Instead of the mind numbing content presented in our classrooms by teachers who are often hamstrung in how and what they teach (or prevented from teaching), why can’t we have more teachers like this who are told, as Hunter was when he asked as a new teacher what he should do, “What do you want to do?” and be allowed to do it. Yeah, not an effective way to create slaves and drones, but imagine what a country we’d have if every student had only this particular class when they were young.
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Because TEACH TO TEST
is why
@#1 Teaching to test is easiest way out for bad teachers. Tests are crucial but good teachers will make kids understand and develop abilities which than can be used to do tests the way it should be done, not by specific preparation. Tests are not a problem. Lazy teachers who pick easy way out are.
Now, with experience in very different systems of education I can say with certainty that American education problem is not in testing or creativity. It is in developing abilities. Those can’t be developed by stoking creativity alone or teaching for tests. No matter how unpopular and boring, drill-like teaching of basic abilities is a must. Than and only than there is use for all that creativity and feel-good angle US system of education blindly sticks to.
By the end of first grade child must know multiplication table. Not because we must do multiplication in our minds but because that drill creates abilities in their brains related to understanding math and solving problems. Memorization of history and whole books of literature is not there for literature or facts one can now find on the Internet. It trains memory. If by 8th grade kid have learned how to memorize complete 100+ pages novel in 2 weeks, that kid has fully functional memory and does not need crutches when learning other stuff (or problem remembering many random long passwords we all use today). And so on,…
Present education system in US creates artists. Artists do not design or build cars, bridges,… or operate on people. They don’t even earn easy money arguing with others in front of the Judge. They are creative cripples. Able to imagine galore but not able to do much.
Four words that fucked the education system. No Child Left Behind.
Board games are fun and interesting way to teach problem solving skills. I’m sure these students have learned a lot from this game, but to be proud about how they’ve solved various real life issues within a game that has had all of the complexities abstracted away and no real stakes is a bit much. I will say that the example of the use of a small conflict to prevent a larger one is an interesting lesson learned. The pooling of money to give to the poor country just to meet an arbitrary winning condition is less impressive.
#4, our education system was fucked long before Bush 2 became president.
#7 Maybe, but at least when I graduated in the late 70’s I was able to read and do mathematical calculations without a calculator. A skill that’s a problem for many graduates today. Try teaching dimensional analysis for technical work to students who think plugging numbers into a formula they are given is algebra.
#4 The Main problem with the education system is the teacher’s union and the state’s monopoly on it. Voucher’s would be a big help and let parents choice how their kids are taught.
Under current system bad teachers cannot be fired. And if you cut budgets it is the newest teachers that get fired, not the old bad ones.
#3… wow. I feel like an idiot. I didn’t know my times tables by the time I left the first grade. Hell, I didn’t even know what a times table was. And I consider myself pretty smart. I love math and took AP math in high school.
Sorry… but trying to get a 6-7 year old to memorize the times-table is asking too much. A 9 year old, perhaps.
Interesting how the OP turned what is a wonderfully positive counter example to the problems facing the regimented world of contemporary eduction into “why our education system sucks”. Uncle Dave, I recommend you watch the video again and listen to the stories told through the words of 4th graders and maybe learn a more constructive perspective to the problems we all face today.
Education started going downhill when the hippies of the 60’s decided that they could be more effective in creating change by indoctrinating young minds as teachers and controlling the curriculum. This started being felt in the 70’s.
It hill steepened when Carter created the Education Department, which mandated that schools graduate a higher percentage of kids. Result – schools lowered the bar to graduate (aka dumbed down the material) to meet the government quota rather than going to the extra effort to help more children clear the existing hurdle height.
It got worse when the hippies gained full control of many school districts and then insisted on all sorts of green and ideological indoctrination over useful education – such as political correctness and lots of revisionist history. They made sure that teachers had no discipline power in class (creating student disrespect) and taught the kids to think far too highly of themselves sans reason with mindless “self esteem” efforts.
