Obama Makes a Push To Add Time To the School Year 1073
N!NJA sends in a proposal that is sure to cause some discussion, especially among students and teachers. Obama and his education secretary say that American kids spend too little time in school, putting them at a disadvantage in comparison to other students around the globe. "'Now, I know longer school days and school years are not wildly popular ideas,' the president said earlier this year. 'Not with Malia and Sasha, not in my family, and probably not in yours. But the challenges of a new century demand more time in the classroom.' 'Our school calendar is based upon the agrarian economy and not too many of our kids are working the fields today,' Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in a recent interview with The Associated Press. ... 'Young people in other countries are going to school 25, 30 percent longer than our students here,' Duncan told the AP. 'I want to just level the playing field.' ... Kids in the US spend more hours in school (1,146 instructional hours per year) than do kids in the Asian countries that persistently outscore the US on math and science tests — Singapore (903), Taiwan (1,050), Japan (1,005) and Hong Kong (1,013). That is despite the fact that Taiwan, Japan and Hong Kong have longer school years (190 to 201 days) than does the U.S. (180 days)."
Waste MORE time!? (Score:4, Insightful)
Wrong solution (Score:2, Insightful)
Kids in the US spend more hours in school ... than do kids in the Asian countries that persistently outscore the US on math and science tests
Doesn't that mean that the problem is not how long US kids are in school?
The problem ain't quantity... (Score:5, Insightful)
...it's quality.
It's not a matter of there being not enough time in the school year to get learning done. It's a case of the pace of learning being too low (essentially zero in some cases).
Re:Waste MORE time!? (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree. While my school days are long over, I doubt it would had made any sense to make them longer. It would probably had a negative impact actually.
Extending the school time only works so far. Those who want to learn, do it anyways. Those who really want to learn or are interested, even more so (thats pretty much where every programmer comes from).
Personally, I would hated to spend more time in school. It would even be more off from my learning to program and about computers, since those are still so shitty in schools compared to learning it on your own.
Maybe better solution is to optimize the time you spend in school? There's lots of useless things already, religion being the first one that comes to my mind. And make more choices to the students to take the classes they're interested in. World is too big to teach everything to everyone, so people need to specialize in their area.
So... (Score:5, Insightful)
How about we require them to actually pass the classes they do attend before letting them move on...
Re:Waste MORE time!? (Score:5, Insightful)
The real problem with education (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is not the length of the school year. It is the profound incompetence of the public school monopoly and the lack of accountability of the teachers unions.
I think it's about time (Score:4, Insightful)
From wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_the_United_States [wikipedia.org]
It doesn't mean it's more quality but I think it's a start.
Re:Waste MORE time!? (Score:5, Insightful)
Hint: Quantity isn't the issue here (Score:3, Insightful)
On top of that, the USA produces a fair number of top notch scientists, engineers, mathematicians, and computer scientists right now, but those top notch individuals tend to be results of family pressure, personal ambition, or sheer-jealousy-inducing talent. Forcing those top level people into more hours of classes that tend to bore the living daylights out of them is not helpful. Mandating more school time for inner city or rural kids isn't going to be terribly useful for obvious reasons. The only students it might benefit are those who are capable and talented, but just a bit slow on picking up new concepts.
Of course, the biggest issue is what happens when you multiply the current school times by 25-30%. As best as I can remember, I spent about 9.5months in school in Virginia (a state in the USA.) If that time increases by 25%, that results in students spending roughtly 11.85 months in school. Alternately, students can spend 10 hours away from home for school, which I'm sure will work really well.
All in all, no thanks, the problem isn't the quantity of time spent in school, but rather the quality of said time.
Wrong Approach, Try Again Mr. President.... (Score:3, Insightful)
The article and even the summary states that countries which continually outperform America in tests send their children to school for less hours than America. That doesn't even warrant the correlation vs. causation fallacy that's just crappy incomplete analysis by Obama's Secretary of Education. Forcing students to spend more hours in the mindnumbing clusterf*** that is the modern lecture system in America is not going to educate them or make them learn more, its just going to push them closer to brainless downer activities after school like more TV. I mean really, who wants to go home and play with an electronics toy/learning kit when they just spent 8+ hours listening to someone they hardly respect drone on about a bunch of topics that they haven't been given a reason to care about?
Don't increase the schoolyear Mr. President, increase teacher salaries giving intelligent people a reason to teach other than philanthropy and find a way to inspire invention and innovation in the classroom. Increasing the time spent in a broken system is just going to increase the number of broken children's minds.
Re:Waste MORE time!? (Score:2, Insightful)
I was also thinking maybe we need to stop pretending and telling our children that they can be fucking NASA scientists, or neurosurgeons, etc. I firmly believe kid's heads are being filled with completely unrealistic aspirations in life. A good 75% of people in general will never require anything more than a technical degree in life. I'm pretty fucking sure that most parents know by the time their little brats are in middle (jr. highschool) school whether or not their child is college material, and should be adjusting their future goals accordingly instead of throwing on the blinders and being 110% supporting of their kids unrealistic goals. I see this happening to the point of tens (probably hundreds) of thousands of young adults being unfairly burdened with student loans when they are never going to use those degrees to pay back said loans.
If anything, shorten the school day/year so our people can go back to acquiring trade skills and progressing the nation; rather than being indoctrinated into the living-outside-of-your-means credit based lifestyle President Obama seems to be pushing for now. Fuck him and fuck that.
Re:More time for students to ignore their teachers (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, just like with the drinking age, the federal government is unlikely to actually mandate that states lengthen the school year, but rather they'll take more money from the states, lose a chunk of it due to the overall federal bureaucracy that will undoubtably be created, and then blackmail the states into changing their laws in order to get their money back (while redistributing more of the money to states/districts that support the political party currently in power). All the while the politicians can look like they're doing something productive, ignore the constitution, piss away money, and slowly chip away at the last remnants of sovereignty that individual states once had.
Phil
Schools take too many days off (Score:1, Insightful)
Sigh. Not this shit again (Score:5, Insightful)
This is stupid for several reasons:
1) Countries don't do an even job testing their students. In the US, everyone gets tested, even kids with severe emotional disabilities (meaning from broken homes and such). In some countries, only kids who are in the "college track" schools get tested. Yes, in some places young kids are tracked like that. In Germany students go to the Gymnasium, Hauptschule, or Realschulabschluss depending on ability. The Gymnasium is for kids who are going to university, the Realschulabschluss is for kids going directly in to the work force. Unless they changed it since last I checked, they only test kids in the Gymnasium with these higher level math tests.
2) Standardized tests don't do a good job of measuring things that are really useful. You can have pupils that do very well on them if you spend a lot of time teaching specifically for the test, and if you have a curriculum that emphasizes memorization heavily. Yes well that is not so useful in this day and age of computers. What is more useful is the ability to creatively problem solve. So just because countries produce kids with good math scores, does not mean they are producing the kind of workers you want.
3) Studies consistently show that the biggest factor in kids doing better in school is parental involvement. If their parents care, the kids do better. A simple measure of this is books. The more books parents have in their house when they have kids, the better the kids do. Not because the kids read the books, but because owning the books is heavily correlated with bright, involved parents and THAT produces better achieving kids. So what seems to be needed isn't more school, but more parental involvement.
