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achillesforever6 posted:God Calc II was such a bullshit class, what was the point of having me take it in order to get a Geology Degree? It was just there to weed out the people who didn't have the time to deal with that bullshit. Though having any calc/trig experience at all would have probably saved my Structural Geology grade. A major reason for it is that there's not enough money to make a specialized course for each major. Although on the other hand, if you do end up switching majors, you don't have to take another calculus class.
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Sep 14, 2015 02:50
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achillesforever6 posted:God Calc II was such a bullshit class, what was the point of having me take it in order to get a Geology Degree? It was just there to weed out the people who didn't have the time to deal with that bullshit. Though having any calc/trig experience at all would have probably saved my Structural Geology grade. Because being proficient with basic calculus is something any graduate of a hard science should be? Edit: I'm trying to think of which part of Geology is devoid of calculus outside of the most superficial level and I cannot think of which. Bip Roberts fucked around with this message at 03:21 on Sep 14, 2015 |
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Sep 14, 2015 03:12
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Solkanar512 posted:I can't help but wonder if there should be less emphasis about some kids sacrificing for other kids, and more on proper funding for schools and understanding that schools can't solve poverty by themselves. Surely, but this is one of those "external factors" for educators. Until the whole country shifts it's values concerning public education, school programs are going to have to make it work when dealing with diverse (and I don't just mean racially) populations with a myriad of needs. As far as the value of peer tutoring and the studies mentioned by blah blah, well, I wonder what the implementation of peer tutoring was like in those studies. I eventually gave up on that strategy, even though it's something that works for my own learning, because it was incredibly hard to implement effectively in a class of 35 kids. Differentiated instruction is another one of those strategies that conceptually makes sense, but is difficult to implement when teachers resort to simply assigning more work to the more capable kids, and well, you can see why even the teacher's pet wouldn't want to do that. What is really supposed to happen is that you're supposed to deliver challenging curriculum. Let the advanced kids work more autonomously while constantly checking for understanding of all students, and then spend extra time working with the students who are still developing. Again, external factors make this very difficult. Project based learning, where a central problem establishes the purpose for learning, is another strategy that should stimulate intrinsic motivation for learning, and would allow a diverse set of learners to collaborate successfully. Yet again, it's hard to implement effectively without sufficient resources and planning time for teachers. tldr, I think it's completely possible to deliver challenging curriculum and make it accessible to all students, but that lack of resources to do it effectively is frustrating. Main Paineframe posted:If a kid is having trouble in class, is it because they're just plain dumber...or is it because the curriculum is insufficient to handle a wide variety of learning styles? It's tempting to blame the underperforming students for their failures and praise the advanced students for their understanding, but it could just as well be that the overperforming students just happen to be better at rote memorization. Yeah, and it makes you wonder what it is we value in this society. At this point I am very unimpressed with churning out potential Jeopardy contestants. When it comes down to it, I would rather students learn more critical thinking and problem solving skills, which is what Common Core is all about. Anyway, personal anecdote time: In my freshman year of college I befriended a bunch of girls from a private high school. It wasn't Waldorf, (do they even have high school?) but it sounded pretty nontraditional, but not in a hippy kind of way. These girls were very conservative and white (yet one wanted me to hook them up with the black kid from my school that was going to our college for the stated purpose of pissing off her dad). Anyway, they did horribly in college and ended up dropping out. They always complained that their high school teachers told them they were very smart. They attended honors classes and AP classes (clearly they didn't pass the AP exams though). Clearly the professors were insane. (I don't know why they were my friends, I was pretty appalled by them, but I think they liked that I knew one black guy.) When I attended AP classes at my shithole school, there were very few actually gifted students there. We were mostly just there to get away from the perceived threats of the general population. So, please understand my doubting the intent and positive effect of tracking. I also think tiger parents often overestimate their children. One of my former colleagues used to boast he would never send his kids to our school (it's actually a decent school, but only has ten white kids) because they wouldn't be challenged. I mean, they're nice, smart little kids, but, like their parent, they aren't that amazing or ambitious. In a way, it seems these parents are doing the same thing they would deny lower performing children- being surrounded by higher achieving students that would hopefully influence and bring up those who are less apt.
