Two of my 1970s elementary schools (out of five - we moved some) were “open” schools with grouping based on ability, not age. And it worked - for the most part. There were issues. What do you do with a first grader operating way above grade level…does he spend the last three years in “independent study” (solution in both these cases was yes - which was a horrible idea - but you couldn’t send a nine year old to Junior High).
One school had everything in modules - it was pretty much guided independent study all the time. So if you had thirty kids in a reading class, they were probably working on 14 different modules. Made it very hard to do any group learning - I thrived in that environment, but most seemed to get lazy. It was very targeted to ability and effort.
The other grouped you by ability twice a year - but the honest truth was that you were grouped by ability in kindergarten and were in classes with those same kids - some of them just aged out into Junior High and new ones were added for a year or so…Because learning is pretty linear (particularly in Math) you really couldn’t skip out of your group and into a new group. There was a little downward movement, but not much…so it really wasn’t much different than what my kids have - which is three math levels in their grade.
This sort of thing was all the rage in the 1970s, but there aren’t many schools I’m aware of that are still doing it. I’d suspect that if it really worked, there’d be more schools, not less, with this sort of format.
I’m not talking about academic writing. I’m talking about not being able to recognize subject/verb tense disagreement. I’m talking about people who, in written form, appear to be speaking English as a foreign language, but who are native English speakers. I expect that by the time a student gets to college, that they should be able to write a coherent sentence, and yes, they should have some rudimentary skills at formulating a decent essay.
Same problem here. Not that it occurred to me, but the closest CC to me was 45 minutes from both my house and my school (and where my parents worked), which were themselves a half hour apart. No public transit whatsoever, and my mother and I had to share one vehicle as it was.
Some of these things sound good on paper, but when you live in the middle of nowhere, they’re not practical.
I taught for 34 years in the Detroit Public School system and retired three years ago. I taught for ten years in middle school and the last 24 in a high school. Saying that, I now realize that disqualifies me from saying anything about public education that will be taken seriously by its detractors and critics. Public Education is one area where the ignorant and inexperienced feel they know more and their opinion is more valuable than those with actual expertise, knowledge, training, education and experience. For them, its a badge of honor.
Having said that, the first thing that should be said here is that there is no American system of public education to examine, study or criticize. It does not exist. We have tens of thousands of different systems that exists in school districts all over this land. Showing weaknesses of the system in Bloomington, Minnesota means nothing to the system that exists in Key West, Florida. But critics love to think that the public schools are one big monolithic system and can be attacked as if attacking a single entity. Its foolish and grossly inaccurate.
The second thing that should be said is that hundreds of thousands of children are getting a perfectly good education in the public system. Every year we graduate children who excel, go on to higher education and take their place in society and the workforce.
The third thing is that the obsession with standardized testing skews the debate to the point where we are looking at the tail and not the entire dog. Does anyone here realize that one of the first rules of creating a rubric (test) is that the test must measure the actual learning that took place? But we persist in giving children standardized tests which ask them to identify things that were not even studied in their classes or are even in the basic curriculum in that district or school.
The Japanese - who tend to score much higher on these tests - have a unified national education system where everything on the test is dovetailed into the standard curriculum, teachers lessons, activities and unit exams. It is no wonder they do better since the system they use is inteded to produce those very results.
Fourth, remember that we have a factory system of education. The basic assumption is that an assembly line is built, students are placed upon it, all move along at the same speed because of their chronological age, and all will finish in exactly the same time learing exactly the same ways, learning exactly the same information. Its cheap - but hardly the best way to educate individuals.
I could go on and on with dozens of more points, but this is enough for now. And it will change the opinion of nobody here.
Reminds me of the time I got stuck for a week with a guy from England. He was in some graduate school in the US.
I got to hear for a week about how bad the American system was and how stupid Americans were.
I never did get around to asking him WTF he was doing in American then.
I just did alot of :rolleyes: instead.
Heymarket, I’d like to, and probably some others here, hear of someof the insights you have as an insider to the “evil empire”.
John Taylor Gatto taught for 29 years in New York school system. He was teacher of the year 3 times.
Just because he was an “insider” doesn’t mean his views are dismissed. Likewise with your views on education. No need to apologize for any insights you have to offer.
You don’t have to be on the “teaching” side of public school to comment on it. The students that went through it also have valid criticisms. In some ways their analysis is even more valid since they are the customers of the system.
