I’ve taught high school and college on two continents.
For all the talk of “OMG China,” I don’t know a single American teacher in China- and I know hundreds- who thinks the Chinese school system is better.
Yes, it is better at producing high test scores. Years of drills combined with test-taking technique training can produce great test scores.
But a lot of things we consider extremely important are not included at all. Even university level Chinese students have trouble organizing and coordinating even the kinds of simple group projects we learned in late elementary and middle school. The whole “Choose a group leader, a secretary, a timekeeper…get each other’s contact info and set a time to meet” thing comes naturally to us, but is actually the result of years of learning and practicing. China doesn’t do this.
Original research and higher-level analytical writing are not taught at all. Critical thinking and creative problem solving are not taught at all.
It’s not better. I’m not sure why people are so attached to thinking that it is.
Precisely. My 9yo daughter had an assignment last year (2nd grade) called a “living museum” where she and her classmates had to decide among different American historical figures (choosing from a list, all nicely demographically represented regardless of actual influence), and perform the following tasks:
Buy/find a costume that your child can wear so they can act like their person
Memorize a short 30 second speech about the life history of your chosen person
Make a poster containing highlights of your persons life
Read 2 books about your person
I think she had to do a report as well
In many ways it was a nice assignment (being her dad, I’m positive she is cute as a button in her baseball uniform), but there was something a little… corporate… about the whole exercise. Like the purpose was to put together a presentation for the boss or something.
And, going along with your point, probably even moreso than a Powerpoint presentation the amount of time and money it took to do this assignment was extraordinary (I’m sure that this assignment cost us over $100 all told (gas, time away from work for Laura, supplies, costume), time that perhaps should have been learning about people in addition to Jackie Robinson.
It sounds like the costume aspect was too demanding on the parents and the project placed too much value on style rather than substance. Ideally the assignment should be completeable almost entirely by the kid, right? If the teacher presented this assignment every year s/he could have a baseball cap available for the kid who picks Jackie Robinson and a similar prop/costume piece for each of the other historical persons. Or else the “costume” should be kid-made out of cheap/recycled materials. I’ve done a lot of class plays where the costumes were based on trash bags. But I like the idea of having various pieces to the project, since kids have different things they enjoy doing and different things they could stand to practice. And the general idea of presenting information well is a great life skill.
If it seems corporate, maybe that is because our schools teach according to the needs of our employers. This means at middle class schools, you’ll find assignments that relate to researching, synthesizing and presenting information while managing time and budgets- exactly the sorts of tasks that middle management might do.
The point of projects like this is rarely to learn about someone in particular. After all, we invented wikipedia precisely so that we don’t have to commit every conceivably useful bit of knowledge to memory. Projects like this are designed to teach the process of gaining that sort of deeper knowledge. In the future, she will have a start on knowing how to conduct research independently- go to the library, decide what sources are worth deep reading and which to skim, learn to present what you learn in a way that doesn’t bore people to death, etc. It’s an introduction to research. The fact that X percent of student will get fascinating by what they research (one of the big reasons I went to the Philippines last year is because I developed a curiosity about the place after a 7th grade project like this) is a neat bonus and when it does work out it’s one of the magic parts of teaching.
The American school system is rarely about actual knowledge, but about process. We don’t feel compelled to turn our children into human dictionaries, we’d rather teach them to efficiently use the resources available to them.
sorry, but please excuse me having a hard time believing your claims. i am NOT an elementary school teacher. however, i have spent time as a kumon tutor and the kumon method is ALL drills. after a few weeks of kumon drills, the kids are, across the board, significantly better at whatever they’re being drilled in. heck, my mental math was better just by drilling those kids, since i checked the papers by sight (it was faster that way). i don’t see how drilling your kids would be any different.
more importantly, i don’t see how teaching creative/critical thinking would help with math and grammar. those are the two skills where drills are MOST effective. your kids don’t have to come up with a new way to add… the old way works just fine. essays? same deal. it’s very formulaic. the intro-body-conclusion format is as old as Plato. and we ARE asking these kids to write essays, not poems.
