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And again, that's wonderful in a pragmatic, academic sense, but if the instructor doesn't TELL YOU that is what they were teaching you, it will escape 99.9% of the students, precisely because it escaped the instructor as well.
Not true at all. When we sit down with little kids to teach them motor skills or memory tricks do you tell them that is the goal or do you just play patty cake or sing the alphabet song?
In gym class did your teachers explain the goal of using large muscle groups before kick ball or did they just let you play?
The purpose of school is to learn how to learn, how you get there need not be explained before every lesson.
We have a lot of useless courses because, susprise, teachers want to get paid.
But it’s more crazy with what they dont cover than what they do cover.
IMO years of K-12 courses should be spent on personal finances and homeownership as these are the two most important aspects of your finances. You can take it in college but by then it’s too late, you’re already in student loan debt just to go go to college.
Decisions about student loan debt, like many financial ones, come under the purview of parents. Should kids whose parents have taught them these things be forced to forgo a class that their parents cannot teach just because you think it’s important? Make them electives at best.
Yeah, the very basics to cook some coffee, make some pancakes, take care of your pets, and not put too much clothing in your luggage. Not the advanced stuff.
Hell you use math everyday too when you’re calculating a tip, not Algebra 2 and Calculus.
Fact is a lot the stuff kids learn today is useless.
Yes, that is why most classes should be electives. You mention finances in another post, I have an accountant, lawyer and financial planner to manage my finances. Meanwhile I use science and math everyday. What is useful to you, is not to others and vice versa.
Not true at all. When we sit down with little kids to teach them motor skills or memory tricks do you tell them that is the goal or do you just play patty cake or sing the alphabet song?
In gym class did your teachers explain the goal of using large muscle groups before kick ball or did they just let you play?
The purpose of school is to learn how to learn, how you get there need not be explained before every lesson.
Singing the alphabet song doesn't teach memory tricks, it IS a memory trick. What percent of children, upon learning the alphabet that way, spontaneously create similar devices for other groups of information? You know it has to be less than 1%, probably less than .01%.
It took the Romans hundreds of years to realize that it would be a good thing to separate letters into words in their inscriptions instead of running them all together. It took incredible geniuses to understand that cause and effect can sometimes be reversed to get back what was there originally. That's why it took thousands of years to discover the principles that brought us photography, sound recordings, radio, and telephony.
How many people would have seen some mold on ruined specimen dishes and realized the importance of penicillin? In thousands of years, one did.
I guarantee that my elementary school phys ed teachers couldn't have cared less about large muscle development, or they would taught us the importance of continuing it outside of class.
Don't tell me what needs to be explained in school. If you expect it to be learned, It needs to be taught correctly, which means explaining its use once you've done the lesson.
My mind wanders while walking the dog. Today it wandered to all the time spent "learning" useless information in school that was needed only for the test and how much more effective school could be if it focused only on the important rather than trivial pursuit.
Just as an example, thinking back to my history teacher, he was a wonderful teacher. Really created an interest in history. Yet at least half the curriculum and most of our brain power as students was used to memorize useless trivia. Take for example, having to memorize the names of the counties or the eight lords proprietors. What does that really matter vs understanding how government works, and why it was designed that way. "Why?" is an important part of history, yet so little time was spent on it vs names and dates.
Saw similar things across so many of my classes -- a focus on the "easy to test" memorization of trivial facts with little emphasis on causes and effects. Even most of our science classes were about memorization, not understanding.
Makes you wonder how much better it would be if we put emphasis on "why" and "how" rather than "what year was so and so born?"
ya i think about all the useless stuff we had to learn in school and i wonder what was the point of even learning it.lol.
Makes you wonder how much better it would be if we put emphasis on "why" and "how" rather than "what year was so and so born?"
That's the conceptual approach.
Unfortunately, the psychology of the learner generally precludes its use before adolescence, but it's totally appropriate for high school material.
I did my student teaching stint with Ms Perez (not even remotely of Hispanic origin) who got an history degree with the idea that if she couldn't get a job, she'd teach (her words, not mine) at Oak Hills High School, and joined them at the point where she wasted the lives of the students spending 6-freaking weeks on the Civil War, and they ended up learning practically nothing.
If you can't teach the Civil War in three days, you ought be stripped of teaching and relegated to flipping hamburgers at McDonald's.
In the conceptual method, you provide students only with that information which can be applied conceptually, and names, dates and locations are rarely of any value.
