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As a tutor, I've noticed that more and more students need tutoring, including some of the best and brightest students.
I've also noticed a trend towards studying more college-level material in high school, and to less free time for public school students in general.
I have some theories, that I have posted at
mod cut - removed soliciting.
I'd like some feedback. Do you agree with my logic? Have I left anything important out?
I recognize some of what I say is controversial, especially since I have little sympathy with what I think of as "The Educational/Industrial Complex", a set of special interests who seek to make obscene profits from the business of education.
Last edited by toobusytoday; 03-25-2016 at 06:39 PM..
I'm not going to bite and go to the website but this is a good question. I find that there are two reasons students need tutoring in my classes.
1) The do a brain dump after the test so they have forgotten material they may need to go on. They are conditioned to work for the grade and then move on to the next thing. It's not about learning it's about the grade. Once they have the grade they don't think they need what they learned. Our spiraling system has conditioned them to believe that they will get a review before they need something again. I spend 15 days throughout the year reviewing basic algebra in my geometry classes. I have to or the kids fail the test because they can't do the math. I'm talking simple stuff like isolating a variable.
2) Lack of effort. It's like they're waiting for someone to do it for them. I don't know if it's fear of failure that paralyzes them or that they've had their hands held so much that's what they expect but more often than not students in this category just tune out when presented with material they need to work at to succeed. It's as if they think ignoring it will make it go away or they're waiting for someone else to do it for them.
They are conditioned to work for the grade and then move on to the next thing. It's not about learning it's about the grade. Once they have the grade they don't think they need what they learned. Our spiraling system has conditioned them to believe that they will get a review before they need something again. I spend 15 days throughout the year reviewing basic algebra in my geometry classes.
I don't understand how a student can get good grades without learning.
If that's the case, then course materials and tests should be designed better so that students have to know what they learned earlier.
Question: Is there any way to remove the link to my site from my original post? The board won't let me edit it anymore.
OK, since you don't want to visit my site, here is the relevant part of the content, without the "ad" part.
---------------------------Text at Site------------------
In recent years, American tutors see more and more students, from schools and colleges, even some of the best and brightest. We used to tutor only those students with genuine learning disabilities, had no one at home who could help, or who didn't want to learn. It's important to understand how this change has happened.
Self-serving pundits, many without teaching experience, receive large grants to develop "new and improved" teaching methodologies. They then sell new standardized tests, textbooks, videos, proprietary subscription website access, and teacher training classes, to meet their new standards. These drain time and money from schools, increasing class size, and force even the best students to waste time learning from the new materials, where are inevitably more verbose. Programs like No Child Left Behind" [As I write this, "No Child Left Behind" is being partially abandoned. So we "need" yet another generation of expensive educational materials.], "Common Core", "Blended Learning", and "Flipped Classrooms" have all asked teachers to spend class time helping the least motivated students to just barely pass those tests, as required to receive federal school funding, instead of teaching. The best and most motivated students mostly teach themselves at home, and are no longer encouraged or challenged to learn by their teachers.
The most common problem now for students is the overwhelming volume of extremely repetitive text, lectures, videos, and web pages.
A concise, well organized textbook presents a typical academic class in 100 - 150 pages. [In my opinion, some of the Schaum's Outline series texts are close to the perfect textbook. I.E., cheap, short and sweet, summarize a days worth of learning in a page or so, include solved problems, additional exercises. For the most part, very easy to learn from. You can review quickly by re-reading the explanations. Except that Schaum's Outline books contain many mistakes / page. They need peer reviews, to find the mistakes.] Students instead read 1000 - 1500 pages of text, 3000 - 6000 difficult to navigate web pages, or endless hours of video for a class. Videos are helpful for students who have trouble reading, but good readers can read several times faster than speech, and most web pages waste time on excessive interactivity. Learning is slow, and review, slower still - even if those web pages remain accessible after the class is over. Students don't get enough sleep and lose interest - and do not learn.
They are called learning disabled or are said to have attention deficit disorder, when the real problem lies in the educational system.
Students seeking admittance to elite colleges and universities typically take 5 - 7 advanced placement (college level) classes in high school.
The perceived need has often been justified by a deliberately misrepresented comparison of incoming American college and university students to European university students. But incoming European university students are typically much more select, a year older, and have taken fewer classes outside their majors, though this varies country-to-country. They could more fairly be compared to sophomores at the top American schools in their fields. The increased pressure cuts further into sleep time, squeezes the fun out of learning and life, and is often counterproductive.
It is better to take fewer classes and do well. The high pressure continues for students who attend elite colleges, whereas professors at lessor colleges often try harder to help students succeed.