Bill Clinton added insult to injury while violating the Constitution with Mandatory State Sponsored Slavery (aka, “mandatory volunteerism”) to get the high school diploma.
No child left behind may have made things worse, if possible, if my nephew’s course work is any indication. The 1st graders are now getting homework as SOP.
The Liberals bitch about Creationism in the classroom, but the education systems’ problems are much, much deeper than that, and they were largely created by the Liberals themselves.
As a former employee of the largest school district here in California. NCLB is being blamed for the problems in our schools. Let me tell you, the problems were there long before NCLB.
Almost 20 years in that District, the constant regime change in the district, every few years, imposing their educational agendas on the system. The teachers union and administrators union in their never-ending fight for power, board of education members using the district for seeking higher office, is part of what I saw destroying the classroom, not to mention teacher apathy.
I could go on longer, but I won’t, because it just makes me mad. I don’t think anyone is really interested.
Please go on BBBC. Were you a teacher?
No, I was a IT person, spent many hours in the classrooms working on systems and the front offices and central offices. Many of my friends and coworkers were teachers and administrators. Spent plenty of time working with and kids, teachers and other employees hearing them gripe about the district. Not to mention, first hand conversations and observations. There are good teachers in the system. Employee apathy is horrible, because those who choose to speak out, get pushed out, or beat down.
The last school I was assigned to, before I retired, had a school site council, which was nothing but a “good ol boys” club, a vocal minority running rough-shod over the other teachers and employees, they loved to use the students to manipulate the principal.
Principal tried to reign them in, and was forced out after only one year on the job.
I think the problem is complicated. For example, I have about six-seven textbooks on a very specific topic. Two of those books are understandable without a very significant time investment, one written by a Boeing engineer who took the time to go step by step, and cut the crap that many authors seem to use to make themselves appear smart.
Learning is difficult, even when it is easy.
Jerry Pournelle’s wife wrote a phonics reading computer program that is suppose to teach “anyone” to read.
Specific tools for a specific job. Just like the book I mentioned.
Both #1 and #14 are right.
My friend has 3 kids in school here in CA and all they do is test prep, test prep, test prep. If we ask them a question that’s not on the test, but grade appropriate (for us when we were in the same grade in the 80’s) they blank out with jaws open and can’t answer for the life of them. They’re not instructed on how to actually do proper math, science, or historical research on their own.
His eldest son had a teacher last quarter that decided to go off script for 1 day and actually teach his class how to actually do historical research and not be hamstrung by taboo dogma or political spin (the winner writes the history books, never mind the facts). That teacher was fired at the end of the quarter.
#3 Exactly right.
What good is higher reasoning if you are ignorant in basic skills?
#13
US education is overly decentralized, and that has roots that predate the modern political era you’re talking about.
The Department of Education is a good thing. Overly powerful semi-political local school executives are the problem.
I’m torn. Nothing is more important than our kiddies. Nothing is more important to our kiddies than the best education we can provide for them appropriate to each child: academic, scientific, social, trades. I think we all agree that all kiddies need the basics? Reading, Writing, Arithmetic but how much of what until the education becomes individualized if at all? I don’t recall anything specific I learned in grade school which in my case did include algebra. I forget most of it but recognize an algebra problem when I’m up against it and that a math guy could be consulted to apply and solve it. Would I know that if I was taught only to plug numbers into a calculator? I don’t know. Is that what schools really do? I don’t know that either.
In high school there were 3 tracks: college prep, trades, left over. Within those tracks things were pretty rote but I still remember the math, history, creative writing. I took a shop class in summer school just for the fun while some of my friends in that track were rebuilding car engines. I envied them.
Creative individualization came only in sophomore year in college after the intro classes were done.
At the end of 16 years formal education you had one guy who could read and think. THEN I was qualified to start thinking what I wanted to do when I grew up. Ha, ha. Individually, I was a late bloomer. Always stunned by those types who knew what they wanted to do from a very early age and pursued it.
