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With all due respect, I get you are passionate about this topic but as someone in a different field this is an example of something many would consider both useless and trivial. Meanwhile I use basic chemistry every single day (which someone else pointed out was useless and trivial to them) and thus it is neither to me.
I think we're crossing topics here and may be miscommunicating. For this discussion it's not about whether "geography is useless" and "math is good" or in this specific of history vs chemistry, but rather in the teaching of any of these subjects, there is useful knowledge and there is trivial data. To use chemistry as a topic, I think a lot of us would agree that some knowledge of chemistry and the scientific method is good. But, I think a lot of us would also agree that memorizing the periodic table is kind of pointless. Understanding how it works and what it means, absolutely yes.
Would you not agree that a teacher putting a partially filled out periodic table on a test and asking the students to fill in the blanks is the kind of pointless exercise that will turn students off science while achieving no understanding?
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?"
We didn't have to memorize states or capitals, or counties, or Presidents. We did have to know the dates of important events, and what they were about, why events and trends unfolded the way they did, who the important figures were, and why they were important, and that kind of thing.
What I found useless was higher math, and literature. I never understood the point of literature, and reading novels. Everything we had to read in literature classes, except for the year spent on Beowulf and other early lit, was unbearably depressing. I found biology to be very useful, and the teacher was engaging.
So much of what we learned in school was useless in the grand scheme of life. It’s purpose was merely to fulfill the whims of those tasked with what minutiae to impose upon us.
My daughter spent a day at a new kind of school here in Florida that has a program called Passion Projects. This program allows students to select a project to complete during the school year that is something they themselves are passionate about(hence the name). The school supplies start up funding(within reason) and mentor ship for those projects deemed “for-profit”, and mentor ship for those deemed “not for profit”.
These kids are creating businesses, growing organic veggies for a local homeless shelter, and dozens of other endeavors. My daughter says these kids are incredibly energized to work on their projects. They are learning about finance, how to create a business plan and a budget, and all kinds of necessary skills to succeed in the real world. She’s going to present this concept to her college presentation class next week so it will be interesting to see how many of her peers agree it’s time to think outside the box when it comes to education.
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%.
You seem to think all of learning is conscious, very little of it is, that just isn’t how our brains work. We teach little children how to learn without ever sitting them down and saying “this is how you learn” because for the vast majority of people, that does them no good.
And yes, who doesn’t have a kid who made up silly songs about colors or animals names or whatever? Just because a child hasn’t had the method of using music along with facts to engage both hemispheres of the brain doesn’t mean they don’t subconsciously do it once it has been shown to them.
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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.
Nonsequiter aisde, word dividers go back to the Phoenicians, so it wasn’t like scripto continua had to be replaced by an entirely new idea. White space was just a new style of word divider, not a new idea to divide words themselves.
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How many people would have seen some mold on ruined specimen dishes and realized the importance of penicillin? In thousands of years, one did.
You think people have been using specimen dishes for thousands of years?
Anyway, what Fleming did was isolate the mechanism of penicillin. His contemporaries (doctors and scientists) had been noticing and discussing the effect of molds on cultures for years. The history of antibiotics is fascinating, but your characterization of it as one mans work is completely off base. This is a good read if you are interest.
Dougherty, Thomas J., and Michael J. Pucci, eds. Antibiotic discovery and development. Springer Science & Business Media, 2011.
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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.
If you say so.
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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.
Taught correctly? Like the history of word dividers and antibiotics? You appear to be laboring under the assumption that there is one correct way to teach something. I suggested you learn a bit more bout how the brain actually learns, it’s interesting stuff.
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.
In order to make arguments or even to make larger connections you have to anchor them to facts. Children are capable of learning facts much earlier in their development than they are of making complex connections between them. Yet being able to recall those facts is a vital skill to using them in the argument later on. Learning what one considers trivial facts is training the brain to access information, so that later it can be used to make connections.
