It’s one of those instances where a bit of fezzing common sense goes along way. Rather than being buried under a mountain of bull-schizzel.
Left Hand of Dorkness, thank you very much!
[quote=“Jefferson, post:58, topic:778125”]
It’s been that way for a long time. I think it all stems from the old hippies of the sixties. You know the sort who spout gobbledegook when blathering on about trendy education. You know the sort that don’t believe in streaming, grammar schools, rote learning, learnings facts, firm disciple, competence in using grammar correctly etc.
I’m an old (and I do mean OLD 
) hippie from the 60’s and I remember no such thing. I learned phonics in (Catholic–so maybe that’s the difference since those nuns were Nazi-type terrorists and if we didn’t learn it, they beat it into us) school and I didn’t spout…
…gobbledegook when blathering on about trendy education. You know the sort that don’t believe in streaming, grammar schools, rote learning, learnings facts, firm disciple, competence in using grammar correctly etc..=
…or other ignorant generalizations and ill-informed nonsense. We could never have gotten away with such nitwit speech.
In other words, this is a place where truthiness and gut feelings (a bit of fezzing common sense) are more important than research and experience (what I presume you mean by bull-schizzel).
If your claim is that conservatives prefer the former whereas liberals prefer the latter, I think you’re mistaken–but I won’t deny a strong anti-knowledge sentiment among large swaths of the modern Republican party, a sentiment key to electing the folks now in office.
You’re welcome! I hope it’s helpful.
If all humans were identical, it would be possible to decide on a single “best” approach to teaching things. They aren’t, so it isn’t. Simple as that.
My own attitude about teaching intelligently, is that most school systems have a huge fundamental defect in how they approach it. That is, they don’t teach with the goal of seeing to it that all the students learn, they teach with the goal of being able to say that they tried. That’s why they CAN get in to heated arguments over which system is best.
I personally suffered as a child, from “to many moves.” My school system was changed from Great Britain, to one place in the US, and then to another; each with a different approach to teaching. Because of the changes, I had years where I remember being told “next year you’ll learn X,” followed the next year (in a different system) being told “Last year they taught you X, so we wont allow you to ask questions about it now.”
Anyway. I personally support, when it comes to English at least, a variegated approach. Not JUST because the students each learn in slightly different ways, but because the sources of the so-called English language are many and varied, and actually hostile enemies of each other.
And then there’s my own disposition: I’ve always been the grumpy, picky sort. I still recall that when teachers started trying to get me to follow along with sing-song sayings like “i before e, except after c, or blah blah.” That’s as far as they got with the thing, before I got mad, and thought “If you jerks can’t make up your mind how the hell to spell words, and stick with it, then I sure as hell aint gonna take on a boatload of mind-impacting nonsense to make up for your problems.”
Indeed.
An example from this week: I had a kid who took a standardized computerized math test and ended up in the first percentile, a very bad place to be. My school’s specialists in differentiation were alarmed and wrote to me asking whether she should be in a daily pull-out group focusing on basic numerosity, things like figuring out how to add up to 10, how to count backwards, that sort of thing.
It’d take her out of daily lessons, so she’d miss things like how to find the perimeter of quadrilaterals or how to solve multiple-step word problems and such, but if someone doesn’t easily know that if you have 7 apples, you need three more to get to 10 apples, those perimeter lessons will be worthless.
I wrote back to the specialists: “Give me a bit,” I said, “so I can retest her.” I’d noticed that on the standardized computer test she’d taken less than 15 seconds per problem, so I talked with her about it. She told me it was boring, so she’d just clicked through the questions. I explained a couple of things:
- The less you engage your brain in an activity, the more boring it’ll be. She made it more boring by not paying attention.
- Because of how she’d zipped through the boring task, she’d created extra work for herself. I was gonna make her take the test again, this time taking her time and showing her work.
She gave a great big sigh, but went back, retook the test, scored in the 47th percentile. Still not ideal, but just about exactly average. Bonus: she told me it was a lot less boring.
A different student genuinely couldn’t figure out 16+1 even when I showed her how to use her fingers: she couldn’t remember to stop counting after a single count, and when I reminded her to do that, she couldn’t figure out that the “17” she’d said after a single count was the sum of 16 and 1.
Both kids were in the first percentile. The first kid needs support with changing her work habits (among other things, I don’t want to get too specific). The second kid? She needs that daily pull-out.
Any approach to education that looks at both these children–not to mention my other kids who regularly solve complex multiplication problems in their heads and clamor for challenge problems–is doomed to fail somebody. A good educator, and by extension a good educational policy, provides instruction according to what each child needs, not according to what an ideologue wants them to have.