I get real tired of crap like this because what they seem to want to do is work hard to turn kids in to little calculators. "Oh let's make sure our kids can score really high on number crunching tests!" Ya, how about not. We get students like that in university (I work for a university) in particular some of the foreign grad students form China and India. They are great at memorizing and slogging through formulas, horrible at doing any real world problem solving.
To them, knowledge is learning what other people know. If you don't know something, the answer is to find someone who does, or find a book with the answer. You look it up and then you know it. The idea of solving a problem through trial and error is totally alien to them. Thus they have a lot of trouble understanding what our group does (I do computer support and as such trial and error is a large part of the job). If you tell them "I don't know," they look at you like you are an idiot and want to know who does know.
We really need to stop worrying about how our kids do on contrived tests so much. Yes, they have uses to make sure kids aren't learning nothing, but we shouldn't have this penis contest over who gets the highest scores. It just doesn't matter. If we want to only test our best and brightest and tell the rest of our kids "Sorry, it's a life of menial labor for you," and spend all our time teaching those bright kids how to do the very best on the test, well I'm sure we could have top scores in no time. I'm also sure that we'd find the quality of our workers would decline.
Re:Waste MORE time!? (Score:5, Insightful)
Hey, think positively. It prepares students for the real world, where people get promoted until they fail. Then they get fired or laid off for not meeting expectations.
Re:Waste MORE time!? (Score:4, Insightful)
Instead of wasting the time of gifted students in order push the herd through a longer school year, we should spend money on more programs to help the high achievers. We don't need to waste more time on the many who amount to nothing, but we do need to nurture the intelligent and motivated, for it is they who move society forward.
We also need more school choice legislation so people can rescue their kids from the public school system and the thug trash that often infests it.
Outliers (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Waste MORE time!? (Score:3, Insightful)
As someone who is no longer in school, I say lets add some days.
I agree. Shorten summer vacation to July. US students spend less time in school that most industrialized countries, so the baloney about them learning less just doesn't wash. We're losing ground in science and engineering and if that means more time in school, then pack your books, kiddo.
What some of you are really saying is won't have as much time to spend on a WoW server or run up your score on Guitar Hero.
Cry me a river.
Re:Waste MORE time!? (Score:3, Insightful)
Quality of education is important, not quantity.
And the education secretary might want to get their facts right [pdkintl.org].
From that article:
There is a homespun myth, treated as fact, that the annual school calendar, with three months off for both teachers and students, is based on the rhythm of 19th-century farm life, which dictated when school was in session. Thus, planting and harvesting chores accounted for long summer breaks, an artifact of agrarian America. Not so.
Actually, summer vacations grew out of early 20th-century urban middle-class parents (and later lobbyists for camps and the tourist industry) pressing school boards to release children to be with their families for four to eight weeks or more.
Re:Wrong solution (Score:5, Insightful)
"Doesn't that mean that the problem is not how long US kids are in school?"
The problem is American popular culture, which exalts stupidity and is savagely anti-intellectual.
No public education system changes will affect this, and the solution is to facilitate school choice so the parents who appreciate the superiority of private education can rescue their children. We can't have an educated
public, but we can and should cultivate an educated. self-aware counter-culture from which we can groom future leaders.
Re:The problem ain't quantity... (Score:4, Insightful)
Even compared to the secondary education I received, things are very dumbed-down today - with existing curriculae preferring to push boutique ideologies instead of the actual history, science, and mathematics. Rhetoric, Civics, and Logic aren't even taught anymore in most high schools, and a second language (no, not ESL) is usually Spanish if you're lucky enough to even get that as an option.
The teachers' unions like to blame the class sizes (e.g. they're not hiring enough new union member- err, teachers), and everyone else finds it convenient to blame the budget (in spite of private schools doing far more with far smaller budgets).
Personally, and from experience? I blame the districts and state management offices. There are far too many support personnel than there are teachers in a school (my last teaching position was at a regional college that had 150+ employees and 38 actual faculty - not teachers, "faculty"). There's too much middle management, too many niche positions (no, not special-ed teachers, I mean the really damned niche positions, like "state licensing facilitator", "curriculum specialist" and similar). Most school district employee lists read more like a who's-who of political favor recipients than of employees who actually contribute something useful towards educating a student. Sure a teacher's salary is crap - because the millions of dollars aren't going to them - it's mostly going to that great big grey hole down at the district office (and to vendors at exorbitant rates... if you think software vendors are greed-driven in the enterprise IT realm, you ain't seen shit).
Money (Score:4, Insightful)
Where's the money going to come from? Adding a few days onto the school year will cost the states billions of dollars. I dunno what state you're living in, but here in California we're already in such a big hole we can't see the sky. Is Obama planning to raise federal taxes for this, or is it going to be another one of those unfunded mandates?
Re:Waste MORE time!? (Score:4, Insightful)
My thoughts exactly. It would be different if teachers would use the extra time to teach more reading, writing, math, science, etc. but we all know they'd either have another study hall period or more fluff like environmental issues awareness bullshit. Obama is obviously doing this as a favor to the teachers unions as more hours worked means more pay.
Re:Waste MORE time!? (Score:5, Insightful)
A lot of fields still require a University degree, nevermind that they don't actually need it
Japan is a bad ideal. (Score:5, Insightful)
From personal experience, many of the students who go to juku go because they don't pay attention in class. They sit around and draw pictures, stare out the window, or talk to their friends. There are students who simply sit and cross their arms, refusing to do anything in any class despite coming to school. And of course, there are students who just don't come to school, because there's nothing that can be done to them; they will move up through the grades and graduate from junior high regardless. There are also students who DON'T go to juku, or go once/twice a week. These students are the ones who actually do their homework and listen in class. Guess which of the two groups generally has better test scores in my school.
I don't really believe in the whole longer school hours argument, either. We have school from 8:50 AM to 3:35 PM; at my school, it was 8:10 AM to 3:10 PM, slightly longer. On top of that, they only have six periods in a day, with a lunch break after fourth period. And on top of THAT, Monday and Friday only have FIVE periods. I fail to see how Japanese children spend more time in school unless they count club activities (generally an hour before school and an hour or two after school). Or perhaps they're counting juku, which SHOULDN'T be counted; it's completely optional and you pay for it. Basically you're paying to go to a classroom with a cubby where you're forced to do what you should be doing in school to begin with.
For another rant, a lot of students who get good grades are simply memorizing and regurgitating facts, especially in liberal arts courses. They aren't learning how things fit together, or how to apply their knowledge, or even how to use their knowledge outside of regimented series of tests. If you think the SATs are bad in America, come here for a bit. This is a land where tests are God, so you learn to please God.
If that's what Obama wants America to aim for, I don't think I approve. At all.
education SHOULD be a monopoly (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, the educated benefit from being educated, but everybody benefits from having educated people around. The former is why private schools are seductive to many, but the latter is why we should embrace education as a public good - external to the market - and support/fix our existing socialized system.
So you're right, the problem is the incompetence of public schools. But privatization ain't the solution.
Libertarians, who are often persuasively consistent (and I really do appreciate your consistency), have given monopolies, governments, and other non-market institutions a bad reputation. Even the term for something that doesn't jibe with a market - "an externality" - belittles the importance of things like pollution, basic science, education, overfishing, national defense, a judicial system, national highways, and on and on and on.
