As a tutor, I get second-hand impressions of this stuff.
For example, many of my geometry students, when asked to perform a proof for me, will often ask me, utterly bewildered, “What the hey is a proof?” Even those geometry teachers who do have them do proofs usually don’t have them doing a ton of them, or having students do them on an exam, for example.
No more constructions, either.
In the dark ages when I started school, we didn’t learn to read in Kindergarten. That began in 1st grade.
In some classrooms, the students’ desks and chairs were bolted to the floor. Your seat was part of the same unit as the desk for the student sitting behind you. There was a hole in the desktop for a bottle of ink and a groove across the top for a pen or pencil.
We walked to school in the morning, walked home for lunch, walked back to school, then walked home in the afternoon for the day.
When a fire engine or ambulance drove by with sirens blaring, all the students would rush to the windows to see it. The teachers never said anything about it; I guess they were just resigned to it.
We used to have Air Raid drills, where we’d go and sit in the hallways away from windows. Or the gym.
On Wednesday afternoons, we’d have “Assembly”, where we’d all go to the auditorium and be lead in singing songs. We’d also all go to the auditorium to watch Mercury launches. They’d put two huge 19" black and white televisions on tall stands in the front of the auditorium for those.
We’d go to the gym to get vaccinations for polio and maybe other stuff. It was a relief when they started putting the vaccine on sugar cubes.
Blackboards were very dark grey and chalk was white. We watched slide shows and educational films. Girls wore dresses or skirts. We played dodge ball in a circle and it was fun, not competitive.
High school included, and yes, it’s an actual policy. There have been a few high-profile news stories about teachers getting tired for giving a zero on an assignment.
That’s an absurd policy. I wonder what the reasoning behind it is?
Totally untrue in my experience. Both my kids’ kindergarten teachers were very sweet and loving with the kids.
The biggest thing I can think of is the way things are taught. Many people I know are shitting themselves in hatred for Common Core, but I like a lot about it.
For one, each math concept is taught from many different angles, presumably to ensure that all the children can grasp the actual foundational ideas, not just grind through an algorithm robotically.
Likewise, when I was in school, we had arithmetic drills, and then a separate section for a few, dreaded, word problems. Now everything is a word problem. I think it’s good, because life doesn’t hand you a “math sentence” to solve - it presents a situation from which you much derive the math sentence, then solve it.
In fact, every subject is much more enmeshed with oral and written communication. It’s not enough to solve 250*10. Students need to demonstrate in writing that they understand why you add a zero to 250. I think this is generally good, but recognize that it could totally suck for students brilliant in math and struggling in writing.
There is also homework in kindergarten, which I find stupid. But in our case, we simply don’t make our kid do it, and she still performs well in school, so her teacher hasn’t mentioned it. Works for me.
I thought of another one - report cards. They used to actually give parents some constructive comments on what to work on…now they are nearly incomprehensible because teachers have been told they only have selected phrases to choose from, lest they offend anyone.
Morale has not improved, but the beatings have ceased, despite the promises I was made as a young man.
How the hell would I know? I’m not in school anymore!
Eh, I graduated from high school in 2009. As far as I can tell, most of the changes mentioned ITT were already in place by the time that I went through the K-12 system. Still, Common Core only became a factor after I graduated, so as far as I can tell I dodged a bullet with that one. I have a younger sibling still in high school and she complains about it a lot, though I’m not even sure that she is really affected by it all that much.
The curriculum is far more integrated. I remember math problems along the lines of “Train A is leaving New York at 60 mph…”, nowadays, Sophia’s math problems ask questions that relate to other things that she’s studying… “George Washington’s army charged Cornwallis’s army at 7 mph…”
Yeah, for all of the uproar over Common Core, I don’t really have a problem with national standard benchmarks for each grade level. Those didn’t exist even state wide in Georgia when I was in school, and changing to another county between grades meant you most likely missed something.
In my part of the US, uniforms are becoming more common in public schools. My teenagers are thrilled that we moved to a county that doesn’t require them, but I miss the simplicity of buying a half dozen pairs of khakis and a half dozen polo shirts, belts, white socks, and shoes at the start of the year. No worries about what to wear tomorrow beyond short or long sleeves!
Regarding the above mentioned zero tolerance policy of suspending instigators and non-aggressors in a school fight. I agree that it’s dumb, but it’s not especially new. When my older brother was a high school freshman (1982?,) administrators tried to suspend him for fighting after another kid decked him in homeroom. (Seriously, theoonly hitting my brother did was meeting the floor really abruptly.) My mom had to go to the board of education to argue the point, and I suspect that she’d have lost the argument if the other kid hadn’t been arrested for armed robbery a few hours earlier.
Yep. When I was in Grade 5 (1983-4) I spoke very quietly. One day the teacher called on me to answer a question and when I spoke too quietly to be heard she sent me into the cloakroom, told me to close the door and yell until the kids at the front could hear me. I’d try and she’d say “Can you hear her, class?” and the class would go “Nooooooo.” So she made me do it again until I finally got sick of being humilated and yelled. I absolutely dreaded any kind of public speaking ever since. I never told my parents because “what happened at school stayed at school” and when I did tell my dad about 20 years later he was like “Why didn’t you tell me then? I would have raised hell!”
I understand that teachers nowadays can’t discipline or embarass kids anymore like they could in the “olden days.”
Do schools actually issue some sort of permanent academic credential for successful completion of the requirements of a kindergarten degree, or is in mostly a ceremonial thing? E.g. are there people with a Kindergarten Diploma on their wall showing graduation cum laude with a major in fingerpainting and a minor in not shouting in the hall?
The level of discipline the kids in public schools must endure practically astounds me. Remember The Breakfast Club, where Anthony Michael Hall’s character gets a Saturday detention for bringing a flare gun to school? If that happened today, the kid would likely be in prison; at the very least he’d be expelled.
My son is starting Junior High, and this reminds me of some of his class scheduling options. The classes themselves are hybrid- He can register for a Science-English, for example.
Ceremonial. My kids didn’t have graduations at each stage, and actually, I sort of wish they would have - its a ritual to mark closing one chapter and moving to the next.
I guess my daughter will get an eighth grade graduation this year (my son was in a different district for eighth and they don’t do them) - and its good. In addition to handing out some minor awards (my daughter won the Geography Bee, so apparently, she’ll get an award for that), the kids get split into two different high schools - so this will be the last “official” moment with some of those kids. They’ll do a slideshow, I’m sure, and hand out some awards, and then “graduate” them to high school.
My sixth grader was assigned a 5-7 page paper with 5 sources (3 had to be books) and 10 footnotes/citations (1 citation required from each source.)
Unlike her dad (and to her benefit) she handled it with aplomb and turned in a 15 page biography of JRR Tolkien. Most of it had to do with his childhood, and she ended it with a quote from Gandalf.
To prepare, she did 11 note cards and an outline. She did the note cards twice as she thought she lost them, recreating them in about 2-3 hours.
She has her mother to thank for these habits. And I think that, compared to the schooling I had, this was about 1-2 years ahead of me (as far as the assignment goes) and is probably 6 years ahead of me in the amount of maturity and preparation.
Sounds like school in Australia during the 1970’s.
Except no air raid drills and we sung God save the Queen!