Texas school board changing the curriculum

[Gorgon]

Ohh and teaching kids critical tools rather than teaching them to regurgitate from a textbook for the purpose of an exam goes without saying.

[Oblarg]

Ohh and teaching kids critical tools rather than teaching them to regurgitate from a textbook for the purpose of an exam goes without saying.

 

This will likely never happen.

 

I really don't have much faith in our public school system. Unless it's completely reworked, it will continue to be awful.

[Hurlshort]

Ohh and teaching kids critical tools rather than teaching them to regurgitate from a textbook for the purpose of an exam goes without saying.

 

This will likely never happen.

 

I really don't have much faith in our public school system. Unless it's completely reworked, it will continue to be awful.

 

This is always an odd statement from the perspective of a public school teacher. Probably because I have public school success stories every year, and I have parents going to great lengths to get their children into the US so they can attend our schools. The system is far from perfect, but it is a gigantic and unique one and it has served many people quite well.

[Calax]

Science in particular is an utterly different field where "fair" is not used. And I'm specifically using that example because that example is exactly what people who say "Teach the controversy!" are trying to say. Evolution is a theory, in science a theory is a term denoting the underpinnings of a particular field (germ theory, gravitational theory, evolutionary theory, nuclear theory). Also, science is about what you can see and experiment on to get results. "Teaching the controversy" is trying to put what isn't science into science, and in order to refute the idiocy that is ID you have to go REALLY deep into the biology and anthropological fields.

Uh huh. If you really believe there is no controversy within the scientific community, I think it's pretty pointless to continue discussing this issue. Controversy is essential to science, as it's the engine driving its continuous self-renewal, be it to reinforce existing theories, expand, or discard them. I was taught about things like spontaneous generation and the luminiferous aether in my science classes, when I was like 14, btw. Where would you suggest these things be taught, "Stuff That Is Not Science 101"?

 

I'm not going to suggest that pseudoscientific crap should be taught as a valid alternative, but being able to examine alternatives that may lie outside the scope of science where science itself still can't provide a reasonably complete answer isn't going to turn kids into mindless zealots.

I wasn't attacking science curriculum in general, I was mainly raging on the ID schtick. Which is why I kept using it as an example. There is a necessity to constantly question the basics, otherwise we wouldn't have things like the recent hypothosis that disconnects Space and Time from eachother (unlike what is currently thought to be true, that space and time are inextricably linked). I do think that there are some controversies within the scientific community that it might be ok to bring up, but you can't go into detail because the students in general would just kinda get that dull stare that we all have when we're bored out of our minds and off in la la land. I mean what kid wants to see the mathmatical formula that postulates the connection in space/time.

[Oblarg]

Ohh and teaching kids critical tools rather than teaching them to regurgitate from a textbook for the purpose of an exam goes without saying.

 

This will likely never happen.

 

I really don't have much faith in our public school system. Unless it's completely reworked, it will continue to be awful.

 

This is always an odd statement from the perspective of a public school teacher. Probably because I have public school success stories every year, and I have parents going to great lengths to get their children into the US so they can attend our schools. The system is far from perfect, but it is a gigantic and unique one and it has served many people quite well.

 

As someone who relatively recently was in the public school system, I feel obligated to rant.

 

 

The quality of an educational system cannot be measured by examining the best performing students. Smart students from well-off families will perform well, regardless of the quality of the educational system, because of the comparatively immense amount of support they have from their families. Thus, the people whom the system has "served well" most likely would be well served under any system.

 

American public school curriculum has several fatal flaws that severely hinder its ability to serve the students.

 

Students need to be in different classes based on their academic strengths and weaknesses from a much earlier point, and these classes have to be exclusive to those students who have the talent to be in the class. Any attempt at tracking students based on their academic talents is crushed in our educational system because the parents have too much sway over the system - if a parent complains enough, his kid will be placed in a higher level class. This is not smart design, and cheapens the educational experience for everyone in the system.

 

And, for the above to work, schools need to be able to identify the academic strengths and weaknesses of the individual students. This is a lot more complicated than it initially seems.

 

The obvious method of identifying a student's academic strengths would be to look at his grades. However, currently grading is not at all indicative of mastery of the subject - it measures work habits. In fact, if anything, grades become a worse measure of a student's aptitude of the subject if a student is better at that subject, because the practice work which makes up a significant portion of the grade loses importance if the student understands the material, and thus the student is less likely to do the work. In fact, grading policies usually aren't even clearly defined - much of the grading is dependent on the teacher, and thus the accuracy of grades varies greatly from teacher to teacher.