Although technology has made it possible to take some coursework over the internet. I did a lot of that when I finished my B.S. up a few years ago…But classes over the internet are not the same as sitting in class…not everyone is going to learn that way, not everyone has the motivation to do it, and I think a lot is lost by not having in class discussions (an ethics class online was the worst - a complete waste of time - what would have been interesting in class - with discussions on relativism and utilitarianism - was lost).
A lot of coursework is impossible or very difficult online - math heavy courses are hard unless you are good at math to start with - anything involving lab work is hard.
I don’t have much to add to this interesting thread, but I’d like to make one point:
My wife is a teacher’s aide, and lesson plans are simply revelation from on high. Teachers are told what to teach, when to teach, and how to teach. Even if class sizes were reduced to one, there is no way (in my wife’s school) to tailor the lesson plan to that individual, let alone the teacher’s preferred style of teaching. If teachers were allowed to teach in the ways they are most comfortable with and that their experience has shown them works, and if they were allowed to adjust the lesson plans according to the needs of this class, this student, this year (instead of what haymarket called the assembly line approach), I think that would go a long way to improving both teachers’ and students’ experience.
We also should take into consideration how different the educational systems are between the U.S. and Europe and East Asia. In the U.S., high school is not as taxing as in Europe or Japan or South Korea. Once someone gets in college in the U.S., that’s when they start to really study hard. In Japan and Korea, it’s the opposite. They go through hell in high school to get into university, and once they get to college, they goof off. I could never understand the billiard halls and video game arcades across the street from L.A. City College, until someone pointed out to me how much of the student population was from East Asia.
Right now, being a high school student in South Korea really sucks. You have to go to regular school, and then have tutoring or other supplementary studies until at least 10 pm. In the U.S., by 4:00 pm they’re hanging out in malls, text-messaging each other.
Ruminator - I happen to like the theater a great deal. I have gone many times each year for four decades now. I guess I have picked up some knowledge about it.
But I have never left my seat and been on the other side of the curtain. I have never been a producer, or director, or actor, or musician, or dancer, or set designer, or any technical person that is necessary to put on the actual show that I see from my comfortable seat.
I have seen well over 250 plays from Broadway to my own little town. But I would not tell a professional director how to do his job or criticize it because my ass sat in a seat.
Are you saying the customers of the school system have nothing to say about how it is run? This is ridiculous.
Customer’s can’t complain their food is undercooked or the fork is dirty because they’ve never been a chef or dishwasher?
Ordinary citizens can’t complain about senators’ votes & ethics because they’ve never held public office?
Teachers are not volunteers. They are paid employees of the school district and ultimately the tax paying public. The customers are ultimately “the boss” and responsible bosses should criticize if they care at all about the product they are paying for.
As far as your “theater analogy”…
You (the customer) can “silently” complain about the theater by choosing another theater performance or not attend at all. Public school is compulsory. Parents can choose to put their kids in a different school (e.g. private school, homeschooling) but they don’t get a refund of the property taxes to apply towards their alternative choice. Your analogy is weak.
Very good point. OTOH, as it’s never been tried, we don’t really know how often that would come up. My own private theory, untested by anything other than observation, is that most students would float to within a three year span. And IF we eliminate social retention early with no stigma, perhaps even less than that. I think the vast range of abilities we see now may stem at least in part from kids getting promoted at the kindergarten and first grade levels who aren’t ready. Their extremely basic foundation isn’t setting solid, and so anything you try to build on top of it crumbles. You get a kid who’s just a little slow in first who gets overwhelmed in second and destroyed in third, so he looks like he’s three years behind his age mates. If he’d gone through first again, he might be solid enough for two and fine in three, putting him only one year “behind”, but doing well.
Again, my theory only. I’ve not participated in a school district where it’s been tried, so I can’t know for sure.
Cute, but I don’t think it’s a realistic fear.
Exactly. I arrived at school at 6:30 and left at 10:00 during rehearsals for plays and musicals. Speech team season was the cushy part of the year for me when I got to leave at 6:15. Plenty of the kids in athletics were there until the 6:15 bus during their practice and game seasons. And, again, this is for high school, not elementary school. High school, the time period when most teenagers are looking for reasons to not be at home as much as possible. (Although this may have changed, now that they can txt and IM their friends from wherever they are…)
My kid being the minority white kid in the CPS district, I’ve seen it a lot. Started with the pilgrims and the Indians, which are now taught as the evil white bastards intentionally lying, stealing land and exterminating the noble brown savages. He was literally in tears a few times with ancestral guilt.
Last semester it was watching *Roots *in social studies. He said, “Mom, do you have any idea how it feels to be the only white kid in a class of black kids watching Roots?!” I cringed, let him skip the rest of the film and we watched it at home.