Newly admitted American college students take "placement tests". Those who fail must take several "remedial" or "developmental" classes, which re-teach all of elementary school through high school Math and English skills, taught in the same inefficient ways, by college teachers with little interest in teaching basic skills. Not surprisingly, about 50% of those students fail, and cannot continue. For these and other college classes, students must now attend 60 - 90 minute lab sessions, where they take turns asking for help, with about 30 other students, from a minimally paid and minimally trained teaching assistant. That's 2 - 3 minutes / student, a waste of time.
The increased need for tutors in America is no mystery to tutors, who see the failed results all the time. Time, money and resources are wasted on new teaching methodologies and materials, leading to increased class size, increased academic course load, and more time needed to study from grossly inefficient new materials, creating a lack of sleep and attention. All of these create learning problems...
I don't understand how a student can get good grades without learning.
If that's the case, then course materials and tests should be designed better so that students have to know what they learned earlier.
Every teacher in the US can tell you with certainty that this is a very real situation and happens much more than we're comfortable with. (<-- preposition... & I don't care. I teach science. )
Kids count points, they put just enough in their short-term memories so as to pass the quiz/test, w/o it ever reaching their long-term memories. This becomes evident when we teach chapter 13 that requires a good, sound knowledge of chapter 6, which all of the kids passed with flying colors, but couldn't recall it if their lives depended on it.
And yes, we keep mentioning memory, when some people are trying to discuss learning. They're hand-in-hand, folks. I can't teach my kids about stoichiometry if they don't remember the concept of the mole, 2 chapters back. I can't discuss gas laws and the relationships of P, V, & T, without them recalling kinetic theory. I can't teach superposition principle of adding vectors without them recalling basic trig functions from Geometry. I could go on all day.
I really don't think this problem is unique to today's students. I've taught for over 2 decades, and I can also recall experiencing it (for myself as a student) when I was in school. But I can state with some expertise that it is probably getting worse. And I know I'll sound like an old fart saying this, but I would lay partial blame on tech. Students are more and more reliant on allowing the tech to be their "memory crutch" for them, instead of building up their own.
I honestly believe - and certain research backs this up - that memories are like muscles: the more use utilize it, the better they become. Long-term memories are not being developed as the students aren't actually working on them.
I don't understand how a student can get good grades without learning.
If that's the case, then course materials and tests should be designed better so that students have to know what they learned earlier.
Because our system doesn't reward the good learners. It rewards the good test takers. Some kids are very good at remembering stuff just long enough to get a good grade on the test. Parents buy into this mentality too. My school allows retakes on tests. Parents are pushing to give students the better of the two grades while the teachers are pushing to take the last grade because it's a better representation of what the student knows. Parents consider that punitive if the student forgets what they knew before...which BTW is what we usually see when students retake the entire test. They get what they got wrong the first time but get things they got right the first time wrong on the second take. This tells me they didn't learn it. They just remembered it long enough to get through the first test. What parents and students prefer is to retake only the portions they got wrong. The mentality is that once they got it right on the test they get the check mark and move on.
Our tests do require them to know what they learned earlier. That's why we have to review it before the test because they need it and have forgotten it. Parents complain that requiring them to know previous material muddies the water. After all my class is geometry not algebra so why am I requiring that they know algebra? They really cry foul in chemistry because I write questions so they need previous material. I'm told this is unfair because the student already passed the test on THAT material. Chemistry is naturally cumulative in nature so I usually win the argument but I have parents who push for me to write tests so previous material isn't required. The only reason I don't get more complaints in geometry than I do is that we do review the needed material. That shuts parents up. I would love to recapture those 15 days to teach geometry instead of reteach algebra but I'd probably hang if I tried it.
The amount of time we lose to reviews and retakes is ridiculous. 15 days are lost to reviewing previous material and 10 to retakes. That's 5 weeks of new material gone from the curriculum.
Every teacher in the US can tell you with certainty that this is a very real situation and happens much more than we're comfortable with. (<-- preposition... & I don't care. I teach science. )
Kids count points, they put just enough in their short-term memories so as to pass the quiz/test, w/o it ever reaching their long-term memories. This becomes evident when we teach chapter 13 that requires a good, sound knowledge of chapter 6, which all of the kids passed with flying colors, but couldn't recall it if their lives depended on it.
And yes, we keep mentioning memory, when some people are trying to discuss learning. They're hand-in-hand, folks. I can't teach my kids about stoichiometry if they don't remember the concept of the mole, 2 chapters back. I can't discuss gas laws and the relationships of P, V, & T, without them recalling kinetic theory. I can't teach superposition principle of adding vectors without them recalling basic trig functions from Geometry. I could go on all day.
