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Old 05-17-2017, 02:09 PM
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Joe Wooten Joe Wooten is offline
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Join Date: Aug 2010
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I used to do my kid's elementary school 6th, 7th and 8th grade classes science class rocket shoots for about 11 years, the last time in 2010. The then science teacher retired that year and the new one had absolutely no interest in doing rockets.

For the first three years, I got Alphas for them to build, then as you noted, the building skills started falling off, so after that I used Alpha III's or the Quest Bright Hawks. All launched on A8-3/5 engines. After the first time I did the same on motor prep to reduce misfires. I also had the measure the altitude using triangulation and tried to show them how much higher you could go if you were careful building the rocket by launching one I had built. I would take an hour a day off work to go in and teach them about rocketry for two weeks prior to launch and supervise the building. It was a lot of fun, and I made a few converts, some who are still flying rockets.

I do the same for the local Scout troop for the Space Exploration MB. I still make them do the original Alpha, but it now takes longer to get it built. I started noticing the lack of fine motor control in their hands about 2008 when the new scouts were so clumsy with knives and knots. The reason why finally hit me later that year as I had the boys sign a "Thank You" card for a generous sponsor. ALL the new kids could not sign their name in cursive, all of them did their names in block printing. ALL of them.

I asked one why he did not sign it in cursive and he asked me "What is cursive writing?".

Without the training in cursive writing, most of the kids had lousy fine motor control in their fingers. The only ones, very few, who did were ones whose parents made them practice cursive writing and learn to use tools. I alter asked one Mom who was an elementary school teacher about this, and she told me they stopped teaching cursive writing as the geniuses running the schools considered it archaic and unnecessary. These morons were the same ones who whined about what they called the "Drill and Kill" approach to learning. They also did not make them learn mental arithmetic, memorizing the multiplication tables, etc.

This was the local public schools in Illinoisy. Now the Catholic/private ones are almost as bad due to pressure from the state educrats and new college trained teachers.
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