Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
You're confusing school with parents and guardians. That's where you are confused. School is school. Parents are parents. Society and culture are society and culture.
I'd be all on board with you if you had suggested stricter schools. But even LAXER than they are now? You've got to be kidding me.
IME peers influence outcomes more than anything else. I've seen some major transformations in very short time.
I teach in a school that can be described as preppy (if that term is even used anymore). Three years ago, we have a girl transfer in mid year. I'd describe her as a goth punk with a bad attitude. She struggled and did poorly that year. The following September I see this pretty girl in a flowered dress and sweater walking down the hall and I can't place her. Then I realize it's punk goth punk girl. The purple hair is gone, the spikes are gone, the leather is gone, the black make up is gone, she's smiling and acting like this has always been the way she is. She graduated last year and is going on to college with her new friends.
I remember thinking as she walked down the hall that day "I bet your parents are happy with this move.".
People underestimate the power of society and I don't understand that. People get that if you live in an area with high gang activity that kids are more likely to get into trouble and have bad outcomes but they don't want to admit that if you live an area where success is modeled that kids are more likely to succeed. I'm convinced it's not the schools or the teachers. It's the neighborhood. Now parents in successful neighborhoods demand good schools and teachers and get them but it's the neighborhood making the schools good and demanding good teachers not good schools and teachers turning the neighborhood around.
While I think teaching is a horrible profession to have as a parent (the hours suck), I wish I'd become a teacher sooner for one reason. I would have realized the power of picking the right neighborhood to raise my kids in. Back when I had my kids I was operating under the delusion that I would be the biggest influence on my kids. NOT even close. It was their peers. I think that's the way it has always been. We told the broker we would not look at houses over $100k back then. THAT was a mistake. We could have raised our kids with much better odds if we'd spent half again that much and we could have done it. It wouldn't have been easy but it could have been done. I see way too much negative peer influence in both of my kids in spite of having taught them better.
That's quite true. Peer influence is huge. So is the influence of the Disney channel stars, and other famous teens on TV, in movies, and in magazines, etc. I recently met the administrator at one of the classiest public schools where I live. We had a really lengthy conversation about how dramatically kids have changed. Kids strive to live the lifestyle of such as Miley Cyrus, Selena Gomez, Justin Bieber, One Direction's members, and so on, and expect the perks, have the entitlement attitude, and want to look like these people. Bad attitude is considered "cool," funny and popular, and when sanctioned for it, they get angry and weep. Their parents are no better! They side with them always against teachers, school, assignments, other kids, and life in general. They also cater to them hand and foot, for example, delivering the lunch of their choice to school upon their call , and when the parents arrive, many of them are themselves surgically altered, using brand names clothes and shoes, cleavaged and mini-skirted, the men using expensive watches and carrying an attitude as if they were Donald Trump. All also imitating their (adult) stars and heroes. So the kids aren't getting a very good example from their parents, and the peer influence only helps to encourage them down the shallowest possible path.
At the private school I taught at in a large city, it was far worse. Nightmarish, in fact. OMG the students each felt he/she was a star, judging from the attitude they carried. Pathetic, living in such a dream world. The wealthier parents will provide for these total loser kids who prefer to behave like famous stars rather than to become accomplished. The ones whose parents aren't wealthy will be out of luck.
You're confusing school with parents and guardians. That's where you are confused. School is school. Parents are parents. Society and culture are society and culture.
I'd be all on board with you if you had suggested stricter schools. But even LAXER than they are now? You've got to be kidding me.
I am not confusing anything. 10,000+ hours in school does not go without effect.
I did not mention anything to do with strict or lax schools in that post. I was talking about how school affects students. Please, read. I also do not believe in your false dichotomy of either "more strict" or "more relaxed."
I'm sure not many people could answer questions back then, either. Plop an interviewer into NYC back in 1890, I bet 50 percent of young people could not answer that question. The very small percentage of people who went to High school probably did perform well, but then again our top 10 percent perform quite well in this day and age.
BTW, my child could and can still name any number of battles, generals, locations, leaders, and other such Revolutionary type questions. He is not a history buff. It is simply in our elementary curriculum. So if the students don't know it, it is because they forgot-not that it has not been taught.
Agreed. There was an old SAT test from I believe the 1920s, on one of these boards once. The questions were amazingly easy! A 6th grader could do the math.
Agreed. There was an old SAT test from I believe the 1920s, on one of these boards once. The questions were amazingly easy! A 6th grader could do the math.
Actually they weren't quite that easy.
You don't learn about surface speed (RPM) in 6th grade.
Agreed. There was an old SAT test from I believe the 1920s, on one of these boards once. The questions were amazingly easy! A 6th grader could do the math.
"Too many moving parts, but I'd rather we work on it, argue about it, than to accept "the curriculum of 19XX was fine, let's just stick with that forever."