Re:The problem ain't quantity... (Score:3, Insightful)
High IQ/Disciplined - fast track to higher learning
Low IQ/Disciplined - fast track to skilled job training
High IQ/Undisciplined - try to salvage them but not at the expense of those above - there may be diamonds in the rough here, but don't mess up the good ones finding them.
Low IQ/Undisciplined - just keep them away from the rest
There needs to be a method of changing groups as well. A student wanting to change their category needs to prove that they belong in the category of their desire. Students in the different categories should not have contact with each other while in school. Sure, everyone needs to learn to deal with idiots and assholes, but that's not what school is for.
Most students will fit into the top 2 categories, the fewest in the third category - thresholds as to what High and Low are would need to be set to produce the maximum number of non-screwups to be produced by the school system.
Teachers should also be divided - better teachers should have more choice of which students they work with. Of course the problem here is determining an objective criteria for grading a teacher.
Time for Teachers (Score:2, Insightful)
How about an increase in time for teachers to prepare meaningful lessons for students? I get 50 minutes a day to prepare lessons, contact parents, and fulfill obligations to various other clubs and responsibilities. There's no overtime pay in teaching, but yet it's one of the professions that require the off-the-clock work.
Re:Wrong Approach, Try Again Mr. President.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Read the story again. The argument is for a longer school year, and not necessarily more hours in school. Think about that for a minute, especially on how it affects knowledge retention. If you have a good argument, by all means make it, but if the debate on education in the country in general is at the same level as in your post, we are in a very sorry state indeed.
Oh bother (Score:1, Insightful)
Has anyone considered adding "science" ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Has anyone considered adding a bit of science to the discussion? Not as a curriculum subject (no doubt covered in other threads) but rather - applying a bit of science to the question of "what is the optimum schedule for learning?"
Think about it - there must be a series of attention "ramps" during the day, week and year, where the ability to absorb knowledge is better than at other times.
Do we do math better before or after gym class? Is there any point to having a math class at all immediately after lunch? Are business classes enhanced after physical competition?
Would a 6am start kick start the day or is 10am better? Note that we have evolved to have half our numbers awake and on guard at night [citation somewhere].
Should we survey people in some way to determine whether they're day learners or night learners (and teachers too, to match the learning profile).
There must be hundreds of questions and answers to this. I suspect we've refined our way into a low-energy orbit, and it isn't getting us anywhere very quickly. We need to learn smarter, not longer, from the stats in TFA.
Re:higher test scores with a simple sacrafice-NCLB (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, China the land of opportunity. That's why so many Americans are flocking to China to work in shoe factories, and why there are no longer any Chinese immigrants looking for a better life in America.
Re:Wrong solution (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is not the amount of money or time available for schools. The problem is it is assumed we are all equal and the schools cater to the lowest denominator in the classroom, handicapping the rest of the class. Unfortunately, segregating students based on ability is an unpopular idea because it does not reinforce the idea that we are all equal.
Re:Waste MORE time!? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wrong solution (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wrong solution (Score:3, Insightful)
No, it doesn't mean that.
It would seem to indicate that the problem isn't that the number of instructional hours is insufficient, but it does not mean that the problem isn't "how long" US kids are in school, either in hours per day or days per year or both.
That US students are in school fewer days and that they are in school more hours per school day could both be problematic; its quite possible that fewer hours of school per day but more total days would tend to produce better results.
Re:Wrong solution (Score:5, Insightful)
I am not so sure about that. From what I have seen of how the public is educated, most people have an inherent curiosity that is slowly and methodically destroyed. Instead of being allowed to explore, they are herded into overcrowded classrooms and forced to learn things through repetition.
Then we are screwed. No democratic republic will stand long if the population is ignorant. The educational system needs drastic and immediate reform. There needs to be competition and the red tape and various nonsense which is stifling exploration and experimentation needs to go away.
Re:Another Cash Infusion for the Teacher's Unions (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:How is the amount of time in school measured? (Score:4, Insightful)
Somewhere in between is where we want our average students to be headed. Unfortunately most students see they are neither valedictorian quality or star quarterback material and become disinterested, settling with 'just enough' and getting by with minimal effort.
NCLB seemed to try to address this, but is the wrong answer. More time in school would be a good idea if only we weren't already using so little of the current school hours- a wrong answer. Not sure what the right answer is, but until the average student sees benefit to working hard for those A's the smart kids earn in their sleep, I won't expect our education system's report card to improve.
Wow (Score:3, Insightful)
I have to seriously wonder why so many people here are so passionate about not needing an education.
Re:The problem ain't quantity... (Score:2, Insightful)
I love your categories. And while we are at it, since home language is such a problem, let's also create a category for those who's first language isn't English. Also, since culturally relevant instruction can help, and students aren't always comfortable with students of other races, let's make sure to make a categories for each race too.
Seriously... do you think about what the implications are? It might work great if you're lucky enough to be chosen, or more likely have pushy or connected parents to get you into the top track. Sorry, I have a conscience, I'll pass.
Quality over quantity (Score:2, Insightful)
The American government has demonstrated its utter incompetence in increasing the quality of education in America.
Increasing quality means doing a lot of things that a lot of people don't want, such as more spending, greater accountability, some extreme changes in curriculum, and so on. But even if told, by God himself, exactly what needs to be done, American politicians would still screw it up.
So, due to the inability to increase quality, we will increase quantity. And of course this will do no good.
The bottom line: if you want your kid to have a real education that will give him/her a real competitive advantage, you are going to have to fork over plenty of cash and/or take responsibility for it yourself.
Re:Wrong solution (Score:1, Insightful)
Part 1: Reward the brightest by having them deal with the malcontents, yeah, that will work wonders. Sorry for being bitter, but all this teaches the bright kids to do is not stand out enough to get stuck with the worst students, and teaches the slow kids how to make the smart kids do all the work in the group. I do recall being the only one able to keep one kid on task in history, because I would treat him with the contempt he earned for acting dumber than he was. Most other times though, devolved into "okay, do your part, come on, do your part, ... seriously, your grade depends on this too, oh forget it, I'm not failing because of you, here's the answer.
Part 2: While breaking up students by skill level makes sense and is implemented in most middle or high schools, how do you do it effectively at an elementary level? You can do self study (my path for math) or take turns on what group you are working with, giving students about 1/3 the contact time they otherwise would get. Elementary is reluctant to breakup classes (and I am sympathetic to the social issues that drive this). The solution would be to take those who were faster/slower learners and group them the following years by class, but this sort of tracking is derided as discriminatory (for some reason we have this idea that any discrimination, regardless of whether the rationale is valid, is wrong.).
Can't read? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Waste MORE time!? (Score:2, Insightful)
For most people, degrees aren't about their competency in a particular field.
A degree generally means that you have some level of reading/writing competency, that you are able to complete tasks, that you are able to work with others, that you have been exposed to some level of socialization, and that you are not poor.
While these things don't always hold true, they are mostly true. If a company had to screen non-degree candidates for positions, it would take much, much longer and be a more complicated process - meaning HR costs would go up.
Re:Waste MORE time!? (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm really eager to take the educational advice of a person who uses apostrophes to pluralize nouns.