He’s already bracing himself for February, which has pretty much turned into Black Supremacy Month at his school. I doubt any of his teachers have seen it, either, because to show weakness or shame about the issue at school would get his ass kicked.
But I acknowledge that this might be a personal demographic problem, only exacerbated by teaching techniques, and it’s certainly not universal.
I think it’s becoming an ouroborus. Some parents abdicated, so the schools stepped in, causing more and more parents to abdicate the “icky” jobs with relief, causing the school to step in more and more until now the parents who HAVEN’T abdicated are being forced out.
Yep. It’s dismal. Sometime around the end of November they got around to putting up a calendar, which often has no times or places, doesn’t include half the events mentioned in the newsletter, and is rarely updated. Here’s the February calender. Where are the activities, games and after school events? Where is…well, anything? They tell us there’s always a ton of stuff going on…where? When? How can I get involved?
Technology is only as good as the people using it.
I’m not sure how you arrived at that conclusion when I’m screaming for greater parental communication and involvement in the schools, and advocating smaller schools, smaller school districts, small private or homeschool groups taught by the parents themselves, but…knock yourself out.
Can I use this as an example of how well inductive reasoning is taught in American schools?
Well, at least you’re living up to your username. Really, what do you think you’ve posted that could possibly be more controversial than my posts?
Then you’d be wrong. The *only *people who can tell a director whether or not her show worked is the people sitting in the seats. The director might have ideas for how to fix things, but without audience feedback, won’t know what to fix. She’s too close to his creation to always see the flaws.
Are you this resistant to feedback from your students or their parents?
Implied via your theater analogy: “I would not tell a professional director how to do his job or criticize it because my ass sat in a seat.”
If I misinterpreted that “wisdom” you wrote, then tell me how to correctly interpret what you’re trying to say. Please clarify how to apply your sentence to this discussion.
And btw, don’t just list the “students.” The “parents” are also part of the issue. Both the “students” and “parents” and indirectly, the entire community are customers and bosses of the school system. Your posts don’t seem to emphasize that fact.
Sitting as an observer magically imbues the sitter with knowledge, acquired learning, experience, wisdom, skill, technical information and other such things necssary to fully comprehend what is going on behind the scenes?
I’ve mentioned that my wife is a public elementary school teacher. In her district, they are allowed to retain students one year if they are doing poorly (and it actually happens more often than you might think). But no more than one year. The reason is that when a student is two years older than his classmates, he/she is two years more physically mature, and that has an intimidating effect on the other students, even if it isn’t acted upon.
Here’s where your analogy fails–the audience watching a play are passive participants. They are not directly involved in the process of putting on a play.
Students, and to various extents their parents, are active participants. They do see a lot of what goes on behind the scenes, because they are part of the process. There is no ‘final product’ that is being delivered to them. A play can go on without an audience. A teacher can’t teach without a student.
So Roger Ebert, who is not a Director, can not critique a movie?
You had some great insight in your prior post, but right now you seem to be saying that the ONLY people who can critique the education system and how it is delivered is teachers. Perhaps I am misunderstanding you - but if that is your arguement I completelly disagree.
I never designed weapons, and am not an Engineer. However - I carried the M16 A2 and have every right to critique the product. Nowadays, SalesForce.com offers me inducements to comment on their product, though I am not a programmer. I do the same with my clients - I toss out Starbucks cards and Amazon gift certificates every month to get my customers to critique my firm’s software - though NONE of my clients are programmers.
We are users of the public education system in America, we are the also the ones who pay for it. That gives us the right and the perspsective to critique. Teachers ALSO have that right, and their perspective is also very important.
No, but it imbues my brain and mouth with the ability to say, “Y’know, that scene made me start to nod off, it’s just not working for me. It was just too dark and gloomy and I can’t really see what’s going on.” The director, having seen the scene dozens of times in rehearsals with the house lights up, knows what’s going on and may not realize that to a first time viewer, things are too dark. With audience feedback, the director and the lighting designer can discuss and decide whether or not they want to bring up more lights during the scene.
Or they can completely ignore the snores from their audience and keep reproducing a shitty scene that doesn’t work for the audience. Their choice, really. But sooner or later people are going to stop buying tickets and a more effective director will be hired for the next show.
Where the analogy falls down, of course, is that it’s not vitally important to the future of our country that I be enthralled at the theatre. It’s rather more important that education “works” for our people than a play. It’s also much harder to fire and hire competent teachers than it is to fire and hire competent theater directors.
