But is the modern public school the most efficient way to do that?
When you think about the average day in say middle school, sometimes 15 minutes of each class is just the teacher settling the class down and taking role. Then their is all the time moving between classes, the pep rallies, and other things that take up time. Many classes are just teachers showing movies.
I’ve known families who homeschool and knock out the days “lessons” in a couple of hours each day and then the kids can work on other things. Some homeschool families form cooperatives where they will spend all day doing say art projects or do music or go to museums.
Now I’m not knocking the hard work teachers put in but I dont think the modern schools are always the way to do things. I think we could be more flexible. Why cant we develop more modes of learning like say 1 room schoolhouses or supported homeschool or online schools where kids only go to class say 1-3 days per week?
The point others have made is that in the last few years that bell curve has started to flatten out and the quality of all the schools has been going up.
Think about this. Say the US has for arguments sake 10,000 TOP, I mean super TOP engineering HS seniors every year. Add in thousands more from other countries. Well MIT only takes about 1100 students a year. Where will the others go?
That is where the other schools programs come in. Those schools have to attract students and they attract them thru attracting good professors and offering good scholarships.
And dont underestimate the power of regionalism. Top Ivy league schools like MIT and Harvard are east coast. Will a top student from say California, Texas, Kansas, or Florida automatically pick them or might they instead choose a local college or one which offers a better scholarship?
So I agree there is a bell curve with some top schools but I think its starting to flatten out.
Out west we have Cal Tech, Harvey Mudd, Stanford, USC, a few U.Calif’s, Pomona, USF, Reed, and various other schools thought of fairly well. Are Hastings grads worse lawyers than Yalies? Are UCSF grads worse doctors than Harvard MDs? What the Ivy League has are connections with Established Power. That’ll change as power shifts westward.
Education means learning. Learning means change. Take a fair-size lead ball and drop it from X height. Note where and how far it “bounces” and rolls. Now repeat the process. It moves differently because of the change impressed on it. It has “learned”. Thus, dropping people on their heads is “education”. Charter schools apparently work this way.
A bit off topic but is HS football even a thing in someplace like NYC? I can’t picture a school being able to afford the land needed for a football field there, or is there some type of facility outside the city that they would have access to.
No not at all, most of what is spent on education is a waste from a societal view since the same signaling could be done with an intelligence test and an yearlong internship.
The problem is there is no real way to break from the current equilibrium.
I once asked the same question and I looked on the NYC website. Yes, there is football but it doesn’t seem to be as connected or run by the schools and the stadiums seem to be more part of the public parks programs so yes there is HS football, but no, it isnt like in Texas.
Not Manhattan, I suppose, but in Queens where I grew up high schools had plenty of land. We had a big track. Another high school did have a football team - a kid from my junior high went there to play football. The hack he used was that he said he wanted to study Latin, which was only taught at that school.
This is pretty insightful. I think this is one reason why so many people are such poor teachers, especially in universities. University professors are undoubtedly experts in their field, but many suffer from the curse of knowledge, “a cognitive bias that occurs when an individual, communicating with other individuals, unknowingly assumes that the others have the background to understand.”
I taught chemistry and physics for seven years in a military prep school. I got numerous awards for my teaching (including “Instructor of the Year”). One reason I think I was such an effective instructor is that I have generally have very clear memories of when I learn a new skill, and I remember exactly what I went through to learn it.
I clearly remember exactly where I was and what I went through to learn all of the various things you learn in a general chemistry class. Indeed, I clearly remember not knowing them. So I was always able to easily put myself in the student’s shoes and see where they were coming from, and I believe this made me a better instructor.
Yeah, I’ve heard a coupla times that the best people to learn a subject from are the people who struggled like hell to learn it because they know all the snags that will catch a person out.
Very insightful posts from Manda Jo and they sync with what I hear over and over again from a friend who teaches middle school.
I’ve always believed this to be the case, partly because it applies to me. For various reasons, science and math were not easy for me in college, and I think this has been a factor in the very positive feedback I’ve received on my adjunct teaching over the years.
But I think robby’s point above (about the ability to remember what it was like before I grasped the material, and the process of mastering it) and how that can make for a more effective teacher–is a very interesting insight.
Offering high school AP classes are not gifted programs. The concept behind gifted classes is mostly where you separate younger kids by ability and teach to their level. By the time they are in high school you are separating kids by ability because they are taking different classes so some kids are taking calculus while others are still working on geometry.
The regents exam has been dumbed down a bit bu6t I think it still serves its purpose.
As for your son in law’s testing, there will always be outliers. But if a society is going to devote scarce educational resources, what better way is there to allocate those resources than on demonstrated ability?
That sort of system works best for kids with really good advocates and mentors. Bias creeps in and you end up with a pretty high population of marginal rich white kids in the pool of admissions.
The admissions process at MIT and Cal Tech is far less subjective than at other schools. You have some very mediocre students getting into harvard through their holistic process.
There is a book, published by MIT Press incidentally, called “The Trouble with Software: Why Smart Engineers Write Bad Code” (it should have been called “Why Software Sucks”) whose main point is that all anyone learns in a CS program is and always has been worthless, at least in preparing you to code. Good preparation for a higher CS degree though.
This whole thread is fascinating though. I know, as a teacher, how hard testing is. But I always attempted to test understanding, not rote memory. This of course made tests very hard to grade. When the answer is wrong you have to try to get into the mind of the student to see what was misunderstood. It also makes multiple choice exams useless since you cannot see what the student has done wrong. I think it was the high point of my teaching career when a student came up with, on an exam, an argument that simplified a standard argument that I and everyone else had missed over hundreds of years. What a thud when she asked me to fill out a recommendation for law school.
The PSAL is the Public School Athletic League. ( there are separate leagues for Catholic and private high schools) Some schools ( or campuses*) have football fields and the teams are connected to either a school or a multi-school campus. But, no, it’s definitely not like Texas
There are a number of large campuses that were formerly a single high school and now have multiple high schools - my high school had about 4000 students. There are now 5 or 6 high schools in that building playing on teams named for the campus.