Re:Waste MORE time!? (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't understand this.
First Obama says kids in the USA don't get enough schooling. Then the article says kids in the USA do get more than most and STILL don't do well in international testing.
Surely the conclusion is not the quantity is wrong, but the quality.
You know, if there's one thing I'd like to change about school - it's homework. There is too much of it, and it's far, far too boring.
My daughter (14) has been leaning about trigonometry. Well, actually she hasn't, she's been learning to use sines and cosines (looked up on a calculator) to solve simple trig problems. But she isn't leaning why it works, what it means, and what really cool things you can do with it. No, it's boring rote work. And she hates it.
There's that crucial word - boring.
Learning isn't boring. It's brilliant. Learning new stuff is hard, but often the most wonderful thing in life. How hard must the teachers has struggled to make it boring. Maybe it's the administrators, those destroyers of joy in life ...
Makes me sad. Maths - boring rote work? ... when e raised to the power of i time pi is minus 1 ... what happened there? Boring? sigh
Re:Change... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Waste MORE time!? (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes, let's go back to less school and just accept the majority of our students being dumber.
I'm not sure I agree with that completely. Yes to less school, no to accepting the majority of students being dumber. Perhaps if students were focusing on the skills they were mediocre to good at, you wouldn't consider the majority of them being dumber. A certified auto-mechanic may never be able to replace a faulty heart valve, and conversely a heart surgeon may never be able to change bad exhaust valve. Saying either one is dumber than the other one is what is stupid, or to the point, saying that either one should aspire to be the other is stupid.
And, seriously, what the fuck is up with your last paragraph? Do you even understand the last 8 years? No? Maybe you'd be better off if you spent more time in school, learning some history and economics.
Children do not fucking need longer exposure to the indoctrination of the socialist and corporatist SCUM invading our US society. Longer school years and pretending everyone is going to grow up and be a doctor means longer exposure to the live-outside-your-means propaganda, and a higher likelihood of someone taking out a large student loan to pay for classes they should not even be in.
Do you even understand the last 40 years? No? Maybe you'd be better off living in a country that's already socialist, with full corporate sponsorship.
Re:Waste MORE time!? (Score:4, Insightful)
Marge also works occasionally, but that hardly fills in the gaps.
Re:Waste MORE time!? (Score:5, Insightful)
I highly doubt it. I just escaped 5 years of teaching, and without the break, you'd have a lot of pretty insane teachers.
You don't truly grasp the insanity of a public school as a kid in it. Herding teenagers wore me out like no other job I've ever done. It's amazing to be immersed in a pressure-cooker of immaturity, hormones, and lack of private space. Add in the tendency of youth to rebel against authority, push boundaries, and do stupid things, and you end up with probably one of the more stressful places outside of operating rooms. (If you've got pre-teens to teens, imagine a population-density of one per square meter in your house, 6 hrs a day. Now imagine trying to get them to do something useful that ENTIRE time.)
We don't have great teachers for a number of reasons:
First, the pay sucks. There's all sorts of public bitching about what teachers get paid, but it's really not that much. After 5 years of teaching, with a Master's degree in Education, I was making $40k. Not bad, except for the amount of school loans I had put into that.
Now, while I could have gotten something part-time in the summer, I had to take classes. Finishing a degree, moving to a Level 2 license, becoming eligible for equipment grants with training seminars, etc.
More importantly than the pay, I wasn't ALLOWED to be a good teacher. I was asked to teach stuff that was horrifically boring, in a boring way. Because success was determined based on how well kids filled in bubbles on a test. How do you demonstrate the ability to do science with a bubble-sheet? You don't. You demonstrate that you can MEMORIZE science facts.
Eventually, after I was off my probation period, I started really teaching. I said fuck all to the standardized test, and we actually did science. However, coming down the pipe was the district-wide curriculum revamping, where we got to help formulate the approved curriculum which was aligned to the state standards. Once I saw that coming, I bailed to head back to grad school.
Standardized tests are blatantly anti-education. They measure the ability and motivation of a kid to memorize answers from other days, and fill in those answers on one day out of 180. Treating one day in the life of a teenager as equal to all the others is moronic, for anyone who's spent any time around teens. Do what most of the country does and place no student motivations in place to do well, and you've destroyed an already flawed test. (Most states never put NCLB test scores on report cards, transcripts, or even give them to teachers or parents. As if teens weren't apathetic enough already....)
There was a time when we had masters and apprentices. Where we actually taught kids what they needed to learn, what they wanted to learn. Those days are far gone. Today, we have factory-schools, like we have factory-farms. Stinking places crammed to the gills, where the livestock has shit jammed down their throats until the folks in charge deem they're ready. I was in a fairly extensive farming community, in a state well known for farming, but our state standards don't cover much in the way of soil science. So my success was judged based on whether I could convince multi-generation farmers to fill in bubbles about stellar life cycles on a test that didn't count, and which their parents would never see the results of. That's brilliant!
As long as we treat every student the same, and give them the same material, we're doomed to failure. We need to tear ass through the basics of reading, writing, and math, and then start giving kids what they NEED to learn. Not what some group of six retired teachers in a conference room somewhere thinks they should learn. Actual, relevant stuff. Then, we need to actually assess whether they've learned it, by watching them DO IT. Not see if they can logic away two answers out of four, and then guess one of the remaining two.
As far as I can tell, I was a pretty good teacher. And now I'm in grad school, doing actual science. Frankly, I should have done this earlier. I'm much happier out of that clusterfuck.
Re:Waste MORE time!? (Score:3, Insightful)
in a country that's already socialist, with full corporate sponsorship.
You have the most amazing case of bipolar view I've ever seen. Make up your mind, please! Are you worried about socialism or capitalism? Most people agree these are nearly opposites.
Re:Quality over quantity (Score:2, Insightful)
if you want your kid to have a real education that will give him/her a real competitive advantage, you are going to have to fork over plenty of cash and/or take responsibility for it yourself.
You're only half right. If you aren't invested in their education, they sure as shit won't be. And I mean real investment, not a sweaty wad of twenties. Money helps, with this as much as anything, but it isn't the important component.
Re:Wow (Score:4, Insightful)
"I have to seriously wonder why so many people here are so passionate about not needing an education."
Many geeks are autodidacts and will learn much more when less impeded by conventional formal education. We may show up to get the certificate, but what drives learning is passion.
Many of them (self included) were bored by school and despised many of the people they were forced to go to school with. A system that would help such folk would work less well for the torrent of retards that make up most of the public.
Re:Wow (Score:4, Insightful)
Bad Idea (Score:0, Insightful)
The last thing we need for our drugged up kids is more time in government indoctrination centers [youtube.com]. As John Taylor Gatto puts it, We Need Less School, Not More [spinninglobe.net]. Also watch State Controlled Consciousness [youtube.com] by John Taylor Gatto.
Re:Waste MORE time!? (Score:2, Insightful)
But, having schools open on the weekends and or late isn't really a bad idea, it all depends upon how it's handled. If there's people there that can help get the homework finished and possibly have extra stuff to help with weak spots it might very well be a worthwhile proposition.
Re:The real problem with education (Score:3, Insightful)
Or say they are acting inappropriately with a student of the opposite sex.