My question to you...again...is what has changed that would result in the curriculum of 19XX no longer working? You want us to look at finding something else. I'm asking why we need something else. Has what needs to be taught changed? Has the human brain changed? Has the purpose of education changed?
My question to you is why do you think the curriculum of 19XX wouldn't work today? You don't want us to accept that the curriculum of 19XX is fine. I'm asking you why.
Entropy - If it's not growing, it's dying. Perhaps you misunderstood my call to assess and improve for wholesale change. i'm very much against knee-jerk reactions, chasing the latest fad and very much for strong standards and focus on basics, but continuosly improving. Yes the curriculum and methods of 19XX worked for guys like you and me, but what about all the kids it didn't work for? Simply sticking our heads in the sand and mimeographing the same lesson plan year after year isn't serving humanity. I'd hope that there isn't a teacher out there who doesn't ask, "what can I do better next year." When there's one that thinks they have it perfect, or worse yet don't care, that's a teacher that needs to go. Plenty changes in the world. From the heavens to deep below the surface of our planet, within our bodies and our soles, we continue to discover new things, even new old things and helping kids better deal with how to think, rather than JUST facts (you'll notice I'm not shirking responsibility for learning the facts.), how to analyse and problem sovle will serve us well into the next century.
Yes, the prupose of education has changed. The movement into independent thought and reason has moved into lower age levels, so the prupose at a given age has changed - now the question is, have some components of that change been misguided. I belive yes, they were/are. But that's where continued analysis and revision comes in.
I am not confusing anything. 10,000+ hours in school does not go without effect.
I did not mention anything to do with strict or lax schools in that post. I was talking about how school affects students. Please, read. I also do not believe in your false dichotomy of either "more strict" or "more relaxed."
Neither does 40,000 hours with parents.
Do you realize that kids have spent more than that 10,000 hours with their parents before the set foot in kindergarten (this is assuming the parents work and kids spend an average of 6 hours a day with their parents.)?
Entropy - If it's not growing, it's dying. Perhaps you misunderstood my call to assess and improve for wholesale change. i'm very much against knee-jerk reactions, chasing the latest fad and very much for strong standards and focus on basics, but continuosly improving. Yes the curriculum and methods of 19XX worked for guys like you and me, but what about all the kids it didn't work for? Simply sticking our heads in the sand and mimeographing the same lesson plan year after year isn't serving humanity. I'd hope that there isn't a teacher out there who doesn't ask, "what can I do better next year." When there's one that thinks they have it perfect, or worse yet don't care, that's a teacher that needs to go. Plenty changes in the world. From the heavens to deep below the surface of our planet, within our bodies and our soles, we continue to discover new things, even new old things and helping kids better deal with how to think, rather than JUST facts (you'll notice I'm not shirking responsibility for learning the facts.), how to analyse and problem sovle will serve us well into the next century.
Yes, the prupose of education has changed. The movement into independent thought and reason has moved into lower age levels, so the prupose at a given age has changed - now the question is, have some components of that change been misguided. I belive yes, they were/are. But that's where continued analysis and revision comes in.
Ok, I totally agree with continuous improvement. I really think education needs to take a lesson from industry here. I'm a firm believer that you could start with any curriculum and address the issues one by one and end up with a good program in several years. Unfortunately, in education we tend to throw the baby out with the bathwater and adopt new programs in entirety only to find they have just as many problems as the old program and all we've done is address one problem at the expense of another.
If it were up to me, I'd go back to version 19XX as my basis because I believe we did a better job of preparing kids for college back then. I'd analyze what worked and what didn't then pick things that didn't work well to work on one by one. I think kids need to learn facts and algorithms because you need something in your head to think about before you can think critically about anything. I think kids need to learn how to learn. I don't want to know where I would be if I'd been handled the way kids are handled today. The fact no one accommodated my short attention span forced me to learn how to succeed in spite of it. As an adult I was diagnosed as ADD but it was decided that I had developed coping mechanisms that worked for me and medication might undo that so we never tried it. I can imagine with the coddling we do with kids like me today that I'd still have problems because I never would have learned how to work around my own issues.
You'll be happy to know that I don't have a binder of last year's lesson plans and never will have one. I don't reinvent the wheel each year but I take the time to decide whether or not to make changes up front. No matter how good I get there will always be a worst lesson plan to work on. It makes more work for me but I never want to be that teacher who just pulls out the binder and heads to the copy machine. Most of my lesson plans get minor tweaks from year to year but I pick one or two to completely revamp each year (much to the chagrin of my students who like to just copy what big brother/sister did in my class).
As to the kids for whom version 19XX didn't work many of them don't belong on a college prep program. They should be in a program that is more fitting their ability and goals.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
The inmates are running the prison as things are.