My parents helped. Not much, but they also did not interfere. I was healthy, that helped. I was well fed. Mom was home when I got home. No gangs or guns on the way to school. Books and magazines at home. Idyllic actually.
Its a mix of things. Who even really knows what the right thing to do is. I know what “system” worked for me, but that already admits that it wasn’t for most people.
“Teaching to a test.”===makes my skin crawl just by mentioning it. I’ll bet it works for some percentage though. It would have never worked for me. The system creates winners and losers by its very design.
Taxed Enough Already Dude said “Privatize Education, give them the freedom to pick their own text books so they can leave behind useless and inaccurate progressive materials.”
Because before public education in this country, only about 20 percent of the population could read and write, and 11 year olds were sent to work in factories. But hey, I forget the new motto for America is “everyone else go fuck themselves.”
#22 You’ll be happy to learn that in America, the unions are the reason kids now toil in schools rather than factories, and that for generations, a woman’s place was in the home rather than the work force.
Not for any altruistic reasons, though. The unions wanted to eliminate cheap labor (i.e., children and women) from the work force, and that was the way they came up with.
BTW, your 20% literacy figure sounds like BS. Being able to read the Bible was a major motivating issue for most outside the South – only the immigrants, rednecks (culture), and recently freed slaves had any major literacy issues. News papers and the like wouldn’t have begun to flourish like they did if literacy was only 20%.
#10, Under current system bad teachers cannot be fired. And if you cut budgets it is the newest teachers that get fired, not the old bad ones.
Bingo. Due to budget constraints, the local school board just voted to non-renew all probationary contracts. i.e., the new teachers without tenure — the ones with the new ideas.
I know one probationary teacher who was fired a couple of years ago because he “went off the reservation.” He walked across the street to a charter school, where his ideas were most welcome, and recently became a Teacher of the Year for his unorthodox methods. Turns out the methods were very similar to the speaker’s in the video — Let the kids teach you how to teach them.
I wish my kids had had a teacher like that. Would have saved a lot of reteaching at the dinner table. I can’t believe my kids were never taught the correct way to do an Algebra problem. I practically had to reteach my kids the entire curriculum.
My youngest is now in a charter school. His grades aren’t where I would like them, but I feel he is getting a better education than at the local public school. I can live with that.
Aren’t “new ideas” counterproductive/subversive to the “teach the test” mantra? I think it is.
#23 Charles Harding, president of Merchants Woolen Company, said of child labor laws: “There is a certain class of labor in mills where there is not as much muscular exercise required as a child would put forth in play, and a child can do it about as well as a grown person…There is such thing as too much education for working people sometimes. I have seen cases where young people are spoiled for labor by…too much refinement.”
http://snolabor.org/pages/cartoon.htm
The industrial age, children and women were particularly valuable because their small hands would fit into the machinery. If you were an apprentice, you might not be treated well, but your “employer” had a substancial financial and time investment in you, and he was unlikely to let you die or be mangled.
If you know of quotes from union leaders saying that the only reason they supported child labor laws was because it made higher wages for other workers, I’m all ears. But I can find a bunch from factory owners saying their work builds “moral fiber.”
“Being able to read the Bible was a major motivating issue for most outside the South – only the immigrants, rednecks (culture), and recently freed slaves had any major literacy issues. ”
So, if you were an immigrant, a redneck (aka poor farmer?), a black or something other than a Christian, you got a crappy education. But for a (Christian) God-fearing, white kids from a middle to upper class family, man, the sky was the limit.
I’m sorry. I lost my train of thought… weren’t we talking about how private educate will only provide education for a portion of the population and not everyone?
Taxed Enough Already Dud:
Who is this Rush Limbaugh you speak of? The one that is a graduate of Missouri Central High School and a product of public education? He also came from a family of lawyers. His family tried to send him to a pubic college, he just flunked out.