I don't think the student's gender would be that much of a factor.
Re:Waste MORE time!? (Score:3, Insightful)
I won't deny that some teachers give these kinds of assignments, but I'd also suggest that teachers do a poor job of explaining to students why they are giving homework. If a teacher is doing their job well, it's either about extension or application. Homework should take a concept and structure the assignment to force the students to engage with it in a unique way, or at least one that forces the student to engage with material that was covered in class. A lot of times, students don't see the value because they just copy it from a friend right before class. Of course, doing so will invalidate the whole reason for the assignment, but in that case it isn't completely the teacher's fault. I will say again though that teachers should make sure students understand the assignment, so they at least understand the reason it's being assigned.
We're starting to see individualized assignments more often. It's easier with technology now, email specific group assignments for differing levels or interests within a class. It's fun to give students assignments that tailor to their own interests, but to be fair again, teachers aren't given the time to do these sorts of things.
Re:The real problem with education (Score:1, Insightful)
Everyone pays taxes. A State gets a chunk of that for education. They then can divide it up, whether they do it by enrollment numbers ($X for every student) or based on some other criteria, the public schools get the money.
As an individual, I pay into that system. You can't tell me that I only pay education taxes if I have a kid, and that the school my child attends gets 100% of what I paid in taxes. If I home/private schooled my child I'd still be paying taxes. That extra tax (that I'm not utilizing by sending my child to school) gets divided up into the $X for every student. That tax is not going to my private school.
Thus public schools have a monopoly.
Re:Waste MORE time!? (Score:4, Insightful)
We don't need to waste more time on the many who amount to nothing, but we do need to nurture the intelligent and motivated, for it is they who move society forward.
I see, so the theory is that those who are worthy will lift themselves up by their own bootstraps, and those who cannot shouldn't be lifted by another. Pretty clear cut. Very much a social "Darwinism" approach. Say, can I borrow your crystal ball this weekend?
Re:Can't read? (Score:3, Insightful)
I rather doubt the article calculated after school learning. I can only speak for Japan (and well S. Korea which isn't on the list), but it's pretty much accepted there that in order to succeed parents must send their kids to a myriad of after school programs. These range from just homework help, to advanced material the public school isn't teaching an age group. I've young (10+) cousins who end up coming home around 8pm sometimes even as late as midnight all because they've around 3-4 extra tutoring places they go to each day.
Re:Wow (Score:1, Insightful)
I have to seriously wonder why so many people here are so passionate about not needing an education.
Straw man.
Re:Waste MORE time!? (Score:4, Insightful)
I did too, even tho the first clause was a bit bad worded. Same issues still stand tho.
No they don't. You could increase the number of days and shorten the hours of day and end up spending less time in school. All the Asian countries referred to below do that.
Of course the superior performance in mathematics in Asian countries could have more to do with cultural effects other than the number of days vs. the number of hours per day in schools. It probably does. However I think it is well established that learning is enhanced by processing information in more smaller chunks. Which is not to say the administration would necessarily be wise enough to shorten the school day as it increases their number.
Re:Waste MORE time!? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Trade school needs to be a real option (Score:3, Insightful)
How about make a career out of the service? Put your 20 - 30 years in, say, the Air Force and retire with 2/3's pay before you're 50. Then you can figure out what you want to do with your life now that you have your medical and living costs covered. There are times I wish that I had done that.
Oh, and you can go your whole Air Force career without using a gun outside of the training range. There are a lot of very interesting jobs there too.
Re:So... (Score:3, Insightful)
consider ending the War on Drugs that funds the violence of the gangs that distract our students?
The war on drugs is a product of what the majority of the population wants. If Obama opposed it, he would have more people angry at him than right now, and would not survive the next election.
If you want to legalize drugs, your task is to convince the majority of the people that drugs should be legalized. It's that simple.
Re:Waste MORE time!? (Score:5, Insightful)
Two points:
1) McMansions have been genuinely pretty cheap in some places. Even during the real estate bubble in 2006, you could get into a pretty nice house in Houston for less than $150k. Some places in the country you could probably push down $100k. In fact, I almost picked up a 3 bedroom in one of Utah's more expensive markets for $120k. Nobody knows exactly where Springfield is, but it seems to have an apparent barely-urban-island-in-an-ocean-of-countryside setting that'd make those comparable markets. And that's before you consider the modern accepted way of gaining the American Dream: credit. Which is, admittedly, a bit tight after the last year, but has been pretty accessible for much of the run of the Simpson's.
2) Work ethic isn't strictly correlated with financial success. In fact, that's an explicit point at times in the Simpson's social commentary. "Lisa, if you don't like your job you don't strike. You just go in every day, and do it really half-assed. That's the American way." Part of our national mythos is that we're a meritocracy, but the truth is considerably murkier.
Re:Bad Idea (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds like the problem isn't needing more time put into schooling, but, making the current time spent more productive and worthwhile!!
For one..maybe we need to quit teaching to the lowest common denominator. Perhaps we need to start rewarding actual success and progress, rather than giving everyone a reward for just showing up, eh? How about competition again and quit worrying so much about everyone's fucking self esteem...and try to prepare the kids more for a real world with competition...
How about stopping drugging the kids so much? In my day, it was called being a 'boy' they way I and my friends acted...now, they just dose you.
How about not assuming every kid is academic? How about making votech type schooling a positive thing, and if kids want to go that way, let them, encourage them....and don't keep them in classrooms bored and distracting other students...? How about rather than making school a right...make it a privilege that you earn by behaving, and progressing....?
Re:So... (Score:3, Insightful)
Then we need to stop calling them "schools" and start calling them "juvenile detention facilities", because at that point that's all you're doing.
Re:Waste MORE time!? (Score:4, Insightful)
Portrayals of single people are probably quite a bit more accurate that those of families (I'm assuming that Frasier's dad draws a pension and basically pulls his weight on expenses, leaving Frasier financially single). I think that any show about successful entertainers is, to a large degree, aspirational, because very few entertainers see prolonged financial success like that.
Family portrayals seem to reflect the aspirations of American families more than the reality. Working-class people living in well-to-do suburbs in big houses. I'm not a big TV watcher, but I can think of a couple: the Cosby show and Fresh Prince. I haven't seen much of either show, but I think the Fresh Prince guy would have to be in very rare company even among lawyers to live like that -- either that or living beyond his means. Even if those shows are realistic, they are aspirational in a way simply because so few people are that successful in their careers. Malcolm in the Middle refers to the family's financial troubles and shattered career aspirations but still gives them, on the whole, pretty nice material things and really glorifies the credit culture.
Again, I'm not a big TV-watcher, but I can think of a couple shows that really aren't/weren't aspirational portrayals of families. One is Everybody Hates Chris, and another is the short-lived show The PJs. There are probably more... but they're the exception. Almost all families on TV are shown in big suburban houses and wearing nice clothes, and that's not really how almost all families live.
Re:Has anyone considered adding "science" ? (Score:4, Insightful)
Has anyone considered adding a bit of science to the discussion? Not as a curriculum subject (no doubt covered in other threads) but rather - applying a bit of science to the question of "what is the optimum schedule for learning?"
Think about it - there must be a series of attention "ramps" during the day, week and year, where the ability to absorb knowledge is better than at other times.