Knowing the date and location Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation is of no value, but giving students a list of vocabulary words, making them look up the definitions of those words, and then making them apply the definitions to the Emancipation Proclamation is of great value: Where the slave States that remained in the Union "in rebellion"? No. How many slaves were freed there? Zero. Did the Union have the authority or ability to enforce the Proclamation in the States that were in rebellion? No. How many slaves were freed? Zero. Then why issue the Proclamation? To appease the Abolitionists who were totally opposed to the War and were protesting and rioting in cities in the North like Cincinnati and New York, where Lincoln had sent federal troops to suppress the demonstrations, and if federal troops are suppressing demonstrations in the North, they can't be used to fight in the South. Why did Lincoln hold off issuing the Proclamation until there was a Union victory? For propaganda purposes. What if another year passed before the Union had a victory? That's an interesting question.
Those only lead to more concepts, like 1st Amendment rights such as Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press and Freedom of Assemble (peaceably, but even peaceful protests by Abolitionists were set upon by federal troops).
That leads to even more concepts, like a citizen's duties and obligations, and the use of civil disobedience, and what should citizens do when they disapprove of their government's actions? How far should their actions go?
And then you can apply those concepts to other events. If civil disobedience disrupted the Lincoln Administration, then what would have happened if Japanese and Germans engaged in civil disobedience during WW II?
And then you can apply all of that to the student's own lives today, regarding the government's military actions in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, and future military actions, which are likely to include Syria, Iran and Central Asia.
And you can do all of that largely without relying on names, dates and places, and it's much more interesting and holds the attention of students longer, plus they actually learn and practice analytical skills which are relevant to their lives.
Your Masters in education is completely different from a research-based STEM Masters. The degree that you have exists only to keep the potential pool of teachers and administrators artificially low. I probably should have been more specific.
Lot of good that fancy STEM degree did you... Maybe it's time to start making better decisions... There are no accommodations in life.
Your Masters in education is completely different from a research-based STEM Masters. The degree that you have exists only to keep the potential pool of teachers and administrators artificially low. I probably should have been more specific.
I believe you have said that Ed degrees, both Bachelor's and Master's, are easy to get and that's why so many people get them, so what you state above is somewhat contradictory.
That is very true. The only reason that grad school exists is to provide cheap, compliant labor to do the professors' "research", that the professor can take the credit for and get paid for. I learned that the hard way.
As an undergraduate, with no academic credentials or status, I came up with a research proposal about a specific example of what we were studying in a senior/graduate level class. The professor and his two grad assistants were very interested, as it had never been studied before and I had all the specimens needed.
It was in the field of embryology, about blocked hybridization between two closely-related bird species. So we conducted what was an unofficial and unfunded little project, that took just three afternoons and evenings. What I supplied, was a couple dozen partially-incubated eggs, some purely from each of the species and some that were from hybrid matings. I raised a large number of wild species of waterfowl and upland birds, on my family's farm.
These people were very skilled in this type of work. I would have been lost trying to see on my own, the microscopic features they found, that confirmed my hypothesis. As I suspected, there was apparently a lethal gene combination in the hybrids. In this case, the embryonic development stopped at the 5th cell division.
Despite my lack of ability going into this project, by the time we finished, I had gained enough skill with their guidance, to have some independent functionality. I could have gone through years of college courses in an ordinary way and never learned what I did in those three days. This is the kind of higher education that really counts and that refutes claims that it's useless.
But there was another lesson from this. A year or so later, the results of our study were described in a minor scientific article, in a low-circulation professional newsletter. That didn't really qualify as being "published research". I never knew of any peer review or repeats of the study. The names of the professor and the grad students were given but no reference to me; not even a mention of an unnamed undergraduate contributor.
The problem with this is, everyone has a different opinion on what is important and what is trivial.
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Originally Posted by lkb0714
Except, once again, the dfintions of testable and useful are going to vary widely from individual student to individual student as well as teacher to teacher.
I think both of these go together well. While there may be opinion involved, I believe that a reasonable sample could work out what is generally important, even if not to an individual, and what is generally trivia. As for testable, there are probably those who have studied that topic (I know there are; we did some work on it in the 90s for a project, but I don't recall the details) but going back to the earlier discussion of the cotton gin as an example. Who invented the cotton gin is easily testable, but other than for background purposes, really of little importance. What resulted from the cotton gin being invented however could be the subject of a lot of PhD dissertations. Or for a more relevant invention, "who invented the internet" is a typically nerdy topic, that no one really cares about.
In that respect "Who invented the internet?" is both testable and trivial. "How did the internet affect the world?" is not easily testable but is of major significance.
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