What is actually being taught about coniferous* and deciduous* trees? Is it just a case of learning lists of species in each category, or are the children being encouraged to learn how to scrutinise, describe and categorise things? If the latter, then it’s not actually about the trees at all, and neither is it pointless.
*Some conifers are deciduous.
I’m going to come to the OP’s defense, just ever so slightly.
Teaching fifth-graders the Latinate words for evergreens and leafy trees accomplishes little. Teach them why leafy trees lose their leaves every year and why evergreens don’t; teach them about the different life cycles and which ones thrive in what environments; discuss – perish the thought! – whether they were ever the same thing, and when and why they started to become different. That’s real science, and I agree that not nearly enough is taught in schools. But too much of the stuff I learned in grade school (and high school and even college) falls into the “useless” category: data, not knowledge.
ETA: Guess I wasn’t the first.
So, BrandonR, what exactly will we teach in this new school system of yours? The overwhelming majority of people don’t need to know the difference between coniferous and deciduous trees in their daily life. But, by the same token, they don’t need to know whether evolution or young earth creationism is true, or about atomic theory, or Newton’s laws. So this school won’t teach physics, chemistry or biology (or astronomy, or …). You don’t need to know algebra or calculus or probability, so it won’t teach any math beyond arithmetic–but you can just punch that into a calculator, so it won’t teach arithmetic either.
It won’t teach literature (how often, in your job, are you required to know something about Jane Austin?). You don’t need to know much history either, maybe just enough to know when your next day off work is.
So, what’s left? What exactly is this school going to teach?
Part of the reason that we teach y’all’s kids about trees is because kids tend to be really interested in living things. My first year of teaching second grade, I had a gaggle of girls who begged me to teach lessons about trees. It wasn’t in the standard course of study, but I squeezed a unit on trees in under social studies (recognizing important features of the environment) and technology/writing (the class composed a tree-identification guide for our school).
A lot of the content is like that. We have both content and skills that we need to teach. It’s really helpful when the content is engaging. Whether it’s useful for the kids’ future is frankly not as important as is teaching them how to learn, teaching them to love learning, teaching them a breadth of content that provides a baseline for future education in many subjects.
And if you’ve never used deciduous vs. coniferous trees in your adult life, you’ve probably never owned your own home. It’s a pretty important difference if you’re making decisions about landscaping, for example.
The problem I see is that kids are graduating from high school and are unable to read or write, or do basic math. These “three R’s” should be drilled in from Kindergarten through at least the third grade. If anything about science, or history or social studies is in there, it should be exercises in reading (you have to read about something, and if any of those things catch a kid’s interest then they can expand on that later).
Once the kids can read, write and do basic math, then start teaching science and history. The kids can read, so they should be able to pick up a lot of information now. They could teach the basics of both in a year.
Then going into the fifth grade, they could find out what the kids are interested in and let them take courses that stress science, or history, or literature or advanced math.
By the time they graduate from high school, they should all be ready for college.
And for God’s sake, teach 'em to type no later than the fifth grade. These days, there’s not much they’ll do in life that won’t involve using a keyboard.
This wouldn’t change what kids are taught in K-12, it would just put it in a more logical order.
Can’t speak for anyone else, but I’m quite fond of my well rounded general knowledge set.
I like know the difference in the names of tree types. I like knowing all sort of interesting information that was imparted to me when I was a wee taco.
Oh, I have a cousin who flat out refused to learn all that pointless knowledge in school. We called him COUSIN DUMBASS. He couldn’t play Trivial Pursuit and never could hazard even a guess while watching Jeopardy or Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. He did get a job driving a truck, though; the Dumbasses of the world somehow manage to thrive.
Right, you have a better educated population by teaching them knowledge that’s relevant and useful to society. Not by forcing them to memorize trivial knowledge (and that kind of classification of a tree, regardless of what you think, is rather trivial to a huge percentage of the population).
I really don’t want to get the discussion sidetracked by a example I used. I’m sure I could think of more trivial and more pointless information but I’ve forgotten it by now.
And what’s the result? Students in college that can’t do basic algebra and can’t decide between the right kind of “you’re”. It’s pathetic. If students don’t get enough time learning these fundamental skills that are relevant to all fields, why are we spending time teaching them trivia? Math and language skills are relevant to all fields, unlike classifying a forest.
This is a misconception. In truth, the American education system was (until recently) quite successful. The test scores gap could largely be attributed to the fact that many other countries focused narrowly on test scores and rote memorization, while our students were more capable of creative thinking and innovation.
Other countries brought in American education experts to revamp their systems in order to foster creativity.
At the same time, we inexplicably decided to abandon our system, and created a new system combining the worst aspects of education around the world. Focus solely on test taking, but without the hard work.
Knowing that different parts of the countryside around my town have different vegetation makes it easier for me to stay oriented when I go for walks. When I was in college, I could see that the train was 1h10’ away from “home”: 10’ before we got to the station before mine, the color of the soil changed from light brown to red; the plants being grown changed too.