These so called trivial or useless information is neither if you understand that you need the skills of memory and retrieval to be practiced often and on a variety of topics so that deeper use of them can come when developmentally appropriate.
As for the internet, to be honest, I don’t care. Pretending it is the most important technological advancement is as subjective as any other. The wheel, fire, antibiotics, the steam engine, whatever hold the exact same place. Why should one be held as more important than another?
Besides the reality is the skill of constructing and argument is the same for all of those “how did blank effect the world?” type questions. Kids don’t need to be taught the answers to any one of these specifically, they need to be taught how to make an argument and that is a skill that may result in retention of that which is considered trivial. As for testabliity, I teach seniors in a class designed to teach how to answer just that sort of question. Know the first step? Reviewing the lit, learning the minutiae of what many would consider trivial and useless except it is required to know those thing to make a meaningful case for whatever they are arguing.
I think we're crossing topics here and may be miscommunicating. For this discussion it's not about whether "geography is useless" and "math is good" or in this specific of history vs chemistry, but rather in the teaching of any of these subjects, there is useful knowledge and there is trivial data. To use chemistry as a topic, I think a lot of us would agree that some knowledge of chemistry and the scientific method is good. But, I think a lot of us would also agree that memorizing the periodic table is kind of pointless. Understanding how it works and what it means, absolutely yes.
Would you not agree that a teacher putting a partially filled out periodic table on a test and asking the students to fill in the blanks is the kind of pointless exercise that will turn students off science while achieving no understanding?
Memorizing information, recalling it, etc. are all skills we need to use, practice, etc. on a variety of topics in order to have that skill later on in life. Even if what we are memorizing and recalling is of no use to a particular person later in life, the skill of memorization and recall is one we all use everyday.
People seem to think memorization and recall are innate. They are not. If you don’t learn how to memorize and recall, and then practice it, you lose that neural flexibility.
So fine, you don’t use the periodic table info anymore (I do btw but that isn’t the point) but by having to memorize a large detailed piece of information and recall it later, your brain developed neural pathways it otherwise wouldn’t have, you subconsciously learned how to break things into smaller units and reassemble them later, and half a dozen other skills you probably don’t even consciously know the name for. And yet you still reap the benefits years later.
Diagramming sentences in the 5th grade, was the most useless thing I remember from school. I refused to pay any attention to it and certainly didn't need it to understand English composition.
But in regards to the rote memorization of disconnected bits and pieces, how would people get straight A grades and be put on honor rolls, without it? They cram lists of those bits into their short-term memories, right up to the minute they take quizzes and tests and forget most of it, an hour later. They rarely do well on comprehensive achievement tests, that require understanding of how collected knowledge fits together and works.
Funny, but I totally disagree with you about diagraming sentences. I thought it was fun, and I think I’m a champ at sentence structure because of having learned diagraming.
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.
Any job that requires a degree, to some extent, is requiring that degree in order to keep numbers artificially low.
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Originally Posted by Steve McDonald
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.
Funny, but I totally disagree with you about diagraming sentences. I thought it was fun, and I think I’m a champ at sentence structure because of having learned diagraming.
Unlike you I didn't really "catch" diagramming. I can't say whether it was a brain thing or because Julie was maturing faster than the rest of the girls in the class.
I also found that, generally speaking, girls understood diagramming better than boys, which might be tied into brain differences (girls having a better facility with language-talking earlier, larger early vocabulary, etc.).
This comes along with a lot of other changes. For example, cursive writing has died out, although it's now making a comeback, and it wasn't taught because it "allows us to read old documents". Turns out that learning cursive helps to develop and hone fine motor skills, among a couple things dealing with neural pathways.
Going back to something said earlier-no a teacher isn't going to start a penmanship practice/lesson by saying to the kids, "We're going to develop your fine motor skills today" (the teacer might, however, have that as an objective in the written lesson plan).
You could be right about diagraming. I know that I am a visual learner, and not much of an abstract thinker. Some say left handed people are right brained, which I am also.
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