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I do not have any children but I feel as a high school teacher I can chime in. I graduated from high school in 1999, 10 years ago. I graduated just before the state of NC went the route of standarized testing and I'm SO thankful for it. There is a big difference in what I teach today and what I was taught. What the kids are learning today is NOTHING compared to what I was exposed to. More than the content it's the experiances the kids of today are missing out on. My high school Biology class was amazing, we had pets, we did experiments, we did some really cool ecosystem projects etc. My class cannot do half of what I did. I have to focus only on the state testing requirments. If my kids don't score well on those tests, I can and will be let go.
We supplement a lot outside of school to provide the pre-existing knowledge structure that is required in order for today's trendy 'discovery' learning to be even marginally productive.
Thank you for admitting that. Sometimes I think that tutoring and supplementation are the biggest "well-kept" secret in the world.
The "classified information" (of just exactly who is supplementing or tutoring their kids) comparison parallels that of the either the Pentagon or the Mob (I can't decide which) for the love of Pete.
Last edited by cebdark; 07-02-2009 at 12:07 PM..
Reason: changed
Everyone likes to complain about the schools today, and say our educational system in America is broken. Sure, it could be improved but in my case I see better schools in my hometown than I had in the same community 30 years ago. I can not get over the number of programs and activities kids get today and it seems to me the teachers are more qualified than my day.
Is this true in your community? Is the quality of education in your kids school better than what you had when you attended back in the good old days in your community?
Worse when it comes to kids like I was and my kids are now. Better when it comes to the bottom of the class and kids who weren't even allowed into regular schools when I was a kid.
Unfortunately, for kids like I was and mine are now, we've dummied down education so we could include more lower performing kids in the classroom and get them to graduation. Any improvements are in the bottom 3rd of the class from what I can see. The top 3rd no longer achieves what it used to because we're teaching to the bottom not the top.
I'm a chemistry teacher and the only way I can teach chemistry for all (our state requires all students take chemistry or physics to graduate) is to dummy down chemistry. How do you teach a class that, traditionally, only the top third of students took to the 2/3 who normally wouldn't take it without dummying it down significantly? There's no way I can teach chemistry to all students and still teach to the levels we taught to when only college bound students took chemistry. The biggest problem being that half of the kids in my classes are mad that they're being forced to take a class that they see themselves as never needing. They are not there to learn chemistry. They are there to learn the bare minimum to graduate and getting them to do that is like pulling teeth.
Teachers are more qualified. We are required to be subject matter experts in addition to holding teaching degrees these days but we now teach subjects to all kids that we only taught to the top before. To do that, you have to teach to the bottom of the class and that dummy's down education for the kids who are above average. So, while the numbers show our averages have come up, the gains are in the bottom of the class and it's at the expense of the top of the class.
This is something I have to fight. I have a daugther who tests in the top 1%. The school would love to just ignore her until graduation because she passes all the tests now. They get the point for her passing whether they do anything with her or not. They'd much rather put their effort towards getting a child who wouldn't otherwise pass the test to pass. I have to push every step of the way and threaten to move her to another school. They only act when I threaten to take that passing point she represents away from them. IMO, she's not the student you should ignore. She's the one who can compete with the top students worldwide. She's the one who can make a real difference someday. Yet she's the one who is ignored because there is nothing in it for the school to meet her needs. She already passes the test. According to her test scores last year, she already meets the minimum for high school graduation and she's only in the 7th grade.
(I'm talking about the local schools here not the charter she has attended for the past 4 years. She's returning to the local schools because the G&T program in the charter pretty much ends at 6th grade and there are honors courses for her there. I couldn't get anything for her at the elementary level in our local schools. Though they did assign both of my kids to the best teachers in the school the year I pulled them in an attempt to get us to keep them there.)
Last edited by Ivorytickler; 07-02-2009 at 12:56 PM..
The education my kids are receiving in public school is significantly inferior to the education I received in public school.
We supplement a lot outside of school to provide the pre-existing knowledge structure that is required in order for today's trendy 'discovery' learning to be even marginally productive.
The following article from Educational Psychologist provides a good analysis on why the currently popular constructivist instructional methods yield poor results. Those methods ignore what is known about the way humans process information and learn.
I love that they expect kids to discover things like math. They're kids. Don't you think it's expecting a lot to expect them to discover math concepts? This is why my older daughter was blown out of the water by EM. She can't invent math. She's the kind of kid who needs to do the problems 20 times before they start making sense. My younger daughter could discover math concepts but they were often wrong because they were based on too little information being presented. Her methods would work for the problems she was given at that time but I knew they wouldn't work in all cases. This is why I moved my kids to a school that uses Singapore math.