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Sep 14, 2015 05:21
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I think the main reason why students under-perform is because of a lack of confidence, not inherent intelligence or even paternal support. Gifted programs and dedicated teachers can help build that confidence from a young age, but students who don't get that support in non-gifted programs can think they're not "smart enough" for more challenging classes and under-perform. If the goal of modern education were to teach machines to perform new routines exactly and repeatedly, I would say we're doing a great job. But we're educating humans who have wills of their own and often have little idea at all how to apply that will after 18-22 years of education. The goal of education should be to develop students that not only have the work discipline and ability to learn fast and independently that is required in the real world, but also confidence in themselves and their talents, whether they are STEM-related or not, so they have the drive and self-knowledge to apply what they've learned to achieve their goals in life. Without confidence and drive, everything else will be squandered.
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Sep 14, 2015 08:39
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blah_blah posted:I don't think it follows that gifted programs are 'extra resources', but rather academic curricula appropriate to a student's demonstrated skill. They are functionally no different than remedial courses for low-performing students. While there are certainly issues with e.g. the perceived 'best' teachers at a school only teaching honors courses, the lowest achieving students in a school eat up a much larger chunk of resources than the highest performing ones do. Fair enough, a system that threads resources appropriate so each student gets appropriate curriculae is great--however, 'appropriate to a student's demonstrated skill' is still really problematic. What about a student's inherent skill? If you do what you propose, what you're going to find is that those top classes are occupied almost entirely with the wealthy and the white, and the bottom classes with the brown and the poor. I am absolutely sure that you are not someone who thinks that intelligence or ability is determined by race, and so you're left with a problem that tracking obviously does not actually sort according to ability. quote:I mean, you've advocated in this very thread that high performing students should be using their free time after coasting through the material to help their lower-performing peers. That represents a massive shift in resources towards low performing students! No, what I've said is that teaching subjects to other people is a great way to master them. It's not a huge shift in resources, but again, it's also something that turns out not to really be happening if you read the article--high-preforming students are instead mostly grouped with each other inside the same classroom. quote:It's also pretty rich of you to go [citation needed] any time someone states something that you feel is unsubstantiated, but your first post in this thread was Fair enough on calling me out on not substantiating it, but Wiki is not a citable source of arguments. If you look down that page to the international section (and indeed just in the criticism section below) you find arguments against tracking, even against its overall effectiveness. That's the problem with citing wiki--it tempts you to cherrypick only the parts on the page that agree with you. quote:Sure, I'm not asserting that the 50% proportion is somehow a canonical one. I'm just arguing that at the postsecondary level we already have made a conscious decision to subsidize people who are already doing well, and there is almost certainly inefficiency there if we aren't doing the same at the primary and secondary levels. It is also well-documented that public funding for universities produces tremendous economic benefit (see e.g. here). There isn't 'certainly' an inefficiency because we don't know how effective or appropriate the level we're supported postsecondary education is--should we be spending more of that money instead on earlier levels of education to give people a better basic understanding? There's lots of good arguments for this--imagine a population where almost everyone had an actual grounding in statistics and critical thinking, where they could actually evaluate claims and evidence. The problem also replicates itself inside college: right now, about 21.3% of those who attend college drop out and never return. We are either failing to prepare for them in high school, or we are failing in some way in college, or we shouldn't be attempting to get that many kids into college anyway and should turn more resources to educating them before college. Far more people go to college now than they did even ten years ago--is that the 'right' number? Should it be even more? How do we figure that out? You and I of course both agree it'd be superior to pour more resources into education, that if the money spent on, say, advertizing quack cures, televangelism, and anime-pillows could be routed into education. But we're in a real economic situation with scarcity, and so figuring out any allocation is extremely difficult. To return to the actual subject: Within the constraint of limited resources, the easiest way to attempt to achieve different performance is with a different philosophy and methodology. But any such method working is also predicated on having competent teachers, competent administration, a functioning school board that believes in stuff like evolution, and a host of other factors. One of the biggest reported problems in our schools is behavior issues, which impair everyone's learning. Turning resources to solving that might have a very large effect. The point is, in reference to the article and OP, that we shouldn't freak out when changes are made, as long as those changes are deliberate and we're in a position to see how they work out. Any change is an experiment, but so is staying doing the same stuff we are now. We've got to allow change and experimentation, guided by people who study this subject for a living. The experts on this are not going to be the parents--obviously we need to listen to them and engage them if anything is going to work, but their focus is obviously at the individual level.
