河北大学研一英语期末考试第一单元

Unit one Education  1.A When I was in college I had an English major and for a while I considered going into teaching. While I was exploring the possibility of becoming a teacher, I did a lot of thinking about the way that the education system in the United States is run. And I disagree with a lot of the ways that things seem to happen and have happened for a long time in our educational system. Uh … people don’t seem to recognize various kinds of intelligence; they seem to just want to give standardized tests and peg you for what you are capable of very early on your education. I’ve always felt that a lot of classes that you’re forced to take in high school are not really geared towards what you are going to be doing. There’s very little emphasis on your own special interests. Uh … everybody’s sort of treated like they’re the same person. Everything is very generalized. There’s a lot of uh … there’s a lot of pressure on students to be as well-rounded as possible. I think being well-rounded isn’t really possible because it becomes impossible to develop any one part of yourself um … to any great degree. And as a result people can’t get into good colleges if they, yaknow, haven’t, yaknow, scored the ... the right thing on the math section of SAT, even if they are brilliant writers, and vice versa. You know, um … people just really are not given a chance, I think, in a lot of cases. Another thing that really disturbs me is the way that students are separated from each other. I got involved with vocational education, uh … which means that the kids go out to a technical or trade school for part of the week, and then they come back to the home school for the other part of the week and they take their academic classes. However, those kids are kept separate from the rest of the school almost as if they’re below them. There’s a lot of stratification. Um … at any rate I feel that the kids are very aware of the way that they’re perceived by the educators, by their teachers and, yaknow, by their peers. And I think that it ... it causes them to act in a way that ... is ... not really optimal. And that’s pretty sad to me. I actually had kids tell me when I was teaching them, “yaknow, we’re the just bad class, we ... yaknow, it’s not that we have a problem with you personally, yaknow, we are just bad, we are bad kids” because pretty much that was what they felt they were. And yaknow, their classes were very limiting, uh the teachers never try to do anything creative with those classes. I think that many of the kids in that class were intelligent, but never actually realized their potential because of the way they were tracked very early on their education. 1.B Margaret Warner:Mr. Unz. Why do you believe that bilingual education should be scrapped? Ron Unz: Well, the overwhelming practical evidence is that bilingual education has failed on every large scale case that’s been tried in the United States, in particular in California. The origins of this initiative was the case last year of a lot of immigrant Latino parents in downtown LA, who had to begin a public boycott of their local elementary school to try to force the school to give their children the right to be taught English, which the school was denying. And I think that really opened my eyes to the current state of the program in California, where the statistics are dreadful. Margaret Warner: Mr. Lyons. Janies Lyons: It is not the case that bilingual education is failing children. There are poor bilingual education programs, just as there are poor programs of every type in our schools today. But bilingual education has made it possible for children to have continuous development in their native language, while they're in the process of learning English, something that doesn't hap pen overnight, and it’s made it possible for children to learn math and science at a rate equal to English-speaking children while they’re in the process of acquiring English. Margaret Warner: Mr. Unz, what about that point — for these children who don't speakEnglish well they will fall behind in the basic subjects if they can't be taught those in Spanish, or whatever language? I shouldn’t say just Spanish, but whatever their family’s language is. Ron Unz: That’s a very reasonable point. And to the extent that we’re talking about older children. 14 or 15 year olds who come to the United States, don't know any English and are put in the public schools I think a very reasonable case can be made for bilingual education. I don’t know if it’s correct, but at least you can make a case for it. But most of the children we're talking about enter California or America public schools when they’re five or six or seven. At the age of five years old, the only academic subjects a child is really doing is drawing with crayons or cutting and, you know, with paper and that type of thing. And at that age children can learn another language so quickly and easily that the only reasonable thing to do is to put them in a program where they're taught English as rapidly as possible and then put into the mainstream classes with the other children so they can move forward academically. Margaret Warner: There is something to that point, isn’t there, Mr. Lyons, that very youngchildren do absorb languages very quickly? James Lyons: They absorb certain facets of language very quickly. They learn to speak in an unaccented form like a native English speaker. But the research shows that actually adults are much more efficient and quicker language learners than children because they're working from a broader linguistic base, a greater conceptual base. I really take objection to what Mr. Unz is saying that children at the age of five, six, and seven are only coloring and cutting out paper. That isn't going to lead to the high standards. 2.A Interviewer: Professor Gardner, what did you find in your studies to be the biggest difference between arts education in the United States and arts education in China? What struck you most, then?