LHoD, can you please be Secretary of Education?
No, you still haven’t grasped it. Must try harder.
It’s the Left-wing bull-shizzel that probably accounts for the USA being so low down in the international league tables when it comes to core subjects/skills.
[quote=“Dana_Scully, post:63, topic:778125”]
The drug-addled hippie teaching methods would have come in after the 60s.
[QUOTE=Left Hand of Dorkness]
Different approaches bear fruit with different kids.
[/QUOTE]
Yes, but not even different “approaches” per se, but rather different amounts of targeted instruction in deficit areas, i.e. differentiated instruction. As you said, common sense.
I agree that you need to try harder, but writing a different poorly-informed sentence rehashing the same lame stereotypes doesn’t constitute “trying harder.” Much like the child this week who I kept making redo his subtraction problem and who kept turning it in with a different reason for his wrong answer every two minutes, you need to go back, take your time, and show your work.
There are reasons why we’re ranked in the middle of the pack of industrialized countries. Last time I was at a training where they scolded us for this lackluster performance, I drilled down into the stats.
What I found out was that in North Carolina, our rankings were actually pretty good. If you look at how districts with between 10 and 25% of students on free/reduced lunch perform, those districts perform on a level on par with Japan–those districts themselves would be in the top 5 of all nations on performance. And if you look at districts where fewer than 10% of kids live in poverty, you’re fantasizing, because there are no such districts.
You’re welcome, of course, to come up with a racist or “lazy welfare culture” or whatever justification for this reality; but that’s just rearranging numbers on your wrong number line. If you’re really interested in trying harder, you’re going to realize eventually that you got the wrong answer.
What a terrible fuckin’ job that’d be. But if it’d keep DeVos away from it, I’d throw myself in front of that train :).
The proof is in the pudding. There’s a reason why, twenty years later when those whole-language-raised children hit adulthood, literacy rates plummeted in the United States, leading to a sudden dropoff in our world leadership abilities. There’s a reason why the tech boom involved almost no Americans, why the Internet was mainly developed in other nations, why our American universities suddenly became a laughingstock around the world, no longer attended by folks from other nations.
That’s the upshot of your theory, right?
That’s the thing, it doesn’t really work at the letter level. Maybe it’s a matter of bad language, but I keep hearing people who have been taught phonics talk about “letters” when that’s not how it works. It’s letter groups at the very minimum, specially with a language that’s got as many digraphs as English does.
The proof is the masses of kids leaving school who know feck all about feck all. This applies to America and the UK. I’m not suggesting, Professor, that there aren’t ANY educated people in these countries.
So what are your stats? What’s the comparison group? Do you seriously think that kids today know less than their counterparts of, what, 50 years ago?
I shouldn’t need to give you shameful stats and embarrassing international comparison league tables (but you can find them without any trouble, I’m sure, if you need them).
We’ve been discussing the teaching of reading but as I have already pointed out, every year in Britain hundreds of thousands of children leave school unable to speak using correct basic tenses. This is after more than ten years schooling. They wouldn’t accept their own six year olds talking like that. The poor little scallies are being badly let down by them with their prospects unnecessarily blighted.
You don’t need to give me the general stats; as I mentioned above, not only am I familiar with them, but I’m far more familiar with them than you appear to be, having delved deeply into them. You called the “bull shizzel” or some similar misspelling, so I figured you must have some other secret evidence. If you’re relying on the same bull shizzel I’m relying on, please let me know.
When you say “hundreds of thousands,” and “basic tenses,” what evidence are you relying on for your claim? Because this isn’t evidence I’m familiar with.
There’s some chance that you’re confused about code switching, dialect, and vernacular English, but it’s nearly impossible to tell what you’re on about with the complete absence of any cites for any of your claims.
Actually, you do. Otherwise, we are free to presume that you simply read some nonsense on the internet that either misinterpreted a genuine study or simply invented a study to get folks who are not familiar with the real information all excited about non-existent “bull-shizzel.”
If you cannot provide the evidence, yourself, your readers are free to dismiss it.
You only have to observe. Have you never heard British footballers, coaches and pundits trying to speak? Well, large swathes of the population speak just like that. So much for ten years’ schooling.
Do you live in Britain? You surely must be aware of the damming statistics that are regularly published? (I’m not talking about private schools here)
Sure, I know that some Brits have trouble spelling (homophones like “damming” and “damning” can cause trouble, for example). I also know that some Brits have trouble understanding the difference between anecdotes and rigorous research. Since it’s actual data that interests me, not truthiness, though, I’m not sure what you have to offer.