I’m currently studying towards a degree in translation. We were given a text to translate: one of the things that told me the “original” text is actually a translation is that it contains a factual error about soil types and a mis-vocabulary which clearly comes from googling two alternatives and choosing the one with most hits. Only, this alternative does not mean what the translator thought it meant. These errors could be caused by having a writer who doesn’t know his subject, but the specific details scream “translator.” The teacher has admitted it’s a translation: I’m the only student in five years who’s detected it, but then, I’m the only one whose 6th-grade, 9th-grade and 11th-grade Natural Sciences courses involved geology. The rest are younger and didn’t study “those useless things.”
Being able to detect that is important, among other things, because it means the teacher was planning on grading us by checking our back-translations against the real original, those who matched it better would get a better grade. Only, rebuilding an original by back-translating doesn’t work for anything more complex than the multiplication table.
You can teach math, science, literature, history, and language without going into trivial details that don’t matter in the big picture. The problem with feeding them all this knowledge that they’d likely only ever use in a game show is that it takes away time from doing stuff that’s actually beneficial; teaching them the scientific method and why it’s important, or maybe how to critically think for themselves.
Instead we’re reducing education to “regurgitate the types of trees in the forest.” So you learn it right until the test comes, and you forget it because it’s not that important and chances are you won’t ever need to know it again. I guess part of my point was so much of education is memorize this list or that date. Education is more about memorization and less about thinking, when I think it should be the other way around.
So you’ve taken three years of natural science courses and you’ve applied all that time by noticing a typo while doing a translation. Doesn’t that almost prove my point?
And pretty soon we’ll all be outfitted with GPS at birth so we won’t have to look at soil colors for direction. 
But you don’t have to teach those things through memorization. I wasn’t expected to memorize anything except for math demos until I got to a couple college classes.
Continuing with the geology example, we got those lessons after we’d studied 3D geometry; we learned to recognize different types of rocks and soils by looking at them. We brought pretty rocks to class and compared them with the pretty rocks the teacher had. One of my classmates brought a pyrite about 1" to the side, another one discovered that the “pretty crumbly big white layered rock” his mother used for table center decorations was caolin.
My grade in a Masters is being affected by something I was taught through for three months between 25 and 30 years ago - and you think that’s irrelevant? And you also think that mistaking “suelos de arrastre” and “suelos de aluvión” is a TYPO? Do you also think it’s not important that a lot of reporters informed the world of the discovery of a new element (called Lithium), contained in bananas, during the 1990s? Really?
Why thank you. :rolleyes:
I agree. But such an ignorant society is proof that we suck at teaching science, which involves critical thinking skills and skepticism. Time that could have been spent teaching and reinforcing such skills is instead spent on drilling concepts that are apparently only moderately useful when planning a garden in certain areas.
There’s deciduous all over my yard right now - I’d say it has a very specific impact on my life, really.
I suppose part of my problem is that so many kids end up graduating and being able to categorize trees yet still think evolution is a farce. The priorities seem to be out of whack. I think learning of our own origins would be a step higher than listing tree types.
But maybe it’s a bad example (I apologize, it was the only one I could think of off the top of my head).
And I’m not saying the knowledge itself is pointless, what I’m saying is that lower-level schools are only capable of teaching a limited number of topics. Shouldn’t they focus on the topics that will end up benefiting the greatest number of students the most? Sure you can expose them to a wide variety of topics, but neglecting the fundamentals like math, science, and English is why I see people graduating college and still using the wrong “they’re” constantly.
And you really feel you’d be less impacted if you didn’t know the specific term for that kind of tree? If I’m ever that compelled to learn a subject, I rely on my self motivation to go out and seek knowledge on that topic.
Even then you’re going to be in the minority. Sure some people are going to benefit from classifying trees (it doesn’t surprise me that many of them are Dopers), but the vast majority is not – they’re going to forget it a few minutes after they’re tested and that will be that.
You don’t, but it’s what is done all too often.
To try and give a better example than the apparently controversial trees question (people are seriously posting–on an internet message board, no less–that homeowners need to remember 20-year-old tree lessons, as opposed to, say, Googling what types of trees do well in their area?), let’s go back to my Junior High geometry class. The textbook we used neatly classified Theorems by number in every chapter–the first in a given chapter was Theorem 1, etc.
And on our tests were questions like “What is Theorem 7?”
Yeah, that’s useful. And this was an Honors class at a good school district.
I use cursive all the time- it’s my fastest way of taking notes and my second fastest way (after the computer) of getting my thoughts down. Any given day, I’m likely to use cursive, “printing” (does anyone call it that anymore?), and the all-caps hand I had to develop for a drafting class.
Sometimes the “pointless” stuff makes a great front for sneakily teaching much more important lessons- like being able to write very legibly, very quickly, and very concisely during a lecture. I learned that in 5th and 6th grade through lessons that had nothing to do with what I would later study in college.
no opinion on the OP atm but i just want to point out that the same kids from the show, who were able to dish out facts correctly, can’t be bothered to spell the answers correctly. that’s right, they can’t be bothered to write out their answers correctly (spelling-wise). i can’t remember specific examples but in one such instance the word is right there in the question itself.
if this is the attitude of kids on a televised show… knowing the difference between “you” and “you’re” must be really low on the totem pole at their schools eh?