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Learning doesn’t need to be fun, interactive

After reading Lana Yoo’s column (“Professors should explore new ways to engage students in lecture,” Jan. 30) I felt the need to advise readers not to readily buy into the latest platitudes such as “interactive style of teaching.”

I truly can’t stand it when teachers call on students to answer a question they have posed. It is immensely distractive to have to wait for another student to fumble around trying to come up with the right answer.

Who does this help? I want the information, clear and fast, from the professor. That’s why I’m here to begin with.

I also don’t need lecture to be fun as the article suggests. Not everything that is valuable in life is, or needs to be, fun.

Yoo doesn’t give students enough credit for being capable and responsible for engaging ourselves, and at the same time, she suggests that it is the responsibility of the teachers to keep students engaged.

I fear the day when professors ask students to please text message the correct answer to some question at hand in the name of improving “student-teacher interaction.”

I can just imagine the bruinwalk.com postings: “Best teacher ... totally interactive ... more fun than American Idol!!!”

Tobias Miller

Third-year, business economics

Money can’t buy a better school system

The Daily Bruin carried an article (“Mayor proposes national education plans,” Jan. 29) on Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s proposal to put $44 billion of federal taxes into a new government program that will fund primarily urban-area school districts that have already been shown to fail at preparing students for the rest of their lives.

As we have seen far too often, most of that money gets swallowed-up by school-district bureaucracy, and the funding that does get to classrooms often falls on deaf ears.

Money does not solve all the world’s problems. Low public-school funding is not the source of the education problem.

Think back to your elementary school days: When students did well in classes, chances were that their parents were actively involved in the children’s education.

They went to PTA meetings, they helped children with their homework, and they made sure their children were involved in after-school activities. I’ll wager that most of us here at UCLA had the privilege of parents who cared.

This is the source of the problem: Many parents are coming to take public education for granted, expecting the schools to take care of every aspect of their child’s education, and claiming that the school, not the parent, is failing when their child comes home with a bad report card.

So instead of directing $44 billion into school systems that have already shown themselves to be inept when it comes to preparing students for the future, take that money and create programs, information campaigns and groups to show parents how to help their children grow and learn.

Parents have a much greater interest in the success of their own children and can offer a much more personalized teaching method than a teacher who has to instruct 30 different students.

This is how a conservative solves problems. Just because we groan when we see more tax money going to school districts does not mean that we are uninterested in the education of our children.

In fact, we are so concerned about the futures of our young ones that we want to offer the best and most direct solution possible: We want to give parents the drive to get involved in their children’s education from birth.

It is time to stop having our government attack the symptoms and instead cure the disease itself. Show parents how to get involved in the education of their own children and all of that funding that gets put into public schools might actually start to do some good.

Jimmy Dunn

Third-year, astrophysics

Secretary, Bruin Republicans