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Sep 14, 2015 12:02
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Honestly, we should be glad that some school districts are making changes. One of the biggest problems looming over Common Core is that, due to poor and limited teacher training, failure to obtain appropriate materials, natural resistance to make real changes to teaching style, and political uncertainty, Common Core is being implemented in name only in many school districts. Over much of the country, the curriculum is just the same crap with a different name. https://www.washingtonpost.com/loca...40f8_story.html quote:The Common Core State Standards that most states have adopted have triggered plenty of political debate. But have they transformed how teachers are teaching — and what students are learning?
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Sep 14, 2015 14:31
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DeadlyMuffin posted:There aren't many core classes in the engineering curriculum that don't require some knowledge of calculus or beyond. asdf32 posted:Honors/AP everything in high school and an EE degree and 10 years as an engineer doing stuff like frequency domain control loop analysis and signal processing. I don't do that stuff all the time but I've done a lot of it and I've done all of it primarily with wolfram alpha, spice, matlab, excel and a host of other specialized tools which handle the mechanics. I understand what you're trying to say--that emphasizing basic tool-use techniques is a waste of time in a world where the tools all use themselves--but the assumption during teaching is that understanding of what the tools actually do is as important as knowing about their existence. Maybe you solve linear systems by using automated tools, but that doesn't mean that the way we should teach students about solving linear systems is by saying "there's this thing called matrix inversion but this program does it all for you, just type numbers into all the blank spaces and hit Solve, if you don't have enough numbers then make some up until the answer looks right". asdf32 posted:But existing math education is like if nobody ever went on to play basketball but if everyone was eventually going to coach some of it. Main Paineframe posted:One of the biggest problems looming over Common Core is that, due to poor and limited teacher training, failure to obtain appropriate materials, natural resistance to make real changes to teaching style, and political uncertainty, Common Core is being implemented in name only in many school districts.
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Sep 15, 2015 07:28
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Yeah, if you don't know calculus you run the risk of rediscovering calculus and writing a paper about it. https://fliptomato.wordpress.com/2007/03/19/medical-researcher-discovers-integration-gets-75-citations/ Then you get mocked for eternity.
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Sep 15, 2015 09:19
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Miss-Bomarc posted:Partial Differential Equations, in particular, is generally presented in the freshman year. Where? I didn't take it until around the end of my sophomore year (which is about the earliest time I was able to).
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Sep 15, 2015 12:24
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computer parts posted:Where? I didn't take it until around the end of my sophomore year (which is about the earliest time I was able to). Where are you going with this? Are you genuinely curious or is this going to turn into a fight where people's personal experience is going to be dismissed because it isn't a statistically significant sample? I took it in the spring of freshman year. This was a general education requirement for all students.
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Sep 15, 2015 12:54
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Solkanar512 posted:Where are you going with this? Are you genuinely curious or is this going to turn into a fight where people's personal experience is going to be dismissed because it isn't a statistically significant sample? I mean if you're going to say "it's absolutely necessary for all engineering students to take calculus in High School first" it'd be nice to see if that was true. Or even more basic than that: If you're going to say "PDE is commonly seen in the Freshman Year", that's something that'd be nice to know and prove.
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Sep 15, 2015 13:05
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Super smart kids don't learn in school anyways, they learn on their own Design courses for the rest of the kids
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Sep 15, 2015 14:13
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If high schools are changing their curriculum then it's a fair bet that colleges will adjust too, so that's kind of a red herring. Either that, or they'll just leave it like it is anyway, since engineering programs are infamous for their aggressive weed-out. Either way, the point of high school should to be to prep people for life, not to prep people for college; if a college adopts requirements that don't match up with the high school curriculum, that's the college's problem to fix. Of course, the status quo isn't producing students ready for college math, either. In recent years, colleges have been putting significant numbers of freshmen into remedial courses after finding that their actual math skills and knowledge are not up to par for college math, regardless of what classes they took in high school. Arranging math classes so that you can cram as many concepts into them as possible for college is useless if the students aren't fully learning and grasping those concepts. Making sure that the curriculum is arranged in a way that's easy to learn is more important than doing the minimum necessary to check off as many college entry requirements as possible.
