Your words, not mine.
Thanks, ENugent! At first I was trying to figure out where in my posts I could possibly come across as quashing creativity (on the contrary, I teach contraband units on the Hero’s Journey and how to write comic strips, and I emphasize discovery of scientific and mathematical principles over rote memorization almost to a fault, and I delight in long authentic projects over daily routine, etc. etc.), but then I figured out that Tripolar has issues. Anyway, I appreciate the compliment!
It occurred to me this morning as I was reading a scholarly article that, even stipulating the highly questionable claim that our public schools used to be the envy of the world, there’s an alternate explanation: maybe other nations had even shittier schools than ours way back then. The countries that have surpassed us in education have taken two different paths, as near as I can tell:
-The China path, which involves a shit-ton of memorization, as part of a culture with a millennia-old tradition of standardized tests; and
-The Finland path, which involves a shit-ton of teacher training and planning time.
I certainly prefer the latter path. I’m unaware of any country that advocates the US system of 50 years ago: who is surpassing our current educational scores by using huge segregated classrooms with no technology more advanced than the electric light?
A claim made with no evidence at all. I can’t even find a passage you could have plausibly misinterpreted this way, so the best I can do is ask you what exactly you were talking about here.
Again, no evidence can be found in the thread that LHoD thinks this. S/he has illustrated the ways in which she can help people learn. This is not the same as arguing that none of them could learn without him/her. That’s such an obvious falsehood–most people throughout human history had no one designated as their teacher, yet all have learned–that you’d have to present some pretty strong evidence before it was plausible that LHoD thought anything different.
Snark which completely misses the mark, since there’s no sense in which LHoD functions as a teacher in this conversation, and no sense in which you function as a student.
Remembering one’s childhood is a separate matter from remembering facts one learned in childhood. Moreover, LHoD did not argue that it’s impossible to remember one’s childhood, rather her claim is that it is difficult to remember a lot of one’s childhood accurately.
No evidence has been presented that LHoD “makes a chore out of thinking.”
Before you incorrectly ascribed a view to LHoD that teaching is necessary for learning. Here you incorrectly ascribe a completely different view to him/her, that teaching is sufficient for learning.
LHoD has not argued that teaching is either necessary or sufficient for learning. Rather, she has argued that it can help, and that learning with the help of a teacher is typically more effective than learning without. You seem to disagree with both of these statements, which is fine, but in your posts you fail to address views like these–the important and interesting meat of the disagreement–and instead ascribe other positions to LHoD which she doesn’t hold and which are trivially easy to knock down. You know the term for that method of argumentation, I assume. (Or do I have to teach you?)
The idea that the kids are dumb most definitely did not come from LHoD.
** And they must have terrible parents too. Imagine! Children who can’t perform in a classroom at the same level of an adult. Whatever is wrong with them? **
More incorrect ascription of views. LHoD nowhere said there was anything wrong with the children in his/her illustrations.
I began that project in all of the above comments. Your ignorance is of the basics concerning comprehension of others’ views and methods for discussing them rationally, with the goal of zeroing in on the truth concerning the matter at hand.
The very last sentence has both “are” and “aren’t” in it, and I’m not sure which you meant. I would have thought you meant “are” since you say you don’t disagree, but “aren’t relevant to the issue” seems like more typical English usage in this context.
What I think is that when we educate people, we are doing it for the good of the educating culture primarily, and only secondarily for the good of the student. I am not criticizing that fact–I’m saying it’s what education really is all about. I have no problem with this fact about education. I expect this to be a view not overtly shared by almost anyone.
I think that “needs” are just “legitimized desires,” and in education, we are both altering desires and shaping what counts as “legitimate” and what doesn’t–hence it’s not surprising that by educating students, we’re not fulfilling their needs, we’re changing for them just what those needs are in the first place.
You told LHoD that as a teacher, she is necessarily playing a horrible trick on her students. Them’s fightin’ words.
Here’s a fact: You can hire the best teachers on earth, pay them a million bucks, and give them all the tools they need–but you still can’t guarantee that the students will do well or better. Teachers are but one link in a complex chain.