Do we do math better before or after gym class? Is there any point to having a math class at all immediately after lunch? Are business classes enhanced after physical competition?
Would a 6am start kick start the day or is 10am better? Note that we have evolved to have half our numbers awake and on guard at night [citation somewhere].
Should we survey people in some way to determine whether they're day learners or night learners (and teachers too, to match the learning profile).
There must be hundreds of questions and answers to this. I suspect we've refined our way into a low-energy orbit, and it isn't getting us anywhere very quickly. We need to learn smarter, not longer, from the stats in TFA.
Isn't what you propose exactly the sort of soft social science that engineers make fun of here on Slashdot?
Re:The real problem with education (Score:4, Insightful)
The amount you receive per student is disconnected for the results you produce, and it is indeed exorbitant. What a con!
Re:Waste MORE time!? (Score:5, Insightful)
Employers care about the breadth of education from 4-year degree because it shows the student has the ability to learn subjects outside of the core competencies. A flexible and diverse workforce is important because you can't predict where the next groundbreaking idea will come from, or how a particular industry will evolve. Steve Jobs mentions the importance of calligraphy to Mac development, and the development of Perl was influenced by linguistics.
A hiring manager will care about anything that sets an applicant apart.
Re:Waste MORE time!? (Score:5, Insightful)
I currently teach in an Asian school, and I have taught in more than one country on that list. I'll tell you the reason that Asian kids do better at math and science: they work their butts off. The amount of homework they get is scary, and most kids are enrolled in an after-school math program as well, to get more time with a teacher and more time doing homework. Added to this, the level of math being taught is way higher then I remember it being at school back home.
I guess this is a cultural thing, as you pointed out: because this state of affairs hasn't grown up in a vacuun, and society here does value achievement in these subject areas. Kids are rewarded for doing well, and even more amazingly respected by their peers who don't get results which are as good.
But kids here graft. That's why they are better at what they do.
Are we smarter than a fifth grader? :) (Score:4, Insightful)
During the summer months, our system is not to "send the kiddies to the field" as Obama's inept education administration official claims
I don't think that's the claim they're making. The only marginally close statement I can find is one by Duncan which agrees with you: "Our school calendar is based upon the agrarian economy and not too many of our kids are working the fields today," e.g., our calendar has some agrarian roots, but by and large we don't have that population anymore.
The key in where the president is actually coming from is probably in this paragraph:
"The president, who has a sixth-grader and a third-grader, wants schools to add time to classes, to stay open late and to let kids in on weekends so they have a safe place to go."
It fits with the President's roots as an activist for the urban poor, which probably shape his perspective. And a lot of the research does say that poor/disadvantaged kids do the worst in making progress during the summer. Institutional support during summers could do a lot to help them become more productive and self-sufficient adults.
Those differences aside, I'd say you have a good point. Summer vacation isn't just downtime from school, it's still an opportunity to work (even if it isn't in the fields) and learn. Moreover, slack has value as recreational time and as a catalyst for creative foment -- not just for the kids, teachers use the time to refine their approaches as well. Extra days could put more into the curriculum for achievers or allow for a gentler curve for stragglers, but narrowing it down is going to have tradeoffs.
It sounds to me like the fifth grader in the article seems to have the balance about right: summer programs offer opportunities to kids that they might even enjoy (and which would meet Obama's goals), but don't force everyone into one particular tradeoff.
So: are we smarter than a fifth grader? :)
Re:Trade school needs to be a real option (Score:3, Insightful)
Your choice of direction after highschool has a huge impact on everything that happens for the rest of your life. It's important to not be too hasty.
Standardized tests are not that bad! (Score:3, Insightful)
Standardized tests are blatantly anti-education. They measure the ability and motivation of a kid to memorize answers from other days, and fill in those answers on one day out of 180.
1) If standardized tests are so bad, why do educators constantly use them to tell us how bad US students are? We constantly hear that we are ranked low compared to other countries. 2) If standardized tests are so bad, why do our universities use SATs and ACTs? 3) If you don't have some sort of standardized test, how then do you tell whether teachers are doing a good job? 4) I haven't taken a NCLB test, but I took plenty of standardized tests in the 80s growing up. Sure the science was more memorization, but you can't memorize your way out of math and reading comprehension. 5) Most importantly MUCH OF LEARNING IS MEMORIZATION. I've had to memorize a ton of facts just to do my daily job. Bits in a byte, Java keywords, fundamentals of OO programming.
More time? Give us Vouchers!!!! (Score:4, Insightful)
If you are really concerned with having a better outcome, and better education, with kids learning more - give us vouchers.
Let people go to private schools who would never be able to otherwise.
Let families afford to be able to homeschool, where learning can really be around the clock with committed parents.
For whatever reason, private education is poison to the current political leaders (like the whole DC voucher fiasco). If you care, let us have more choices for how we educate our kids.
Re:Waste MORE time!? (Score:3, Insightful)
It isn't just Darwinistic, it lies in line with my Objectivist/libertarian leanings.
I would take it a step further - eliminate the Dept. of Education and all federal funding for education. If states want public schools, they can fund them. Public schools are not a right, and the way we are funding them now is purely evil.
Re:Bad Idea (Score:5, Insightful)
IT said they're already doing more hours than kids in the rest of the world.
Sounds like the problem isn't needing more time put into schooling, but, making the current time spent more productive and worthwhile!!
Actually, I suspect the "hours in school" statistic refers purely to state-run schools. In Korea, and most of Asia, probably students leave school in the afternoon, only to continue studying at private learning centers until evening to get advantage for the next placement test. They spend a lot of time there. So I'll bet Asian kids study many more hours than Americans when you factor in these "hagwans".
Re:Waste MORE time!? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Waste MORE time!? (Score:1, Insightful)
There's a HUGE difference here between high school and elementary/middle school.
I've got two kids in elementary school now.
From my perspective, what summer is:
A) money making machine for day care
B) 3 mos paid vacation for school staff
C) a chance for every skill obtained over the previous 9 months to atrophy
D) an incredible headache for everyone else
School should be year round with nice two or three week breaks between semesters. Just like College.
Take the 3 months we have for summer, divide it into 4 even chunks and stick one between each quarter of the year.
BAM! more continuty for students, no massive down time, no budget problems.
Yes, for fuck's sake, school should be year 'round, and "no, because different places are ... DIFFERENT" is the stupidest fucking thing I've ever heard.
Re:Waste MORE time!? (Score:5, Insightful)
I worked with a registered nurse who did not know who Freud or Stalin were. At all. They came up at various times in our conversations (not work related, but still....) and she had no idea. Didn't know them by name or picture. She had a master's degree, but her education was entirely vocational. I feel sick to my stomach admitting that more school won't help the problem, but I think the underlying cause is that our culture does not look down on ignorance. Any knowledge that doesn't translate directly into dollars is considered "useless" by almost everyone. Even if someone is dead wrong about something they still have "a right to an opinion," so even pointing out that they're just ignorant makes *you* a presumptuous jerk.
Re:Waste MORE time!? (Score:5, Insightful)
Obviously you don't know the first thing about why people play sports. Hint: not everybody who plays sports is trying to make a career out of it. Yeah, there's a lot of losers out there whose high point in life was playing sports in high school. There's just as many people who were losers in high school, losers in college, and are losers now with their shitty ass white collar job and boring lives. Which one is worse?