OTOH, i feel sorry for kids in your district if PE, recess, science, and social studies are being cut. i really do. that seems downright impossible even in the most desperate of school systems. science? history? cut? 3 hrs a day of math, 3 hrs a day of english, for 6 days a week? no improvement? something bigger has to be at play if your district is putting in ALL that kind of effort and still getting zero results. i wouldn’t conclude that “drilling has no effect” but rather “maybe there’s something in the water.”
We did projects like this in my very poor neighborhood, and it never presented a problem. Kids were generally able to choose something that was doable for them (I was a famous ice skater because I knew I had skating costumes) and the costumes were usually more of a suggestion than a professional job. Anyway, if a family can get it together enough to come up with Halloween costumes, they can swing this as well.
Also, speaking frankly, sometimes it’s good for school to be an imposition on parents. The biggest thing that will make a student succeed is parent interest in and involvement in school. It’s a careful line to tread- after all, plenty of students have parents who genuinely are limited in how involved they can get. But done right, a parent-student project can encourage parents to become interested in their children’s school work. A parent who is unable to help with the math homework or doesn’t speak enough English to read with their kids can still be involved in this sort of project.
A small amount of investment isn’t the worst thing in the world, either. While you’d never want something big enough to constitute a real burden, the fact is that people are more likely to take stuff they’ve paid for seriously. Even a token investment- of time, of effort, or of money, can make a big difference in someone’s commitment. Having some expectations for parents to contribute helps them be a part of the education process.
I remember as a child, I had a project to decorate a cardboard cutout with my mother. Being the child of a busy single mom, I didn’t think it was possible. So as not to burden my mom, I hid the project and never mentioned it. Of course, she eventually found out. I think that really stuck home for her. We spent a special night together doing the project, and from then on I knew she was there for me when I needed her. I think it also encouraged her to really think about her role in my education (she did a great job!)
Writing an essay is much more complex than that. I am not an English teacher, but I have no idea how you would teach essay writing by rote.
Maths shouldn’t be taught that way either. Kumon is good at improving arithmetic skills, I agree, but I found that kids who went to Kumon had no better understanding of maths than non-Kumon kids. They could solve a set of similar exercises faster, but they still made silly mistakes and had trouble knowing how to solve an unfamiliar problem or choosing the right method. Of course kids get better at something when they are drilled. It doesn’t mean they understand what they are doing.
How good are you at Tweeting, using IPhone apps, and playing Wii. Unless you’re better at than your kid, or your kid had learned those skills at school, then shut up, the kid is better educated than you are.
And students who do not fit the profile of an average learner.
Like Sped kids. Special ed kids are not just the “Ummm who’s President Obama?” kids.
They range from MR (all levels) to learning and behavorial disabilties to hearing, sight and mobilty related. For the past few decades we’ve had a policy of wholesale mainstreaming kids with disabilties. Some kids have thrived, but others… Just I am SO sick of parents and experts hailing inclusion like its some glorious utopia. Mainstreaming/inclusion has been the norm for years now…but theres been no uptick in academic acheivement for kids with disabilties as a whole.
We really need to reconize that kids with disabilties need a contimum of placement, from regular school regular classes with minimal accomondations to magnet programs to self contained classrooms to even…gasp seperate schools. Yes, little deaf Hannah wouldn’t be placed in the neighborhood school, BUT she would have access to teachers of the Deaf who were fluent in ASL and knew how to teach dhh kids. She wouldn’t have to deal with teachers whose attitude is " Oh Hannah isn’t responding to these minimal accomondations. Therefore she’s going to be one of those kids who spend their entire lives on disabilty and not acheive anything." Trust me…it happened to me.