I really don't think this problem is unique to today's students. I've taught for over 2 decades, and I can also recall experiencing it (for myself as a student) when I was in school. But I can state with some expertise that it is probably getting worse. And I know I'll sound like an old fart saying this, but I would lay partial blame on tech. Students are more and more reliant on allowing the tech to be their "memory crutch" for them, instead of building up their own.
I honestly believe - and certain research backs this up - that memories are like muscles: the more use utilize it, the better they become. Long-term memories are not being developed as the students aren't actually working on them.
I love teaching science BECAUSE it is so cumulative in nature. My students are SHOCKED to find out they have to remember what they knew before. At first they cry foul but then they realize they just have to knuckle down and do it.
My kids are point happy. Sometimes I use to this to my advantage. For example on one of our geometry tests there is a question for which you could actually show that any answer is possible if you prove enough relationships. I have fun with this one. I tell my students I'll give them full credit on the problem if they can show that their answer works. They work the entire hour trying to figure out this one problem and use a lot of geometry in the process. All for half a point because they get half a point back just for correcting the problem, lol. A lot of learning and reasoning happens that day.
I do think tech has reduced memory capacity but so did books. Before people could read they had to memorize. Then they could write it down. The problem with not memorizing is that you can't think about what's not in your head. You can't put things together in new ways without thinking deeply about them. Lord help us the day our phones can do the thinking for us. It'll be interesting to see how the world changes because people can so easily look things up these days. For this generation finding the answers is probably more important than being able to figure them out. Unfortunately, this means there will be a lot of followers and few leaders. The leaders will be the ones who can put information together in new ways. The followers will just be data finders and processers.
Question: Is there any way to remove the link to my site from my original post? The board won't let me edit it anymore.
OK, since you don't want to visit my site, here is the relevant part of the content, without the "ad" part.
---------------------------Text at Site------------------
In recent years, American tutors see more and more students, from schools and colleges, even some of the best and brightest. We used to tutor only those students with genuine learning disabilities, had no one at home who could help, or who didn't want to learn. It's important to understand how this change has happened.
Self-serving pundits, many without teaching experience, receive large grants to develop "new and improved" teaching methodologies. They then sell new standardized tests, textbooks, videos, proprietary subscription website access, and teacher training classes, to meet their new standards. These drain time and money from schools, increasing class size, and force even the best students to waste time learning from the new materials, where are inevitably more verbose. Programs like No Child Left Behind" [As I write this, "No Child Left Behind" is being partially abandoned. So we "need" yet another generation of expensive educational materials.], "Common Core", "Blended Learning", and "Flipped Classrooms" have all asked teachers to spend class time helping the least motivated students to just barely pass those tests, as required to receive federal school funding, instead of teaching. The best and most motivated students mostly teach themselves at home, and are no longer encouraged or challenged to learn by their teachers.
The most common problem now for students is the overwhelming volume of extremely repetitive text, lectures, videos, and web pages.
A concise, well organized textbook presents a typical academic class in 100 - 150 pages. [In my opinion, some of the Schaum's Outline series texts are close to the perfect textbook. I.E., cheap, short and sweet, summarize a days worth of learning in a page or so, include solved problems, additional exercises. For the most part, very easy to learn from. You can review quickly by re-reading the explanations. Except that Schaum's Outline books contain many mistakes / page. They need peer reviews, to find the mistakes.] Students instead read 1000 - 1500 pages of text, 3000 - 6000 difficult to navigate web pages, or endless hours of video for a class. Videos are helpful for students who have trouble reading, but good readers can read several times faster than speech, and most web pages waste time on excessive interactivity. Learning is slow, and review, slower still - even if those web pages remain accessible after the class is over. Students don't get enough sleep and lose interest - and do not learn.
They are called learning disabled or are said to have attention deficit disorder, when the real problem lies in the educational system.
Students seeking admittance to elite colleges and universities typically take 5 - 7 advanced placement (college level) classes in high school.
The perceived need has often been justified by a deliberately misrepresented comparison of incoming American college and university students to European university students. But incoming European university students are typically much more select, a year older, and have taken fewer classes outside their majors, though this varies country-to-country. They could more fairly be compared to sophomores at the top American schools in their fields. The increased pressure cuts further into sleep time, squeezes the fun out of learning and life, and is often counterproductive.
It is better to take fewer classes and do well. The high pressure continues for students who attend elite colleges, whereas professors at lessor colleges often try harder to help students succeed.