Re:Trade school needs to be a real option (Score:3, Insightful)
I went to Portland State University in Oregon (definitely not a bad school). The median student age was quite a bit older than me. Your implication that once you attend school you are somehow "locked in" and can never go back is absurd. People can, and do, go back to school for second or third degrees all the time. If you're 30, 40, even 50 (and I've seen even older than that) and you want a degree, go get one. You may not be able to get into certain schools (usually private, elite schools where the student body is strictly 18-22) but that doesn't mean there's nothing you can do. Far from it.
I'm pushing 30 myself, and considering going back to school part time to slowly earn a Master's in engineering. I have one child already and another on the way. I have a full time job. I can't go back to school full time, but that doesn't mean I can't go back to school.
Re:Waste MORE time!? (Score:2, Insightful)
You are soooo right. No amount of longer days, longer hours, different teachers, whatever, is going to change the reality that the system is fundamentally broken. The first step in fixing the education system is to abolish the federal Department of Education and rethink the whole system from a more local point of view.
Of course, that's not ever going to happen.
Re:Waste MORE time!? (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course, there are cultural issues that prevent this parental oversight from happening, and _that_ is what needs to be addressed. Americans on average put in more hours per week of work than nearly any other 1st world country. Couple that with single parent families, parents that work multiple jobs, and the myriad of other issues that (un)reasonably prevent parents from taking that active role in their child's development -- and well, its no wonder we're in this sorry state of affairs.
The solution is _not_ to throw more money into the education system by extending the school year. The solution is forcing parents to be accountable for their childrens' development. But to be real, we'll probably vote to extend the school year to get a few more weeks during the summer where we don't have to pay a _real_ babysitter.
Or, for the tl;dr; crowd -- School alone doesn't make for good students, parental involvement does.
Re:A Kid's (7th Grade) Opinion (Score:1, Insightful)
Sock Puppet Alert!
Re:Waste MORE time!? (Score:5, Insightful)
For one, construction generally pays pretty well, especially if you are proficient at it. Besides, athletics teaches important aspects of life that basement dwelling geeks generally won't get -- socialization and teamwork. Building strong working relationships and possessing good networking skills nearly always trumps specialized skill in a given field. Thats why your boss is an idiot, but still makes more money than you
With all that said, what fuckin high school did you go to? I've yet to meet anyone who pines for the good ol' days of high school -- the cliche Al-Bundy-four-touchdowns-in-one-game crowd or otherwise.
Adding time in school won't help... (Score:2, Insightful)
In fact, there are a host of problems which all contribute to the issue, none of which will be addressed by keeping children in school longer.
The issues as I see them are:
1) Fundamental flaws in the theory of education at the policy making and administrative levels. An example of one such: I am old enough to have been in school when grading systems began to be changed from A-F to E(xceeds expectations), S(atisfactory), and U(nsatisfactory). The reason given for the change was that children who got poor grades felt inferior to those who were doing better, and that this was bad. Some time later, the 'E' grade was disposed of for the same reason. While that grading system is gone, the fundamentally flawed premise that caused it remains to this day. American education became for a long time, all about making students feel good about how much they didn't know. The flawed premise here is the same as in Communism - when you remove the rewards for doing well, you also remove the incentive to excel.
2) Use of schools as a platform to indoctrinate students with the current popular ideology. Whatever the ideology in question, this -always- happens at the expense of useful learning, both because the 'facts' presented by the curriculum tend to be skewed to present that ideology in the most favorable light, and because students are discouraged from questioning the 'facts' presented (as that represents questioning the ideology itself).
3) Fundamental flaws in the theory of education at the classroom level. Schools used to use rote memorization only for the purpose of teaching the basic building blocks of a subject. The next step was to teach critical thinking and problem solving to allow students to figure out how to solve problems given the basic information. As a result of the second point above (and the reliance on teaching to the standardized tests), critical thinking is now discouraged.
4) Standardized tests are presented in such a way that teachers (and those who create the curriculum the teachers use) are able to teach to the test, and spend a large portion of the school year doing so via rote memorization. The concept of standardized testing being necessary grew out of the poor performance of American students. Unfortunately, the manner in which it was implemented allowed rote memorization to be used to prepare for the tests, rather than teaching the fundamentals of the subject and encouraging the development of problem solving skills.
5) Colossal waste of money in education. Most of this money is wasted in administration and bureaucracy, some in fraud, and some to genuine attempts to improve the quality of education at the student level. A problem here is that (except for the poorest school districts where there is not enough money to cover essentials), spending more money per student does not increase the quality of education. Some experiments were done to vastly increase the amount of money being spent per student - those experiments universally resulted in no measurable improvement in test scores. When the educational process is flawed at its most basic level, throwing money at the problem is not the answer.
6) Failure of certain American subcultures to value education. When you are told from birth by the people who are raising you, the people around you, and the leaders in your community that you aren't good enough to make it without handouts; that you are by virtue of your ethnicity or skin color doomed to substandard employment and a substandard lifestyle; that people who succeed despite that are traitors, and that crime is the best way to get ahead... then the students tend to see education as a waste of time. They know that if they choose to avoid crime as a way of getting ahead, that jobs in menial labor will always be available, and require no education. Since they don't believe they can do better, they don't see t
not really (Score:3, Insightful)
Rote learning has been de-emphasized in the US for a few decades now, to the point that many of us believe that American students could benefit from some boring memorization. Multiple choice is not used for learning, it is used for tests in the US because they are very easy to feed into a computer. Teachers that are serious about their topic tend to have assignments that are hand checked. Other teachers just lecture then test with a scantron or equivalent.
We have entire units in school about how to use a library, how to find information, how to research a topic. We also are required to solve math problems and show our work, just the answer alone is never enough when doing an actual assignment. For a standardized test, then yes, you just give the answer, often multiple choice, but this is more to do with the limitations of test checking technology than a doctrine of "trivia style learning".
I think it is pretty insulting that you think you can sum up the solutions to the American education system in a paragraph.
Re:Has anyone considered adding "science" ? (Score:2, Insightful)
I concur, no one here objects to a scientific quantifiable approach to social science here. We just dislike the post modern sophistry that seems to litter that field.
Re:Waste MORE time!? (Score:3, Insightful)
Homework is about practising and reinforcing something that has been covered in class. A child is taught for instance fractions in class, and then they go home and do practise problems for homework. This serves as a way for the teacher to gauge whether they have understood the class by how well they do on the homework, it also reinforces the lesson through repetition.
In order to learn something it is necessary that it is revisited after the initial lesson and homework plays part of this process.
As has already been said if the homework is just copied from a friend then it is worthless but that doesn't devalue homework as a teaching tool. It is a case of making children realise that doing the homework helps them learn and serves a purpose. When children copy homework or fail to do it it is often due to overall workload. If teachers co-ordinate to make sure that children don't have too much homework then they are a lot more likely to complete it properly.