He :).
Thanks for your comments on this; I appreciate them. For what it’s worth, here’s my thought about teaching:
Everyone can benefit from the help of a knowledgeable, intelligent instructor when they’re trying to learn almost any skill or body of knowledge. Learning is the central job of childhood for pretty much any mammal, and that goes extra for human beings.
I tell my students straight up that it costs about fifty bucks a day for them to be in school, and that that’s a lot of money. They should try to get fifty bucks worth of learning out of every day. It’s my job to set up opportunities for them to get that learning, but it’s their job to take advantage of those opportunities.
Yes, I teach some content: what does place value mean? Where should capital letters go? What’s an anemometer?
But a great deal of my teaching is how to think like a modern adult: when measuring rainfall, what’s the proper metric–temperature? volume? depth? When trying to research something online, what’s the best key word to search for? If you have a conflict with another student, how can you solve it so that everyone is happy with the solution? When embarking on a major project, how can you break it into smaller steps? When telling a story, what are the key pieces you should tell, and what’s a sensible order for telling them?
All of these are skills, and none of them come naturally to kids. It’s not because they’re stupid: on the contrary, they’re brilliant, inasmuch as brilliance signifies an ability to learn. Rather, they’re ignorant of the ways our culture handles these situations. My job is to help them figure out how to handle them.
Right here.
Surely you recognize the traditional teacher’s response to those who point the inconistency in the teaching plan. Throw up a straw man and attempt to ridcule the student who thinks out of the box. I doubt Left Hand even realizes what he is doing there, it’s probably been ingrained in him that his primary job is to maintain order in the classroom. If this is simple misinterpretation on my part, then I apologize. But it certainly wasn’t a meaningful response to my question.
Then **Left Hand **goes here:
My memory is not flawed, and I am not mentally retarded. To address the first part, if human memory is so fallible and people can’t maintain their childhood memories, then school is a waste of time for children. The second part is simply an ad hominem attack.
[quote]
Poor comprehension skills** Fry**. The subject was the replacement of teachers by computers. An exagerrated description of the situation on my part, I don’t think teachers will disappear from the use of technology, but the traditional teacher’s role will. Left Hand and other’s seem to feel that a person in direct contact with a student is the only way to achieve the goals we all seem to agree on, but the only argument for this is that it is the traditional approach. In his posts, Left Hand does point out the extraordinary ability of children to learn, something they are born with, not given them by a teacher. People aren’t born with all skills and knowledge they need, but they will pick them up readily with only a minimum of assistance. Yet for some reason that ability rapidly diminishes among many children when they go to school. Why is that? I think a significant part of that is the education culture which believes it gives children the gift of education, while diminishing the children’s abilities in order to convince them they are dependent on school.
Again, incorrect, as I pointed out before. It may not have been Left Hand’s intent, but it is clearly the expression of a professional teacher.
It’s difficult to remember many things over a long period of time. But that is irrelevant. You remember many things from childhood (do you still remember the alphabet? If I may be ‘cute’ without insulting you). Many of the memories you have of your childhood are very accurate, especially the memories of how you feel about school. I think teacher’s should spend more time recalling those memories and feelings instead of taking the tack that children’s feelings are the incorrect ones, and your own are faultily recollected. I addressed this topic previously as well, which is more about Left Hand’s substitution for actually addressing this.
I did not specify Left Hand there, but was addressing the same problem consistently, that the traditional school system removes the incentive to learn that children are born with. You could try to address this topic somewhere instead of introducing yourself into my discussion with Left Hand without addressing the topic.
I don’t know what you are talking about. Here is Left Hand’s statement on the matter:
Left Hand appears to take the position that children lack the capacity to learn without the aid of a teacher. Are you missing that somewhere? This is the topic of the discussion, and what we disagreed about.