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Sep 15, 2015 14:22
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computer parts posted:I mean if you're going to say "it's absolutely necessary for all engineering students to take calculus in High School first" it'd be nice to see if that was true. I would say that it's really common and incredibly beneficial, not absolutely necessary. I certainly won't extend that to PDEs because you have the individual schedule of the particular schools dictating those terms - mine preferred to have had semester math courses to get a variety of material out there to support the other required science courses, but I think other schedules are reasonable as well, depending on the needs of the rest of the major. WhiskeyJuvenile posted:Super smart kids don't learn in school anyways, they learn on their own This is really loving lovely. All kids deserve access to an education broadly suited to their needs, and if it's "too much trouble" then its the adults running the system we should be looking at, not the students themselves.
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Sep 15, 2015 14:29
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Baloogan posted:Yeah, if you don't know calculus you run the risk of rediscovering calculus and writing a paper about it. https://fliptomato.wordpress.com/2007/03/19/medical-researcher-discovers-integration-gets-75-citations/ Then you get mocked for eternity. This has nothing to do with "knowing calculus" and everything to do with knowing what calculus is. All you need to know is enough to google it. It's actually highly unlikely this person didn't take calculus. They probably did but it was probably so detached from actual use-cases that they forgot what an integral does (find area under a curve). That's the problem. asdf32 fucked around with this message at 14:36 on Sep 15, 2015 |
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Sep 15, 2015 14:34
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Solkanar512 posted:This is really loving lovely. All kids deserve access to an education broadly suited to their needs, and if it's "too much trouble" then its the adults running the system we should be looking at, not the students themselves. Not to mention, making gifted kids show up and be bored all day, with the tacit admission that they don't need to be there are aren't going to learn much, seems downright cruel.
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Sep 15, 2015 15:11
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PT6A posted:Not to mention, making gifted kids show up and be bored all day, with the tacit admission that they don't need to be there are aren't going to learn much, seems downright cruel. Learning to show up at boring rear end places is actually an important life skill because you have to do that for most of your life.
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Sep 15, 2015 15:42
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Panzeh posted:Learning to show up at boring rear end places is actually an important life skill because you have to do that for most of your life. School doesn't need to be like an amusement park, don't get me wrong, but it seems insane to combine that with the admission that the boredom won't even be the least bit productive. Why not at least keep teaching kids new things at whatever pace they can comfortably handle, regardless of their specific level of ability? They're still going to have to learn to deal with boredom, but at least it will be productive boredom. If this is the attitude of the public school system, I can see why private schools are so popular (which only serves to further impoverish and destroy the public education system, of course).
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Sep 15, 2015 15:56
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WhiskeyJuvenile posted:Super smart kids don't learn in school anyways, they learn on their own I find the problem with smart people in general is that, especially through high school, they're rarely challenged. Regardless of any level of intelligence you may have, at some point you're going to hit a wall at some point where being smart simply isn't enough. Smart people, when they hit that wall, rarely know how to deal with it because they don't know challenge or the concept of putting effort into something. For smart people especially, high school is a critical period for them.
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Sep 15, 2015 16:04
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PT6A posted:Not to mention, making gifted kids show up and be bored all day, with the tacit admission that they don't need to be there are aren't going to learn much, seems downright cruel. If kids are "bored all day" then we should be fixing the problems with the general curriculum, not making a second, super-special curriculum for anyone who looks bored.
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Sep 15, 2015 16:19
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Main Paineframe posted:If kids are "bored all day" then we should be fixing the problems with the general curriculum, not making a second, super-special curriculum for anyone who looks bored. What's the difference between these two ideas in your mind?
