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Since teaching cursive writing is being discontinued and memorizing multiplication tables is considered not necessary, what's the point of teaching anything? Whatever a young person wants to know they can find it on the internet.
Since teaching cursive writing is being discontinued and memorizing multiplication tables is considered not necessary, what's the point of teaching anything? Whatever a young person wants to know they can find it on the internet.
So if kids master the times tables and cursive writing, they should be done with school?
Since teaching cursive writing is being discontinued and memorizing multiplication tables is considered not necessary, what's the point of teaching anything? Whatever a young person wants to know they can find it on the internet.
Unfortunately, many young people think this way.
If all you can do is look things up, then all you can do is use what others have found. You cannot find new knowledge on your own. You are a user of information vs. being a creator of information. Who is worth more? A person who can use a cell phone or computer or one who can create the next generation of one or the other?
One of the issues I see with young people with this attitude is they lack the ability to determine if the information the find on line is reliable. They run with whatever they find because they do not know how to think critically about what they find. Critical thinking is a skill you develop by learning and thinking. In order to think about something it has to be in your head not on your phone.
I tell my students that everything they learn is training their brains to think in a different way. They are developing information processing ability and hopefully information generating ability. At the very least in this digital day and age you need to be able to process information and be able to think deeply enough to determine if the information you have found is reliable and makes sense. Those who can generate it will be very valuable to a society that only can process. They will lead the way.
When I look back on my own education I have come to realize that every subject I studied taught my brain to do something different. In time my brain became able to do more than what I was taught to do. If you take the attitude that you don't need to learn because you can always look things up you never get there. All you will ever be is a parrot parroting back what someone else put on the internet. All you will be able to do is copy others. This is not a unique skill. ANYONE can do that. If I were a business owner and hiring people who can find things on the internet I wouldn't offer more than minimum wage because people who can do that are a dime a dozen.
When it comes to the brain it's use it or lose it. If you do not train your brain to think all you can ever be is someone who blindly follows what they are told. This scares me about this generation. I swear you could get them to do/believe anything with the right internet presence. They can be lead by the nose through their cell phones and if they don't learn to think critically they will be lead by the nose their entire lives.
I love teaching geometry and science because I can force my students to reason through problems rather than look up answers. They try. I used to put a Galileo thermometer on my desk and offer 10 point extra credit for explaining how it works. The phones are whipped out....then I add "BTW, the common internet answer is wrong". Unfortunately, they fixed that one so I don't do that anymore. Now I have a density bottle on my desk and the challenge is to explain how it works. Because my students don't know the name of the process by which it works they can't look it up. In three years I've never had to give those extra credit points. My students give up quickly when the answer isn't right there. They could find it but it takes a little thinking to figure out what to look up. I am very careful to not use terms that will give it away. This isn't surprising. I never had a taker on the Galileo thermometer either.
Older people seem to be able to do something younger people cannot. We can look at an internet posting and determine whether it's garbage or not. To me the error in the old explanation of how the Galileo thermometer works was glaring. My students need to be told if they are right or wrong. I often ask them to compare answers to those of another student and get asked "But how will we know which one is right?". Kids today have little ability to assess the reliability of information they read. They have zero ability to assess their own work. They need someone else to tell them they are right or wrong. You should see what happens when I make my students write their own chemistry procedures. One student will make a mistake, someone else will see it and the next thing you know the entire class is making the same mistake. They never even ask WHY the person did what they did. When I ask WHY I rarely get an answer beyond it was there so we thought we had to use it.
The question you really need to ask is do we want a society full of people who blindly follow what they are told via the internet?
Last edited by Ivorytickler; 05-28-2016 at 06:45 AM..
... Kids today have little ability to assess the reliability of information they read. They have zero ability to assess their own work. They need someone else to tell them they are right or wrong. You should see what happens when I make my students write their own chemistry procedures. One student will make a mistake, someone else will see it and the next thing you know the entire class is making the same mistake. They never even ask WHY the person did what they did. When I ask WHY I rarely get an answer beyond it was there so we thought we had to use it.
The question you really need to ask is do we want a society full of people who blindly follow what they are told via the internet?
To be honest Ivory, I think you see this because you were a practicing engineer before becoming a teacher. I honestly don't believe most teachers who come through traditional programs would see anything wrong. Using your example of procedures, no one teaches them how to develop one, they just follow a cookbook. We get college degreed scientists in at work who have no idea how to write an experimental procedure or do a write-up. Have been in many meetings where they brief senior management on their work and they will state right up there on their PowerPoint chart that the purpose of doing the experiment is to do the experiment.
I am constantly stunned at how much basic stuff we have to teach them, including how to use the library.
My take would be different. The assumption that you make is that everything is available on the internet, probably one Google away. However, what happens if you do not know what to look for? Then Google is helpless too. The internet is useful when we know at least partially what we are after.
I also agree that this levelling downward of the education system is worrisome. I do hope however that somehow the children will learn methodologies to discover and understand new knowledge autonomously.
So if kids master the times tables and cursive writing, they should be done with school?
No but it would help with writing and math skills. I used to have great cursive writing. Then I came to school here and my f'ing idiot teachers couldn't read it so they made me write in block letters. I'm practicing very hard to get my cursive back.