An interesting list of words that connected together make little sense. My statement was clear. You claim * that the student’s needs are secondary to the educating culture’s.* My response is,* The ‘educating culture’s’ needs are aren’t relevant to the issue*. It’s quite common to use ‘are’ and ‘aren’t’ to point out the difference in a matter of disagreement. ‘Needs’ have no relationship to ‘desires’ no matter what you think.
They could be fightin’ words, but it has no bearing on the truth. I doubt this is Left Hand’s intent, but it is built in to the traditional education system as I have discussed before.
Left Hand of Dorkness, this was a response to Frylock’s rambling criticism of my posts. We may have some disagreements, but I’m perfectly willing to discuss the issues with you. I did not intend my statements as a direct criticism of you, but the system you work within. However:
Those are your words. You introduced invective into this discussion.
Not like that it isn’t.
“The ‘educating culture’s’ needs are aren’t relevant to the issue” is not a sentence in any dialect of the English language.
Well you have me there. Until this last time I read the quote, I hadn’t realized I had written that:smack:. My apologies, my statement was unclear, and meaningless, and your response in regard to it makes sense.
For clarification, I am stating: “The 'educating cultures’s ’ needs are not relevant to the issue.”
It sounds like you are talking about indoctrination, not education.
Got it, thanks for the clarification.
I probably am talking about indoctrination–and LHoD would surely not agree with me here but I think that’s basically what a “teacher” is–an agent of indoctrination. I say that while also believing that there’s nothing wrong with indoctrination–in fact, it’s necessary. The question isn’t whether we should indoctrinate, it’s what we should indoctrinate.
Anyway, I’ll bow out of the conversation now, for various reasons it’s not important for me to specify.
Yeah–everyone indoctrinates kids. Young mammals, especially young humans, are excellent learners–but without guidance, they may not learn useful shit.
It’s why you can get your ass kicked by 10-year-olds playing World of Warcraft. They’re much better learners than you, and they have a lot of time to learn in, possibly unlike you. But learning how to play WoW isn’t especially useful for them, and kids who spend their afternoons unsupervised have a bad tendency to learn how to kick ass at video games, and not learn how to construct a reasonable argument or how to solve social conflicts constructively or how to approach a difficult math problem or the like.
If by “indoctrination” you mean “steering kids to learn useful shit,” then yeah, I’m all about the indoctrination. I certainly minimize my own perspective, again sometimes to a fault (I wouldn’t even tell my students that Mubarak’s ouster was good riddance), but I do believe that it’s important for kids to devote a significant amount of energy to learning how to research, how to approach a problem logically, how to act diplomatically, how to express their thoughts elegantly, how to read deeply, and so on.
No, they’re not–and herein shows your trouble with reading coupled with a angry paranoid response to what people say. I said that if you think like a child, it’s due to severe mental retardation. This isn’t an insult; rather, it’s the very definition of mental retardation.
If you need an explanation of Piaget, of Vygotsky’s Zones of Proximal Development, of the concrete operational stage, etc., I can give that to you. If not, I’ll just summarize: kids think about the world in very different ways from adults, in different and predictable ways.
There’s a shitload of evidence to support this conclusion of mine. It’s totally uncontroversial. My smartest second-graders, kids whose insights sometimes blow me away and humble me, predicted that if you poured 30 ML of water from a tall narrow glass into a short wide glass, you’d have less than 30 ML of water. They were amazed when they ended up with 30 ML of water. At the same age, I was in tears over my disagreement with the riddle’s answer that a pound of feathers weighed exactly the same as a pound of lead.
To adults, these conclusions are trivially obvious. To a child, they are not.
Similarly, tell an adult the following story:
-Bob played with a toy dog. His younger sister Mary watched him. Mom called Bob,so he put his dog under the bed and told his sister not to touch it. While Bob was gone, Mary played with the dog. When she was done, she put it in the toy chest. Bob came back in the room and looked for the dog. Where did he look for it?
Nearly every adult will say that Bob looked under the bed, where he left it. Very young children, unable yet to understand the difference between their minds and those of other people, will say that Bob looked in the toy chest.
