My point being, that’s a different problem. The fact that my math teachers were bad (most of them didn’t understand their subject at all) does not mean that math sucks, or that math is useless: it means that I had bad math teachers.
Personally, I could have done without the estimated fifty gazillion credit hours of pre-calculus that my high school decided was more essential to my well-being (in my future life as a translator) than any knowledge whatsoever of how to cook, clean, perform first aid, perform basic home repairs, mend clothes, drive a car, make anything with my hands, fill out my income tax return, or vote.
Quick note: it never ceases to amaze me how everyone thinks they’re a pedagogical expert because they went to school. Hi, I got my teeth cleaned this summer, let me tell you how we should revamp our national dental-care philosophy!
I agree that that’s crappy teaching. Teaching by rote is terrible. But, to continue the tree example from above, when I taught the kids the trees, there was very little rote learning involved.
We went on a walk of our campus and looked at the different trees. Each kid was assigned to one of four trees.
On a monthly basis, we went to our trees and observed them. Each time we focused on a different aspect of the tree: roots, leaves, bark, branches, etc. Students drew that part of the tree, wrote three sentences describing the tree, and talked about how it was different from the last time they’d seen it.
Three times–once each in fall, winter, and spring–we took photographs of the tree.
We used books and websites to research how humans use the tree, for landscaping, lumber, or other uses.
Finally, students put it all together, working in groups in Microsoft Publisher to create a two-page spread about the tree for a guide book.
That’s not rote learning. And to the folks who talk about drilling the three R’s, there’s a heckuva lot of reading and writing in that project also. Yes, there was some stuff that wasn’t reading, writing, or arithmetic–but it was all authentic learning, directly related to the students’ actual environment, helping them understand what was around them in a way that was developmentally appropriate.
Good teaching, in my opinion, works that way: it gets kids excited about a topic, and it channels that excitement into academic work. Kids learn both the content and the skills.
In my opinion, we need to do far MORE science, far MORE social studies, at young ages than we currently do. NCLB de-emphasizes science and ignores social studies entirely, while putting increasingly unrealistic statistical demands on school systems in the areas of reading, writing, and mathematics. As a result, schools de-emphasize science and ignore social studies in a desperate attempt to avoid further sanctions under the law.
Agreed… Not that pure knowledge classes should be abandoned, but for every physics class, there should also be a general auto maintenance class. Guess which skill set I’ve used more in my life?
Also, music, as a class, needs to go bye bye. Extracurricular activity, sure, but the number of students who end up in music jobs is miniscule. Not a useful subject imo.
Music classes will never go away as long as the lobbyists for the recorder industry have their way. 
In my experience, the ones who would, to use your example, think evolution is a farce are the ones who won’t remember a goddamned thing about categorizing trees, either.
School should absolutely, positively, entirely not be solely about preparing people for earning a paycheck. It should be about developing well-rounded human beings who can function well within our society. And an aesthetic appreciation is part of that. Thus music classes, PE classes, PE classes in which kids learn the rules to basketball (for example), etc.
Good music education, incidentally, develops students’ mathematical skills and can improve reading skills also.
What percent of music students continue to use the skills they learned in music class to enhance and enjoy their lives? A good many of them. I sure wish I had the opportunity to learn to play music. It seems to bring so much joy to my friends.
I mean, we want people to learn things that will help them get a job. Why? So that their lives are better. Well, music makes people’s lives better, too.
In any case, very few schools require students to take music (though they may have a small generic arts requirement.) And the arts contribute a lot of things- they keep artistic minded students excited about school, they cultivate creativity, and they encourage students to try new ways of thinking.
Geez, I must have gone to a different set of schools than the rest of you.
The point of schools is education? Since when? In my experience, the point of primary schooling is to identify and destroy independent thinking, enforce confirmity, instill unquestioning respect for the status quo, and mold students into functional cogs for assembly lines.
The fact that the best example you could come up with of “trivial, irrelevant” knowledge is, in the opinion of so many of us, not trivial or irrelevant, is a strong argument against the avoidance of teaching things that some person somewhere thinks are trivial or unimportant.
It’s as natural as anything for kids to notice that some trees have big, leafy leaves that turn brown and fall off in the winter, and others have green pointy needles that stay on all year long, and to wonder what those two kinds of trees are called. Noticing things, making distinctions, classifying things, learning names for the different categories that things can fall into—these are pretty basic human tendencies.
You sound like someone doing the “kids these days!” blah blah blah with little or no actual experience in kids or education. As far as I can tell, kids aren’t being handed a list of trees and being told to memorize the scientific names and category they fall into. When I was a kid, we were taught the qualities and traits that distinguished the types of trees, the environments in which they grew and the ecosystems they were involved in, how they tied into the water and air cycles and how plants have evolved. We were taught identification techniques, we were taught, as Mangetout said, “how to scrutinise, describe and categorise things”. It wasn’t about rote memorization, nor was it necessarily about trees, it was about exploring the natural world and being walked into a second-grade intro to the life sciences.
How in the holy hell you imagine you’re going to engage a bunch of elementary school kids in “science” by taking out all the interesting parts like biology and ecology is… well, suffice it to say that I think you’ll win a whole lot more grade school converts to the scientific method via the study of the living natural world than you will by plopping an O-chem text in front of them.
You don’t interest kids in science and math by foisting upon them all the dry academics, you interest them in science and math by teaching them about plants and animals and stars, and how to use fractions in cooking or decimals in buying comic books. The dry academics come later, once the interests have been instilled.
It’s the same with reading and writing. You don’t teach kids a lifelong love of literature and grammar using NCLB tactics, it comes through exposure to the myriad of fascinating and wonderful things found on the written page. That means spending school time reading things that might not be strictly academic, but “not strictly academic” does not in any way equate to “educationally useless”.