Newly admitted American college students take "placement tests". Those who fail must take several "remedial" or "developmental" classes, which re-teach all of elementary school through high school Math and English skills, taught in the same inefficient ways, by college teachers with little interest in teaching basic skills. Not surprisingly, about 50% of those students fail, and cannot continue. For these and other college classes, students must now attend 60 - 90 minute lab sessions, where they take turns asking for help, with about 30 other students, from a minimally paid and minimally trained teaching assistant. That's 2 - 3 minutes / student, a waste of time.
The increased need for tutors in America is no mystery to tutors, who see the failed results all the time. Time, money and resources are wasted on new teaching methodologies and materials, leading to increased class size, increased academic course load, and more time needed to study from grossly inefficient new materials, creating a lack of sleep and attention. All of these create learning problems...
I would argue that Shaum's outlines are a great place to review but not to learn. A brief outline isn't deep and doesn't lead to understanding. You need to keep in mind that you are not teaching. You are tutoring what has already been taught. Yes, review materials work well for you but they're not going to work in the classroom. I tried using them in college and they didn't help much. They were great for reviewing for my finals and teacher exams though but my understanding of the material goes deeper than they do.
I also don't see lectures as being repetitive. When I lecture on material I lecture once. They do contain material that's in the book but my experience is that students need to see things three times to get it. I require my students to pre read the chapter before I lecture (the only homework assignment I actually give points for because it's so valuable). In my classes it's pre reading, lecture and then an activity using the material. Then we move on. Trust me, seeing it once will not work. If it did work you would be out of a job. Remember YOU are repeating what has already been taught so you're part of the repetition process.
I would argue that the sleep issue has been around since high school students started working. I remember getting home from work at 11:00 and having to get up at 6:00 to catch the bus at 6:30. I was lucky if I got 6 hours sleep on work nights and NO homework got done. That was in the 1970's and I was pretty typical.
While students do take high stakes tests repeatedly this isn't an issue during all school years. Just 11th grade. And yes it has an impact on class work. I teach 11th grade classes and I see my students getting behind as the tests dates come up. I don't see this cutting into their sleep. They prepare for the test and just cut out homework while they're preparing for the test.
As a tutor, I've noticed that more and more students need tutoring, including some of the best and brightest students.
I've also noticed a trend towards studying more college-level material in high school, and to less free time for public school students in general.
I have some theories, that I have posted at
mgrunes.com/tutoring/WhyTutor.html
I'd like some feedback. Do you agree with my logic? Have I left anything important out?
I recognize some of what I say is controversial, especially since I have little sympathy with what I think of as "The Educational/Industrial Complex", a set of special interests who seek to make obscene profits from the business of education.
I don't agree with most of what you have written. The only item I do agree with is your statement about, ""new and improved" teaching methodologies."
My biggest disagreement is your statement, "The most common problem now for students is the overwhelming volume of extremely repetitive text, lectures, videos, and web pages." How can repetition and different ways of learning subject matter have a negative impact on education? I learn by repetition. My mind makes connections to what I already know and have learned. Some students will learn better by watching a video. Others will get a better understanding by going to a website where the material is explained in a different manner.
Education should have advanced because of technology but it hasn't. A teacher can incorporate so much into a lecture with pictures and videos. Compare that to my 11th grade history teacher who read his same notes every year including the dated jokes he had written in the margins.
Starman71 and Ivorytickler addressed some of the real issues. Retention is a major problems. I think it is because of the over-reliance on study guides. Students today don't read textbooks, they wait for the teacher to provide a study guide and learn what they need to know for the test. Why bother reading a textbook when some of it might not be on the test? We all know that you don't want to fill your brains up with useless information.
Technology in the classroom is another problem. Why remember facts when they are instantly googled? What they forget is that facts are necessary to understand concepts. And if school boards and administrators knew how much time was wasted in classrooms because of technology. This includes everything from game playing, social media, looking up worthless stuff, and technology issues such as devices not being charged, classes taking a third of the class period for all students to get logged in and get to a website, and other technical glitches.
Sleep can be an issue with students, but it is their own fault. Many try to get by with less than four hour of sleep every night. Much of it is due to social media and game playing. I have had a student who admits that he is addicted to playing video games all night. He comes to school with with no sleep the night before and wants to sleep in his classes.
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They really cry foul in chemistry because I write questions so they need previous material. I'm told this is unfair because the student already passed the test on THAT material. Chemistry is naturally cumulative in nature so I usually win the argument but I have parents who push for me to write tests so previous material isn't required. The only reason I don't get more complaints in geometry than I do is that we do review the needed material. That shuts parents up. I would love to recapture those 15 days to teach geometry instead of reteach algebra but I'd probably hang if I tried it.
I love teaching science BECAUSE it is so cumulative in nature. My students are SHOCKED to find out they have to remember what they knew before. At first they cry foul but then they realize they just have to knuckle down and do it. 