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Sep 15, 2015 16:40
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Main Paineframe posted:If kids are "bored all day" then we should be fixing the problems with the general curriculum, not making a second, super-special curriculum for anyone who looks bored. People learn at different speeds. At that point, you're having unrealistic expectations such as understanding of certain concepts within specific time frame that can't be met by certain people. Let's face it- not everyone is good at math. Most people aren't and don't even understand what math is. That's okay. We don't have produce an army of mathematicians out of high school to get thrown into universities. Lowering the bar for smarter kids and raising the bar for everyone else is not the way to do it.
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Sep 15, 2015 16:44
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some people are just inherently intellectually inferior and
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Sep 15, 2015 18:22
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Ernie Muppari posted:some people are just inherently intellectually inferior and I think you misunderstood my point. Not everyone is going to be engineer, and they don't have to be. The worst curriculum trap high schools can get into is the one where you teach that way just to keep pace with STEM colleges and kids who want to go to them. It'd be better to adopt something like the German system, where kids begin to specialize in high school and start taking classes specific to their talents. The idea of standard examinations where"you must be this good at math or science or english" is meaningless in that sense. If you're becoming an engineer, what you do on the SAT/ACT/no child left behind exam is not going to help.
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Sep 15, 2015 18:34
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Ernie Muppari posted:some people are just inherently intellectually inferior and This gimmick is really loving stupid and doesn't advance the discussion in any way, shape or form.
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Sep 15, 2015 18:52
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well i certainly wouldn't want to disrupt such rigorous  debate and discussion of a very serious issue as goons blubbering about the completely hypothetical loss of perfect precious ap math classes for gifted students(USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Sep 15, 2015 19:04
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Ernie Muppari posted:well i certainly wouldn't want to disrupt such rigorous Seriously, this is becoming tedious. If you have an actual point to make then please make it, otherwise quit making GBS threads up the thread with low effort potshots.
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Sep 15, 2015 19:08
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Solkanar512 posted:Seriously, this is becoming tedious. If you have an actual point to make then please make it, otherwise quit making GBS threads up the thread with low effort potshots. There really isn't anything to the thread, though. They're not getting rid of AP classes. The small change to math curriculum is in line with pedagogy. Freaking out about it is silly, as is almost all the freakouts about common core. Thread is kind of over.
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Sep 15, 2015 19:13
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Ernie Muppari posted:some people are just inherently intellectually inferior and Well, yes. Not everyone has equal ability with everything. Some people are physically inferior, some people are intellectually inferior, some people are shorter, etc. We might wish it were otherwise, but wishing doesn't make it so. We need to talk about how we can best accommodate people of all ability levels in all things, instead of just going "oh, well, he'll be alright no matter what, so let's just teach to the lowest common denominator." Why do people like you get so bitter about the idea of gifted classes, anyway? Is it based in some sort of childhood trauma where you felt excluded, or what?
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Sep 15, 2015 19:19
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Solkanar512 posted:What's the difference between these two ideas in your mind? The latter means having two broken curriculums - one that isn't suited to the learning styles of most students, and one more advanced but equally-broken one for the few students whose learning styles are covered by the curriculum. Of course, that's in addition to the third curriculum that already exists and that no one ever talks about in education reform - the "special needs" curriculum for students who, due to learning disabilities or some other cause, cannot be expected to be served by any standard curriculum, but are usually all shoved together into a single "special" curriculum because the resources simply don't exist to give each one a custom education suited to their particular disabilities. Job Truniht posted:I think you misunderstood my point. Not everyone is going to be engineer, and they don't have to be. The worst curriculum trap high schools can get into is the one where you teach that way just to keep pace with STEM colleges and kids who want to go to them. It'd be better to adopt something like the German system, where kids begin to specialize in high school and start taking classes specific to their talents. The point of high school is to not specialize, but rather to assure a standardized level of skills and knowledge that (in theory) every high school graduate has, regardless of what school they graduated from. Some jobs may require a higher educational level than that or some more specialized skills not covered in a standardized education, in which case those students can go to college and specialize in one particular field, but the point of high school is to ensure that every graduate has a wide-ranging level of basic knowledge, skills, and life skills that could be potentially applied toward many jobs. If they want to be an engineer or some other knowledge-heavy field, they may need specialized education on top of that, but the point of high school is to provide a basic but comprehensive education that is applicable to every industry. Now, when I say "basic but comprehensive", I don't mean "college prep", I mean "ability to read, write, and do simple math" - and high school is failing even at that! This is incredibly important - a number of studies suggest that over 10% of American adults are straight-up illiterate, and many more are barely literate. The latest numbers, from a recent federal study, say that 14% of American adults are essentially illiterate, and 29% of American adults have only "basic" reading abilities at best. Clear statistics are harder to find for math, but anecdotal accounts suggest the situation there is only slightly better. This is why education reform is so goddamn important. The most critical issue is not about how to best fast-track students' advanced skills, it's about ensuring that we're even preparing students with the most basic, most essential workforce skills. Foreign manufacturers, for example, have been complaining for years about the poor quality of the American workforce, especially in the South - Toyota supposedly has to use "pictorials" to train workers at their Alabama plants because they're too illiterate to read written directions.
