Letters to the Editor

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