly evolving, so maybe this is what the next generation needs. I'm no education expert, so I don't know what F's do to kids. I do know that personally if I ever got an F it would motivate me to try as hard as I could to never let it happen again.
But think about this... Years ago, when it was first made illegal in Illinois for teachers to physically discipline students by spanking them, some conservative parents were outraged. Nowadays the thought of a teacher ever doing that is nonexistant. So maybe in a few decades, a teacher giving a child an F will be practically a sin.
Posted by: Pete at July 26, 2005 12:26 AM
"They" is too general, Phil. Was this a single PTA/O, a school district, a state, etc? I wouldn't worry about it too much. Having heard about it nowhere else, I'm guessing this was just sensationalist bs to provoke, and will likely fall by the wayside.
Besides, failure, no matter what you call it, is still failure. If a kid is getting "less than satisfactory" grades, then it'll be up to the parents and kid to do something about it if they want improvement. In my mind, it'll be about whether the kid wants to improve themself or not, and if not, they'll be found out at some point down the line anyway.
Posted by: Dann at August 2, 2005 12:31 AM
yea, sorry, I said 'they' because I don't know who the radio was talking about when I heard it. The radio may have said who their info was coming from, or who was involved, but I don't remember what was said. I was just stating the idea of F's leaving the school system.
Posted by: BMF at August 2, 2005 02:19 PM