Re:Waste MORE time!? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Waste MORE time!? (Score:3, Insightful)
That's such a stupid and short-sighted argument. Playing middle or high school football isn't about wanting to go pro or even wanting to play football in college. I spent 6 years playing football, and last time I checked, I only swing a hammer when I'm upgrading my house. One of my best friends played Iron Man football in high school, and he now has a ton of Cisco certifications and is an extremely well payed network engineer at a major telco.
Playing football in HS is about having something to do after school. Something that doesn't involve being lazy in front of a screen and thinking you're somehow superior to all those other kids out there.
Re:Waste MORE time!? (Score:4, Insightful)
No thanks, I waste enough time in school already.
Thats not the only problem with this. My local cartoon government here in Springfield [illinoistimes.com] has been talking about year-long school for a while now.
First, it gets damned hot here in the summer. They're going to have to inatall air conditioning in all the classrooms. There's no way to concentrate or learn when the temperature is 95 degrees and the humidity is 100%. The cost is prohibitive, especially since the city and state are having severe budget problems.
Secondly, there are things kids need to learn that school can't teach. That summer vacation is actually a valuable learning experience, especially for younger students.
Thirdly, why can't we let kids be kids? The best times of my life were when I was a kid and it was summer vacation. It's cruel to take this away from children.
They seem to be creeping toward year-long school anyway. When I was a kid (a long, long time ago) school started in late September and ended in early May. Now it starts in early August and doesn't let out until June.
I had hope for this President, but I'm far less hopeful than I was when he was first sworn in. Yearl long school is a stupid, STUPID idea.
Re:Waste MORE time!? (Score:3, Insightful)
We don't need to waste more time on the many who amount to nothing, but we do need to nurture the intelligent and motivated, for it is they who move society forward.
HAHAHA!
And whom do you think comprise the dregs of society? The ones who pull a country down with their poor health and crappy/missing work ethic? If you don't nurture them while they're young, they'll simply become a burden to the rest of society when they get older, requiring more social services, more police, more prisons (and thus, more of your taxes).
Ever watch the Olympics? You know how they measure the long jump? They take the distance from the back foot. Not the front foot. Society is measured not by the happiness of its best members, but by the misery that is tolerated from its worst.
Re:Standardized tests are not that bad! (Score:3, Insightful)
1) Because they are easy. It's hard to do good testing, but we've decided that we need to compare EVERYONE because.....well, we want to. Future success can't be used to assess past learning, it seems.
2)Increasingly, they are not. Several studies showed that grades in the last year of high school were a BETTER predictor of college performance than SAT/ACTs. Many schools are dropping those requirements.
3)You can't. Nor can you tell WITH a standardized test. Telling whether or not a teacher is doing a good job is very hard. Kids may hate them, but they could be a fantastic, and rigorous teacher. Kids could love them, and they could do nothing but tell jokes all day, and give out answer sheets with the homework. Assessing teaching is maddeningly frustrating. About the best you can do is look at whether kids can use what they learned later down the line.
4 and 5) Totally linked. Learning isn't memorization. It's only been that way for the last hundred years of so. Look into the philosophy of education and learning, for the last couple of thousand of years, and you'll find much differently.
Re:Waste MORE time!? (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't think the athletics programs themselves are purely to blame. I played football my senior and junior years of high school. I wasn't really any good but I had a really fun time, well actually practice sucked but the game nights were enough to make it worthwhile. The coaches would get upset because I played for fun not to boost their career.
I think the emphasis we place on excelling at all these sports to the exclusion of academics is the problem.
Granted I did poorly in school regardless because I wouldn't do any homework. That had nothing to do with sports though. I just didn't see any added value in excelling grade wise. I didn't really want to go to college so scholarships and college admissions wasn't a motivator. I eventually joined the Chair Force as a programmer and got enough experience that now I don't need a degree to find work.
Re:mixed feelings (Score:2, Insightful)
I agree that tenure causes problems, but the problem with eliminating tenure is that the truly great teachers will always be controversial because they'll be teaching students to think critically, question everything. So junior goes home and points out a flaw in his parents' preferred ideology, parents get all mad and start calling for firing the teacher. Admin gives in to pressure, and you've lost a good teacher
Re:Wrong solution (Score:4, Insightful)
the schools cater to the lowest denominator in the classroom, handicapping the rest of the class
That doesn't explain the prevalence of Honors classes, AP classes, etc.
The problem is that there isn't a single problem but a whole rash of much larger, much more subtle problems. There's the problem of anti-intellectualism in American society. There's the problem of school funding being tied directly with property taxes (creating separate-but-unequal education that only reinforces class division). There's the problem of parents not giving a damn about their kid's future. There's the problem of those same parents having to work three jobs to make ends meet, making them too tired when they get home to give a shit about if their kids did their homework.
And there's the problem of people thinking there's just one problem, and if we could just fix that problem! then everything would be alright.
Re:Waste MORE time!? (Score:3, Insightful)
the rest end up working in construction or a similar career
Construction usually pays pretty well, and many construction workers go on to sart their own construction companies and become rich doing so. The fellow who owns Felbers also owns a construction company, and he started out as a construction worker.
My random thoughts... (Score:2, Insightful)
* More hours are not necessary
* More choice would be a good step (school vouchers for instance)
* Reduce effect of tenure (i.e. make it easier to fire a bad teacher)
* Pay for performance (why does a teacher need to be in their 50s before they earn well, and conversely why should a bad teacher in their 50s be paid very well)
* Encourage academic competition (knowledge bowl, mathcounts, etc.)
I took advantage of the talented youth program at a local University to get ahead in Math. I started that in 9th grade after a successful year in the Mathcounts team in 8th grade. Believe it or not, my local math teacher _discouraged_ me from doing it. Why? Because he thought I would get a better education with him.
I ended up being the first student at my small school to achieve a 4 or better on the AP calc test, and I took the test as a junior instead of as a senior. My point is that students should be challenged and not discouraged from pushing themselves to greater achievements. I believe many in the educational system find the lowest common denominator and teach to that, which is a real dis-service to most students.
Re:Waste MORE time!? (Score:3, Insightful)
Just as a counterpoint, the greatest lesson from high school that has driven my success did not come from a classroom. It came from a wrestling mat. There I learned that if I took a shot and got hit with a particularly fierce counter, whining was NOT the appropriate response. The only appropriate response was to drive through it, or change tactics.
As an adult, things have not always gone particularly well for me. I know few people for which things are always rosy. My response to the typical trials of life has been what I learned from a sport, and it has put me far ahead of those in my peer group, who otherwise had the same classroom instruction but that did not learn what the wrestling mat had to teach.
Re:Bad Idea (Score:3, Insightful)
Americans are no longer philosophically equipped to deal with the reality that different people have different capabilities.
We live in an age that Charles Murray refers to "Educational Romanticisim", whereby the Left ponders that every child would be an Einstein, if not for insufficient funding, and the Right ponders that every child would be an Einstein if only we had school choice.
Whatever the merits of each proposal, the indisputable reality is that human ability occurs in a distribution from one end to another (hence "The Bell Curve"). As a fairly radically egalitarian society, we obsess about the left side of the curve.
Can schools be made better, in general? Probably. Can they be made dramatically better, in general, by any approach? I doubt it. Will they be made significantly better by simply spending more time doing what they do now? I'm certain that they cannot.
One last quote, from Thomas Sowell:
A man is not even equal to himself on different days.