If you want to fight about Higher Ed, go ahead… but I’m talking about providing a free public education. I would argue that the heyday of America was in the last century (1900’s) and partially (but not entirely) that is because we mandated an education for everyone.
I am taking the unpopular position that public education is doing a darn good job, and a spectacular job given the political constraints it has to live under. But there are broken schools we need to fix, and figure out how to bring the educational ideas from charter schools (which are not always better, BTW) to everyone.
I’m sorry if you feel your little Johnny or Jane is not being treated fairly, or being taught a Godless liberal agenda or is too smart to mingle with meager minds, but, you know, that is why you are the parent. Education doesn’t stop with public schools, it starts with it.
There are at least 3 groups directly involved in the education system:
The Teachers
The Students
The Parents
The Parents seem to be least accountable. Even the best teacher is faced with a classroom of 30 students, where 15 don’t want to be there and 2 are actively fighting/selling drugs and the teacher can do nothing about it.
It seems hopeless trying to the get the parents of the 15 to become involved and make sure their kids are behaving.
So, instead, a modest proposal: legalize marijuana. The 15 students who don’t want to be there will stay at home, stoned with their parents. The drugs dealers will be out supplying their clients. That leaves 15 interested students with a class size that the motivated teacher can manage.
The unmotivated teacher will be blazing-up in the teacher’s lounge.
Hyph3n,
thank you for building a straw man argument around part of what I wrote and completely ignoring a key part of what I wrote.
If you had had any decent history lessons, you would have known that many kids a century ago were taught how to read and write at home by their parents since education wasn’t public or they were too far away from a school. Even people who were raised in log cabins in the woods got that sort of literacy education (remember Abe Lincoln?). Again, for protestants, being able to read the Bible was a Big Deal to them since they didn’t rely on priests as go betweens between God and themselves. Thus being able to read the Bible was very important to them.
As for “redneck”, that denotes a worldview more than anything else and essentially boils out to “live for the day, day by day” and “don’t do more than you have to to get by”. A worldview that came from the colonists that settled a good chunk of the South. If you had ever read “Black Rednecks, White Liberals” by Thomas Sowell, you’d know the culture came from a part of Britain where “book learning” wasn’t valued at the time of the emigration and that life at that place and time was so chancy, planning for the future often didn’t pay off. As such, redneck culture didn’t place an emphasis on literacy.
As for all the business owners you mention extolling the virtues of child labor, I specified Union Leaders, not Business Owners.
My source for that? It was either a History Channel documentary or a local community college UHF channel history series called “The Western Tradition”. It’s been quite a while since I saw it. I must admit it was a very clever marketing ploy by the unions at the time, since it held for a century or so for the women and still holds for the kids. The only marketing ploy that successful since then was clothing Santa in Coca Cola’s company colors…
#25 “bring back child labor, and the factories that employed them.”
Maybe we could have summer ‘work abroad’ programs in Shenzen.
#24 “those poorly educated made this country #1 in everything good…”
So maybe conservatism is on the right track, is that you’re saying?
#30 You’re leaving out the two most important groups: school boards and teachers unions. This is NOT a political observation, but rather a structural one. I think teachers unions are troubling, but school boards are totally useless. The combination is corrosive.
Other countries do it differently, and with better results.
Its because people, that’s me and you, don’t understand that education is rote memorization for 15 years until you have learned enough to challenge the establishment.
Before then, your contributions are not required.
Until you do a master’s thesis, gag this down and puke it back.
What you may do is develop your own ideas on your own and make them the basis for your master’s thesis.
ah..the power of a deadline
Thank you all for your considered opinions and your thoughtful comments. This video and these comments bring hope to this old soul who has seen so much in our society going downhill ever since the feds decided to basicallly destroy the family unit and to take God out of everything, especially our classrooms. Other than his blaming the Republicans for EVERYTHING and his turning people off with his name-calling, I even enjoy Bobo’s comments as of late. That’s REALLY saying something. So thank you everyone for caring. It really does this old heart good.