Behaviorism does work, but it’s not intended for much more than classroom management – if you don’t want a student to do something, you have to use the basic principles of operant conditioning to get him to stop. (Threatening to take a kid’s computer away because he’s playing chess with his friend and not paying attention to the class works well, and if he did it again, the computer was going to sit on my desk for the duration of class. Simple behaviorism, but it works.)
That said, I agree that unions aren’t being very good stewards of the profession. I get a zillion e-mails from the Pennsylvania teachers’ union, and with the exception of a few that were actually helpful, most of them were ZOMG!11!!! Save our pensions!!!11!!! Everybody panic!!!11!!! Meanwhile, when I actually looked at the plan the union wanted, it was great for teachers who had been teaching for a while, but not so good for those just starting.
And forget about innovation in teacher education. The Pennsylvania Association of Colleges and Teacher Educators has filed testimony with the state Department of Education to prevent the University of Southern California’s online teacher education program from offering certification programs in PA. This is intended to protect the existing teacher education programs offered in Pennsylvania, which turn 18 to 22-year-old suburban kids into 22-year-old suburban teachers. Nothing wrong with that, but when you consider the problems that the urban districts are facing, PA needs teachers who can deal with the problems of poverty, lack of motivation to graduate, and limited options beyond high school, not teachers who can safely assume that the vast majority of students will graduate and go on to college.
It’s actually not that difficult to teach essay writing by rote. Most of the state-mandated writing tests use the traditional five-paragraph format, which involves a thesis paragraph, three supporting points with evidence, and a conclusion. Scorers look for specific elements in the essay, so the essay can still be complete garbage, but as long as the scorers find those elements, the essay will still pass. I’ve read essays from students who were in the advanced English class that sucked pretty badly, but which were well-constructed because the students were taught to make the scorers happy, not to write a good essay. The rote part comes in when that’s all a kid needs to do, so teachers can assign these and drill them. Now, teaching how to write a good essay that is enjoyable and worth reading is a different matter entirely. That does take effort and skill.
Agreed. It’s pretty much what I was saying about maths - drilling works to an extent, but it doesn’t usually help students understand things any better.
Every suggestion for improving the education system should be prefaced with this statement:
This suggestion is only an attempt to put a bandage on the problem, because we can’t enforce the actual solution, parents who are involved with, and concerned about, their child’s education.
The problems with education lie with the parents, not the schools. When the parents don’t care, there’s nothing the school can do. It’s why I quit teaching. The schools can’t enforce any rules. The kids who have involved parents do well, the ones who don’t don’t. The teachers are largely powerless, yet they take the blame from politicians because that’s easy and lazy and plays to budget cutting demagoguery. The real problem is that the households are broken, the parents are unemployed or underemployed and a lot of the parents are kids themselves.
Seems to me that the point in such things is in linking the two ideas. If you make education grim and joyless, a kid who isn’t interested (most, because most people don’t like grim and joyless things, let alone kids) will simply shove all that boring rubbish away in a big heap in their mind of “school stuff” and forget about it. They aren’t interested. Whereas if you link it to other things, whether that be candy bars or the process of creating a PowerPoint presentation, it becomes much harder for that kid to seperate “school stuff” and “interesting stuff”. And when they’re sitting in a chair taking an exam, or in a situation where they need to use what they’ve learnt, it’s going to be much easier to remember something you had some interest in or some agency in. Hey, I can still remember projects I did at school; I can still remember classes that I thought were interesting or challenging in some way. And I also have memories about some times at school being bored and unimpressed - but I can’t recall what I was learning that made me so bored. Because it was boring. That it was boring is all I can remember about it! Which is not only useless in terms of actually using any of it, it’s also a future impediment to me being interested in learning about those subjects.
Also, i’d be interested in some cites for your idea that people actually learned things back in Twain et al’s day, as compared to today.
I think you’ve missed the point in that paragraph. The details of the Battle of Gettysburg aren’t important. The skills to produce a good report are the point of education.
Just