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That's because the way the school system is set up, grades are carrots dangling in front of students, and classes are a list of tasks to get through. Get through the class, get your carrot, next!
Exactly.
Yep. I'm a very curious learner, but that hardly ever showed through in class. It's on my own time that it really shines.
I have a few curious students who will delve deeper but most just want their grade. They treat classes like ticket punching to move to the next level.
As someone who is fresh out of high school, I have to admit 'tis all too true, and I'm what's considered a "high-achieving" student. The simple truth is that practically all secondary education systems, no matter where they are in the world, don't really seem to foster curiosity. I think a large part of that has to do with the standardization of schools and increasingly unreasonable expectations of college admissions, which IMO place a little too much emphasis on being well-rounded.
I happen to work well in an educational environment like that because I like most subjects and activities just fine, but I'm hardly the norm. Most kids have a pretty good idea of what they like/dislike by the time they're beginning high school, and I think being forced to take too many classes in unappealing subject areas tends to demotivate them in all subjects.
Us Millennials are no more or less curious than previous generations. Just because some (most) of us seem unmotivated in the classroom doesn't mean that we don't pursue our interests outside of schoolwork.
In this age of teacher accountability & using test scores to fire teachers, curiosity is a luxury. If it's not on the test it's not going to be taught -until the test is done, you can't teach other topics.
Yep. I'm a very curious learner, but that hardly ever showed through in class. It's on my own time that it really shines.
For me, it showed in class but my teachers didn't know what to do with it. I did have a few great teachers though. In 3rd grade, we were doing an art project and I didn't like that doubling tape to make loops made things stick up so my teacher gave me some paste. Later she found me playing with the paste and came over to talk to me. I asked her why paste makes paper stick. She tried to explain that paper was made of fibers and that the paste gets between the fibers but my 8 year old mind saw a solid sheet of paper. So, a few weeks later, we did a science project. We made paper from pulp.
My high school algebra teacher said that I'm a why person stuck in a what world. She said that she could take a room full of students and show them how to do a problem and, while everyone else was doing the problems assigned, I'd be too busy trying to figure out why it works the way it does. OTOH, she said she could take the same room of students, teach they why things work the way they do and I'd be the only one to figure out how to do the problems.
I'm not sure how I'd handle a class full of kids like me but I'd love to take up that challenge.
In this age of teacher accountability & using test scores to fire teachers, curiosity is a luxury. If it's not on the test it's not going to be taught -until the test is done, you can't teach other topics.
(I need a frowny thumbs up for this one) You're right. They don't judge us on the cuirosity of our students but, rather, on what percentage meets the minimum. I could let the upper half of my classes stagnate, concentrate on the bottom 30% and look like a great teacher. I could challenge the upper half of my class, entice them to learn and grow and look like a lousy teacher when the test scores come out. Unfortunately, I can't serve the extremes well in the classroom with 30 kids in the room. Allowing for travel time around the room, I only get 2 minutes per lab group on lab days.
My biology teacher had an interesting approach, which I think fostered and rewarded curiosity. On the final exam, students could append an "extra credit" essay, written without notes in the exam room, on any relevant biology topic not specifically covered in the semester's material. This was worth up to ten points, according to merit, so it was possible to get a final exam score as high as 110. This was announced in advance, so students could do independent study in preparation for it.
These days, exams and scoring might be so rigidly standardized that such a thing would be impossible. But at the time, preparation for these extra credit essays even became lively topics of discussion in the lunch room.
I think, increasingly, "curious" children are being classified as Learning Disabled, and then placed into special-ed to beat it out of them and make them act normal and follow the flow-chart.
I had a classroom full of students like this...they could not sit still for anything that did not interest them...but when given choice, for example, one of my students, who was a good reader, failed an English assignment, I asked him why...he said that he did not want to read the "Diary of Anne Frank", he thought it was a boring book. For my class, students were allowed to choose what they wanted to read, he read "Lakota Woman"...and wrote a very insightful, 10 page essay on this book, and how he related it to his own experience of being Native American.
So, why couldn't the English teacher just let student pick a relevent book to their interests? A 15 year old boy..just does not want to read a diary written by a 14 year old girl.
Almost all children are naturally curious when they enter the educational system. It's the educational system itself that's at fault, destroying the child's curiosity and initiative in short order.
That's because, unfortunately, the entire point of the grotesque apparatus has evolved so that it's no longer about educating children, but rather about grinding their beautiful souls to powder, turning them instead into docile little factory workers, lawyers, soldiers, and middle level managers. Because socialization is now the key objective of schools, they actually squelch initiative, conditioning students to not want to be curious. After all, if you master the material faster and better than other kids, then what happens next? You get put into an Advanced Course, where you get even more work, and more demanding. Where the heck is the incentive in THAT?
So the average child's day goes like this: Sit down. Be quiet. Stand in line. Don't speak until spoken to. Fill out this worksheet. Listen to me talk about this subject, even though you mastered it two days ago. Read this book written at the sixth-grade level, even though you read at the tenth-grade level, and then listen to me talk about it for the next two weeks. Sit down. Don't question authority. Don't read ahead. Be quiet some more. And the sequence goes on and on ad infinitum.
Educators love to go on and on about the nobility of teaching, yet it is probably the least creative enterprise in American life today. In fact, if you plucked some child out of the 1880s and plunked him down into a modern classroom, he would find it to be mostly familiar. Sure, there would be differences, but the school day would largely go the same way, with force feeding of information in the way educators deem necessary, at the pace they deem necessary. Personally, given the mindbending monotony of what passes for the modern classroom, I'm amazed that there aren't more discipline problems in school than there actually are now. I mean, just to give you a fine example, even recess is now programmed activity for most students, because God forbid that any child might want to play in his own particular way.
Think about it. Put a six-year-old into a classroom, and everything is exciting. Yet in six or seven short years, those same children have turned into dispirited, sullen husks of their former selves. What has school done to them during the intervening time to make them that way?
Last edited by cpg35223; 05-26-2011 at 04:33 PM..
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