Agreed on point one, point two makes me facepalm and groan in agony. Once again, exposure to music is not about “learning to play the flute so you might one day get a job in the NY Philharmonic”. Music and exploring sound are math and physics lessons in disguise. Music education boosts IQ, literacy, vocabulary, social skills, reasoning, and memory. Education in the arts is tremendously valuable in ways that have little or nothing specifically to do with a child becoming a musician or a painter in later professional life.
Save the music!
You print everything? Or you just never write anything down? I use cursive every day, whenever I need to write anything.
This “cursive is useless and shouldn’t be taught” thing comes up every so often, and I still do not get it. At least for many people, cursive is the easiest, fastest, flowingest, most natural way to write. It’s something we do all the time. Why shouldn’t we have been taught how to do it?
In addition to that, it teaches hand-eye coordination and fine motor skills. NajaHusband is an excellent theoretical scientist, but he laments his not-so-fantastic ability to do fine bench work. He was never really taught any kind of useful penmanship, either. Personally I think if he had been taught fine motor control at a young age, he might have better control over his hands as an adult.
Certainly some schools teach like this, but I think it’s a lousy method.
Yesterday’s math lesson was on rectangles. Students drew a rectangle on grid paper, then wrote a description of their rectangle on the back. I chose a few students to read their descriptions to the class, and everyone else tried to replicate their rectangle using square tiles. One kid wrote, “Five columns, three rows.” Everyone (or nearly everyone) could create that one right away. Another kid wrote, “8 tiles”, and of course there were two distinct rectangles that people could create from that. We talked about why that description was insufficient, and he decided to change it to, “8 tiles, two rows.” After that, everyone was able to create his rectangle. We discussed why his description didn’t need to tell the number of columns, and we talked about which method was easier for students to use (the class was pretty evenly divided on whether they preferred the first student’s description or the second). I re-emphasized a point I’ve made all year: there are many ways to solve most mathematical questions, and as long as you use a valid method that you understand, you’re golden. Either descriptive method was fine. We finished the lesson with a little test: I gave them a page with four quadrilaterals on it, and they had to identify whether each one was a rectangle, and defend their answer.
Notice all the writing involved in the lesson. Notice the room for creativity within a mathematical framework.
And this isn’t bragging on myself here. I conducted this lesson right out of the textbook, almost word-for-word.
There’s definitely a movement to encourage independent thought, creativity, and higher-order thinking skills in the school system. I support it completely.
I don’t mind learning facts that have no practical use. My complaint is that THEY DON’T TEACH ANY PRACTICAL KNOWLEDGE of how to survive in the real world! In elementary through high school, anyway (I never went to college - but most of my friends did, and they didn’t major in business or accounting, so they still have no idea).
If there is essential knowlege these days, it is knowing how to properly manage your income and save for the future. We learnt absolutely NOTHING about this in the public schools I attended. Thankfully I became interested on my own, but as I watch my peers flouder deeper and deeper into debt and overspending with no idea of how to budget, save, or make their money work for them- I realize how rare I am.
I agree!
I can’t speak for BrandonR, but I “print” everything. In actuality, a lot of letters end up connected in a cursivish kinda way, but the way I write things down evolved directly from how I was taught to print, not how I was taught to write in cursive.
I never got used to writing in cursive. It was a very slow, laborious process to me, while my printing flowed freely. If I tried to write quickly in cursive, I started to get mixed up and the result wound up illegible to everyone, including me. On the other hand, when I print quickly, it the result is just illegible to everyone except me.
My complaint in 2nd grade, when they began to teach cursive, was that for the two previous years I had done a LOT of printing and had gotten fairly good at doing it quickly and efficiently. Now they wanted us to start all over with something different.
I used cursive because it was required for school assignments until I got out of elementary school, then I basically never used it again.
I generally agree with this. Schools should do a better job of teaching the real basics: How to feed and cloth yourself, how to look for a job and how to deal with the money you do have. If you have ever taken any high school classes for “slow” kids (of course, no dopers ever have), the do cover this kind of stuff sometimes - how to work a check book for example.
To the OP I’ll say what I said to my two boys when they complained. It may seem pointless to you to memorize the kings of France or to learn the inner workings of DNA. Yes, it is very unlikely that you will use that information in your “real life”. But, consider the alternative where you do whatever you want all day - is the information you get from Dr. Phil or Call of Duty or skateboarding going to be all that useful in “real life” (the answer is NO, BTW.) I have forgotten 99% of all I ever learned in school, that 1% I just happened to remember is a whole lot more than you know right now - so go to school and stop being ignorant.
This is correct. Why the hell do the rest of you think children go to school for so goddamn long? Once one is taught to read, write and do simple arithmetic, there isn’t much else that one cannot learn on his own.
School actually prepares kids to spend 40 hours a week or more at a soul-sucking career where the only compensation is the means to (maybe) afford food and shelter – things which should be basic human rights anyway, but I digress.
if a person learns basic science, physics, chemistry, biology, and mathematics through the 12th year level and gets the reasoning and problem solving skills that go with those; then you have a large skill set to use to approach making it through life for maintenance in the real world. if you couldn’t figure things out from scratch then you could at least read the manual or a service book and use them.
BrandonR, I gotta disagree with you on this one. In childhood, the brain is like a sponge - it soaks up everything. The purpose of teaching children things like the difference between a conifer and a deciduous is not to make them tree experts, but to give them a little taste of everything and more importantly, to teach them how to learn. Then as they grow older, they will have had the exposure to a variety of things and it will help them decide what they want to “specialize” in, so to speak.
And one should never stop learning. If a day goes by in someone’s life where they don’t learn something new, or learn to do something better that they already know, that day has been wasted and can never be recovered.