Word: problems
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Dates: during 1980-1980
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...ambitious modernization drive. What clearly worries Peking is the fact that, in a country where most people still lead poor, austere lives, abuses of power have a generally demoralizing effect. Admits one Chinese journalist in Peking: "It has taken us a long time to realize how deep this problem...
...title suggests, the fascination is in the hunt, in the search for solutions. Problem: a small tribe in New Guinea, the Fore, was threatened with extinction. For unknown reasons, most of its women were being attacked by a nerve disease that began in giggles and ended in death. Dr. D. Carleton Gajdusek, an American epidemiologist, arrived in 1957 and investigated. He gave the victims every medicine on the shelves. He checked the water in the streams, the soil, even the ashes in the cooking fires. Finally, after months of inquiry, he discovered that when someone died, the Fore buried...
...tangle of teaching troubles is too complex to be easily unraveled. But one problem whose solution seems fairly straightforward is the matter of illiterate and uninformed teachers. Competency tests can-and should-be administered to screen out teachers, old as well as novice, who lack basic skills. Such screening would benefit pupils, but it would also put pressure on marginal colleges to flunk substandard students bound for a career in teaching. Indiana University Education Professor David Clark asks rhetorically: "Is it more important to make it easy for kids to reach professional level, or to have good teachers?" Pressure...
...Paul Copperman in The Literacy Hoax: "The stage was set for an academic tragedy of historic proportions as the nation's high school faculty, about half of whom were young and immature, prepared to meet the largest generation of high school students in American history." To compound the problem, many teachers had been radicalized by the 1960s. They suspected that competition was immoral, grades undemocratic, and promotion based on merit and measurable accomplishment a likely way to discriminate against minorities and the poor. Ever since the mid-1960s, the average achievement of high school graduates has gone steadily downhill...
...conference on teacher burnout was held in New York City. Surprisingly, the syndrome seems nearly as common in small towns and well-off suburbs as in big cities. The National Education Association has already held more than 100 local workshops round the country to help teachers cope with the problem, which University of California Social Psychologist Ayala Pines defines as "physical, emotional and attitudinal exhaustion." Last March, Stress Consultant Marian Leibowitz held a burnout seminar in Edwardsville, Ill. (pop. 11,982). It drew a paying audience of 250 to a hall big enough for only...