We're dumbing down our kids.
To be honest Ivory, I think you see this because you were a practicing engineer before becoming a teacher. I honestly don't believe most teachers who come through traditional programs would see anything wrong. Using your example of procedures, no one teaches them how to develop one, they just follow a cookbook. We get college degreed scientists in at work who have no idea how to write an experimental procedure or do a write-up. Have been in many meetings where they brief senior management on their work and they will state right up there on their PowerPoint chart that the purpose of doing the experiment is to do the experiment.
I am constantly stunned at how much basic stuff we have to teach them, including how to use the library.
I don't believe that is the case. I first noticed this when I returned to school to work on my MAT. My younger classmates had zero ability to assess their own work. They didn't know if something was right or wrong without being able to check the answers in the back of the book. Often we'd walk out of an exam and they'd talk about how easy it was and they were sure they aced it only to see a look of dismay on their faces when they failed the test. They didn't seem to have enough sense to know what they didn't know. I didn't understand where this came from until I started teaching. If I ask a question in class out come the cell phones. They don't try to reason through the problem they want to google it.
We'll I was writing my own lab procedures in high school without expressly being taught how to do so. How many labs do you have to do before you get the idea of how procedures are written? I remember my mid term final VERY well. We walked in on Monday and the teacher gave us two test tubes. By Friday we had to tell him what was in them. While there were test stations set up around the room (with procedures on how to do each test) it was up to us to decide the order of the tests and whether or not we needed a separation in between steps. If you used up what was in your test tubes you were done. That's what you got. About 25 ml of each solution. Each solution contained 2 compounds. I got 3/4 and I was just elated. I knew I didn't have the last one when I turned my results in but I got 3 out of 4 and earned a passing grade on the semester final. If I did this today I would be drawn and quartered by the parents after I was fired. How DARE I test kids on their ability to apply what I teach. I get push back now because I will put application questions on my tests. Parents and students alike complain that I didn't "teach them how to do THAT". No I didn't. I was asking if you understood well enough to apply what you learned to a new situation. Fortunately, I'm tenured now so this goes no further than a parent complaining. While my principal would love to write me up for stuff like this he can't unless he writes up every teacher in the building who does it and I'm not alone.
My chemistry teacher did not teach us how to do this task. It was an application task. We had done labs throughout the semester using the tests and separation techniques we'd need. What we had to do was develop a flow chart of tests and separations that would allow us to identify the uknowns without running out of solution to test. Today I'd have to hold their hands, walk them through the process and then give them more of their unknowns because they blew it.
I would argue that they should know how to write their own procedures because they've followed procedures so many times. I did in high school. My teacher didn't teach me how to write my procedures for the semester final. He warned us well in advance what that final would be and that it would involve the tests we were learning. It was up to us to come up with the procedures (which are now readily available on line so I couldn't do this as a final anyway). I just did a lab where my students were supposed to write their own procedures. I would say most groups copied what another group did without even thinking about what they were doing. If I hadn't changed the name of the lab I'm sure I would have gotten lots of canned procedures looked up on the internet. It amazes me that all I have to do is not use a key term and they can't find what they need on the internet.
This is something new. In fact it's one of the reasons I decided to move from engineering to teaching. Starting in about Y2K, I noticed that the incoming engineers had some similar characteristics that weren't good. They needed to be told what to do, told when it was right, and they needed to be patted on the back frequently or their self esteem went into the toilet. Year after year my boss chose not to hire the engineers in training that would come through our group. I asked him why and he told me he couldn't deal with having to pat them on the back just for showing up to work. That decision would come back to haunt him when in spite of not hiring new people for years he still had to make the same cuts all the other departments made. If he'd hired them maybe I'd still be an engineer. I was one of the last cut.
I blame the internet and the idea that you just need to be able to find information. I kid you not that my students act like the person who FINDS the information on the internet first is the SMART one. Like they did something. No, you looked up someone else's answer. That is not the same as doing something on your own.
Education has attempted to fight this by defaulting to inquiry based learning but they just google the answers there so that doesn't work. The idea is to conduct an experiment and then reason out what it means but nothing is accomplished when they just google the answers. It's all out there on the internet. I have to come up with unique things and then avoid terms that will allow them to look up the answers to get any thought at all out of them and then it will only be a few as the rest will do whatever they do. They're great at cheating. I used to think they were very creative and put a lot of effort into cheating but then I realized that the instructions are online. Being someone who doesn't turn to Google for the answer first it never dawned on my to Google ways to cheat. I came to the conclusion quickly that my efforts to thwart cheating will never work. There are too many ways they can cheat and I just can't police them all. I was dumbfounded by the plethora of cheating methods available on line. Yeah, I'm worried about what will happen to society when this generation is in control. They can't think for themselves and are easily led by the nose by the right internet presence. I blame how easy it is to look up answers vs. think.
Last edited by Ivorytickler; 05-28-2016 at 12:40 PM..
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I'm sure I would have gotten lots of canned procedures looked up on the internet. It amazes me that all I have to do is not use a key term and they can't find what they need on the internet. 