If you think like a child, then you think that 30 ML of water poured into a short wide glass will be less than 30 ML of water. You’ll think that Bob looked in the toy chest. You’ll be retarded.
If you think that the short wide glass will contain 30 ML of water, and that Bob will look under the bed, then you don’t think like a child.
And yes, your memory is flawed, or else you’re not a human being. This kind of flawed memory is highly relevant, since you seem to think that having been a kid 50 years ago qualifies you in any meaningful sense to talk about how kids think and learn. I’m around kids every day, am responsible for the mental success of a bunch of kids every day, and I’m intimately familiar with both theory and practice of how kids think. When I think they think like adults, I fail at my job. When I approach them in their own worlds, I rock at my job.
I wondered for a while whether it was worth responding to you. It probably isn’t, but I feel like telling something anyway. You are an asshole. It’s the combination of your inability to think and patting yourself on the back for knowing more than children do. I can think like a child, as I can also think like something like you do, because I have not limited my brain to operating on a fixed path determined by others. Perhaps you can insult children who don’t know better and get away with it, and maybe you gain satisfaction from that. But trying to impose your own limitations on your students is an indication that you do not ‘rock’ as a teacher, much less as a person. Learn to read and comprehend, then to think and create before you undertake to gauge others. And I’ll try to explain a simple concept to you now, if children cannot rely on their memories from childhood, there is no point in their learning.
Thank you for reporting your own post, but I’m still going to issue a Warning for such a blatant insult.
The rest of your post would have worked without this sentence.
[ /Moderating ]
So weird. So so so so very very weird.
I’m sorry, Tripolar, but it’s true–your posts in this thread are just weird. I’ve seen your posts in other threads and they’re not weird. In this thread, you’re weird.
LHoD has not insulted any children in the least, not even in the slightest bit. No one would think so from having read his posts. No one. I mean, I guess you do, but I find this absolutely unaccountable.
And it’s not a “simple concept” that if you can’t rely on your memories from childhood then there’s no point in learning. I have no frickin’ clue when I learned how to add or how to read. I have no recollection of it at all. (Do you?) Yet, here I am adding and reading. I learned it sometime in my childhood, and the knowledge stuck with me, but my memory of it is completely gone. I’d say that’s a “simple concept” but I suppose it’s not to you because dammit, Tri, you’re being weird in this thread.
ETA: All I can figger is you had some really bad (as in abusive) teachers as a kid, and also, you’ve got perfect recall or something and haven’t realized that everyone else doesn’t.
And as someone who makes video games, I can tell you untold man-hours of work goes into interface design and tutorials and feature ramps that introduce concepts slowly and require increasing levels of mastery, providing constant feedback on success and failure. Someone is still indoctrinating the kids. WoW is the probably best example of ‘playability’ in a multi-billion dollar industry where most of the tens of thousands of employees make more than teachers. I’m dubious that we can ever make programs that can respond to people with something approaching the depth and complexity of another human being, and even if we can I can’t imagine the market is ever going to find education a viable channel for these energies. We can hope, I guess.
I just had a son and have been worrying about the state of education in the US, but some great posts in this thread from Manda Jo, even sven, LHoD and others have made me feel a lot better.
Hi Fry, glad to have you back.
Thank you. I take pride in that. 
You can’t have seen very many of my posts and arrived at that conclusion.
Left Hand didn’t directly insult children, and I don’t think intended to insult children. But he seems to me to hold some kind of view that children don’t think correctly, and are missing some ability to learn, and need a ‘teacher’ to correct those things. His various comments don’t express a clear statement on that issue. I doubt that is actually his attitude either, but I think I see some of the standard educational system mantra leaking into his comments. It’s only natural considering his job and frequent exposure to educational PC.
I don’t really have much of a problem with any insult, intended or otherwise, aimed at children by Left Hand. I have a problem with him insulting me.