I agree that supplementing is a well guarded secret. And it's parents keeping the secret. When I was fighting EM, I would attend meetings and have parents arguing with me about how good EM was. Then I'd ask for a show of hands of parents who were working with their kids at home or had them in tutoring programs to make it work and nearly every hand would go up. All anyone could see was test scores were up and they attributed that to EM when it was the parents and places like Kumon and Sylvan that were driving the scores up. The program sucked.
My theory is that parents want to believe their schools are good so they do what they have to to prove the point and then sit back and say "see our schools are good". I once got in a heated debate about EM with a woman and I had to remind her that each of her kids had spent, at least, three years in Kumon and ask her if it was EM or Kumon she attributed their success to. She just looked at me like I was from mars. It never dawned on her their success wasn't due to EM. Yet she'd paid for about 9 years of tutoring at Kumon.
I have to defend inquiry based teaching for physics but physics kids are kind of up there to begin with. I think it would work for chemistry too if it weren't so difficult to find experiments students can do inquiry style. You can't just say, here are some chemicals, have at it. I can give my physics students a pile of parts and a vague objective and most of them will come up with something. I find even when they end up way off base, it's a learning experience.
Last edited by Ivorytickler; 07-02-2009 at 12:58 PM..
Everyone likes to complain about the schools today, and say our educational system in America is broken. Sure, it could be improved but in my case I see better schools in my hometown than I had in the same community 30 years ago. I can not get over the number of programs and activities kids get today and it seems to me the teachers are more qualified than my day.
Is this true in your community? Is the quality of education in your kids school better than what you had when you attended back in the good old days in your community?
How about 20 years ago? Yes, it is better than what it was 20 years ago. Maybe not the big city schools, but small town schools. Yes.
My brothers did very well in school and because the school shaped them correctly, one is very goal oriented while the other still is wanting to go to college to figure himself out.
My 3rd brother came from the California school system, where they did a very poor job helping his speech and disability problem. We moved out of that nightmare and into the school my other brothers graduated. Not only was his speech corrected, he no longer needed "special classes."
I can't compare effectively because my children are growing up in a totally different place than I did. I can say that after living in multiple places over the past few years, there can be dramatic differences between school districts, even in the same general vicinity.
Here's a personal anecdote to illustrate:
When I was a child, I attended elementary, middle, jr. high, and two years of high school in the same middle class neighborhood. After my sophomore year, my family moved to an extremely affluent community on the opposite side of town. While I had always done well academically up to that point, I completely crashed my first quarter at the new high school, and it took me awhile to get my bearings. I just wasn't prepared for the difference in work load and my grades plummeted. I cannot say for sure whether that reflects a failure on the part of my previous teachers or a personal failure. I suspect it's a bit of both.
My child is learning so much more than I did in elem school that I'm worried for when he's in middle school & his homework is over my head & I can't help him!
My theory is that parents want to believe their schools are good so they do what they have to to prove the point and then sit back and say "see our schools are good". I once got in a heated debate about EM with a woman and I had to remind her that each of her kids had spent, at least, three years in Kumon and ask her if it was EM or Kumon she attributed their success to. She just looked at me like I was from mars. It never dawned on her their success wasn't due to EM. Yet she'd paid for about 9 years of tutoring at Kumon.
This has been my experience as well - especially about it not dawning on them that the success of the student can be attributed to the tutoring.
The following article from Educational Psychologist provides a good analysis on why the currently popular constructivist instructional methods yield poor results. Those methods ignore what is known about the way humans process information and learn.
As a teacher and a parent, I want to speak my five cents worth about this subject. Compared to the education I received as a child and my own children received I truly feel that that as educators we are not allowed to teach children all they need to learn to make it in todays society. I know that I teach many of the same concepts I was taught, those concepts are taught in such a different manner that I'm not sure my students are learning.
Example; I dissected a frog when I was in 10th grade, my children dissected frogs as 9th and then 8th graders. In 2007, I began dissecting frogs with my 7th grade students. Please don't misunderstand, the students loved this activity, but frankly 7th graders can't focus long enough to really learn what is needed from a dissection.
Also, everything I teach is focused on "the test" I don't really teach what my students need to learn to move to the next level and then on to high school. Now I teach what is needed for our school to score well on "the test". The amount of time I spend on a topic is not dependent on the students learning the concept, but how many questions about that topic are on the test. If you look at my textbooks, some topics have no wear & tear on their pages because they are not on the test, so Ido not teach them.
In this educators opinion, as long as we are slaves to standardized testing, it is our students that are going to suffer the consequences.
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