 

Test grades are a better method, but test design is a challenging problem and current standardized tests are not particularly effective. Current multiple choice tests are great for measuring if a student is capable of answering a problem, but terrible for measuring whether or not a student actually understands what he is doing. The latter is what is important in determining which class a student should be in, not the former

 

Similarly, class design needs to be focused on the ability level of the students in that class, and students should not be forced take classes in subjects in which they are not skilled and which they most likely will not need. The average student will not need math past algebra, yet it is almost universally required for all students to take at least precalculus.

 

English classes need to teach literacy before they teach literature. Grammar is almost completely absent from English curricula, yet students are expected to write essays and perform literary analysis. You can do neither without understanding how the English language works. Foreign language, as well, is almost impossible to learn without the framework of grammar.

 

I could go on, but I'm getting tired of typing. I'm very disappointed with our educational system.

[Hurlshort]

Actually, most schools are moving towards Standards based grading, at least in the K-5 grades. Middle Schools are starting to adopt it as well. It is fairly difficult to move away from the accepted letter grade systems, but it has been slowly happening over the last decade.

 

Standards based grading means you are graded on a number scale, depending on what your mastery of the subject is. It is also a lot harder to assess than traditional percentage based grades. So it eliminates the importance of busy work.

 

Obviously it is a much better indicator of skill, but there are some large flaws here. Say you have a PE class, and a student in that class never dresses out and never participates, except on the few assessment days. The student runs a fast mile or does a bunch of pull ups, but is only participating on about 5% of the year. With a standards based system, they would receive high marks in the class. But is this really a good preparation for the real world? I consider myself a successful person, and I will tell you that my success has a lot more to do with my work ethic than my skills. Will this student try to tell his boss that he only needs to come in one day a week because he can fulfill his job requirements in that time? I'm sure there are a couple jobs out there where that will fly, but not many.

 

As for your other complaints, it sounds like you have a problem with parents more than the schools. And I'm right there with you, schools are a product of the parent community. There are good and bad teachers on every campus in the US. The deciding factor in the quality of the education will always be the parent.

[Wrath of Dagon]

From your edit : 'in the opinion of some'. That's rather flimsy isn't it. In the opinion of some we have been secretly invaded by martians.

"In the opinion of some" refers to almost all agencies being compromised. That many were compromised isn't in question, as the examples show.

 

Edit: And the "some" they refer to are historians, not some random kooks.

Edited May 23, 2010 by Wrath of Dagon

[Irrelevant]

I agree with most of a Oblarg and Hurlshot have said about education, but I do think math is necessary because it taught me two things: 1. You will have to do useless/mindless tasks in order to get certain things done. 2. Even if you suck at something with enough time and practice you can become competent at it.

I do not think that work ethic can be taught in schools, that is simply up to the kid and to the parent(I mean, you can teach it, but as it is now,(good grades requiring a strong work ethic)there are still alot of people that dont pass))

Taking some lessons on why your going to school and what to do afterwards would certainly be usefull; Its odd to see people thinking about what do with their lives during college, not before.

[Humodour]

Mathematics is incredibly necessary. If it's common belief in America right now (am I getting the right vibe? kind of jumped in) that mathematics is not necessary, then you can say goodbye to superpower status within a few decades, regardless of anything the outside world does.

 

Certainly any education system without compulsory mathematics education would be a scary beast indeed.

 

Lack of compulsory linguistics and literary analysis subjects isn't much better, either...

[Walsingham]

I agree with most of a Oblarg and Hurlshot have said about education, but I do think math is necessary because it taught me two things: 1. You will have to do useless/mindless tasks in order to get certain things done. 2. Even if you suck at something with enough time and practice you can become competent at it.

 

100% with you on this. And I too hated maths at school.

[Hurlshort]

In my area, math is being pushed very hard, much harder than it was when I was a student.

[Irrelevant]

I don't know if it was this way with you, but the reason I hate math is because they start with a basic foundation, give you 5-10 questions on it and then the rest of the questions made a minor jump in logic which I would almost always fail at(I kind of get it now but it made it so frustrating)

[Wrath of Dagon]

Don't worry, the smart Indian guys will do all the math for you.

[Hurlshort]

My students have a funny, if slightly messed up way of defining the different math levels. The low math is white math, the mid level is Chinese math, and the advanced class is Indian Math.

[Calax]

My students have a funny, if slightly messed up way of defining the different math levels. The low math is white math, the mid level is Chinese math, and the advanced class is Indian Math.

I wonder what they'd make of stuff that I'm gonna learn in the course of my physics studies.

 

I get the feeling

"That's not math, that's foreign language!"