I do remember learning to add and read, and don’t remember other things from my childhood, and the same goes for the rest of my life too. I’ve noticed that people have different levels of recollection from childhood, so if you don’t remember, it doesn’t sound unusual. But you do remember how to read and add. I assume you’ve done those thing many times since, so that would be expected. But if you reflect carefully on the basis of your knowledge, you may realize you remember things you first learned at a very young age, with little or no reinforcement since. I’m sure in my case and yours, the less reinforcement, the more likely you are to forget. But people often recall memories from their youth that they had not revisited in many years, and may never have been able to recall on demand. Not all the things we think we forget are actually forgotten. Sometimes the associations that allow us to recall memories become so obscure that we cannot remember how to access them again. Memories can also become distorted or lose detail over time. But not always. For many different reasons the clarity of memories will vary. I don’t doubt that the most distant ones are most subject to degradation, but I don’t think there’s a clear, fixed relationship between
precision and time.
My whole point here is that having a good memory of childhood is a great asset to a teacher. What you read in a book about what a child thinks may or may not be accurate, while many people have an excellent example of what an actual child once thought right inside their head.
Far from perfect recall. But I do remember an awful lot of my entire life since the age of 4. I did have one really bad teacher, a couple of really good teachers (I’ve been in contact with one for almost 40 years), and bunch of the run-of-the-mill sort. The bad one wouldn’t be allowed to teach now-a-days, and the modern run-of-the-mill sort are probably better teachers now. I have relatives and friends who are teachers, and consider it a noble profession. So I don’t have a issues with teachers. I do find considerable problems with the educational system and its academic and political allies though.
Thing is, tempting as it’s been, I haven’t insulted you. You’ve misread some of my factual statements about cognitive growth to take them as personal insults, but they were no such thing.
I find this a remarkable claim, because reading is such a complex battery of skills. Where were you, for example, when:
-You realized that text is read from left to right?
-You realized that books have front and back covers?
-You figured out what sound the letter “z” makes?
-You learned to look at a picture for a clue when a word was difficult?
-You learned to try different medial vowel sounds on unfamiliar words?
-You started pausing at periods?
and so on.
No, that’s a terrible example, because your memories are so skewed by time. I have excellent examples of what actual children think in my classroom. I ask them questions all the time, and in so doing I uncover both wonderful insights (I had a kid blow my mind the other day when he solved a patterning problem in a way that I was sure wouldn’t work, but when I tested out, worked in all cases) and misconceptions. While I do read that hifalutin research by them pointy-headed scientists about cognitive growth, that’s not my primary source of information: my primary source is the kids I work with daily. When I talk about misconceptions and insights, I’m not talking about what I think I had many decades ago, nor what some Poindexter hypothesized: I’m talking about the kid today who told me that 53+10=17, or the other kid who figured out the inverse property of addition (not in those words, which is fine, because I don’t think they’re the right words anyway).
Yeah, absolutely, in some cases. If you think that 30 ml of water poured from a fat container into a thin container will become more than 30 ml of water, you’re not thinking correctly. That’s not the magic of childhood, that’s just plain wrong. If you think that the angles on the left side of a rectangle are called “left angles,” you’re just plain wrong.
With the water, you can figure that out on your own. My job as a teacher is to make sure that everyone has experiences where they can figure it out. If they don’t, they’ll find themselves later on at the mercy of marketing geniuses who reshape bottles to confuse consumers about their contents. THe left angles thing is something that very few kids will correct on their own. My job as a teacher is to correct those misconceptions.
But “missing some ability to learn”? Where on earth do you get this from my posts?
I’m not insulting you. Believe me, if I were, you’d know. But I deal with kids directly every day of my life, and I read research about childhood cognitive growth, and my job depends on my being able to get into the heads of kids to figure out what’s going on in there. I have very little patience for romanticized nostalgic views of childhood, and that’s what you appear to me to hold.
I’d be curious to know what would happened if you showed LHoD’s posts in this thread to your teacher friends and relatives.
You don’t think the depression had anything to do with that?
It was worth reading and I agree that the only thing worse than rote learning is rote teaching but how do we get teachers to do this? How do we deal with teachers who are practiaclly under seige and under threat of physical violence in their classrooms?