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Sep 15, 2015 19:31
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Main Paineframe posted:The point of high school is to not specialize, but rather to assure a standardized level of skills and knowledge that (in theory) every high school graduate has, regardless of what school they graduated from. Some jobs may require a higher educational level than that or some more specialized skills not covered in a standardized education, in which case those students can go to college and specialize in one particular field, but the point of high school is to ensure that every graduate has a wide-ranging level of basic knowledge, skills, and life skills that could be potentially applied toward many jobs. If they want to be an engineer or some other knowledge-heavy field, they may need specialized education on top of that, but the point of high school is to provide a basic but comprehensive education that is applicable to every industry. Now, when I say "basic but comprehensive", I don't mean "college prep", I mean "ability to read, write, and do simple math" - and high school is failing even at that! This is incredibly important - a number of studies suggest that over 10% of American adults are straight-up illiterate, and many more are barely literate. The latest numbers, from a recent federal study, say that 14% of American adults are essentially illiterate, and 29% of American adults have only "basic" reading abilities at best. Clear statistics are harder to find for math, but anecdotal accounts suggest the situation there is only slightly better. well generalized education is only for the rich so clearly the problem with all those alabamans is just that they weren't placed into the toyota factory worker track at age 12
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Sep 15, 2015 19:44
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Main Paineframe posted:The point of high school is to not specialize, but rather to assure a standardized level of skills and knowledge that (in theory) every high school graduate has, regardless of what school they graduated from. Some jobs may require a higher educational level than that or some more specialized skills not covered in a standardized education, in which case those students can go to college and specialize in one particular field, but the point of high school is to ensure that every graduate has a wide-ranging level of basic knowledge, skills, and life skills that could be potentially applied toward many jobs. If they want to be an engineer or some other knowledge-heavy field, they may need specialized education on top of that, but the point of high school is to provide a basic but comprehensive education that is applicable to every industry. Now, when I say "basic but comprehensive", I don't mean "college prep", I mean "ability to read, write, and do simple math" - and high school is failing even at that! If this is the point of high school, we should be permitting a not-insubstantial number of kids to graduate at 15. At least some of the time, honors and AP classes function as a sop to kids who should really be at a local CC already getting their general ed out of the way. Of course, if we were to permit that, we'd face the same social problems caused by tracking, but even more so, since there would arise a massive stigma against those who got their diploma at the normal age kids do now.
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Sep 15, 2015 19:59
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Jack of Hearts posted:If this is the point of high school, we should be permitting a not-insubstantial number of kids to graduate at 15. At least some of the time, honors and AP classes function as a sop to kids who should really be at a local CC already getting their general ed out of the way. Of course, if we were to permit that, we'd face the same social problems caused by tracking, but even more so, since there would arise a massive stigma against those who got their diploma at the normal age kids do now. Why, exactly? There's nothing in there that requires that "a not-insubstantial number of kids" to run out of classes after two years. He didn't say anything about banning honors classes, or AP classes. He said that the purpose of public education ought to be to educate everyone up to a certain standard, and that the minimal level of this standard is failing to be met. Now, implicit in your response would thus be the belief that educating everyone up to this minimal standard requires "permitting a not-insubstantial number of kids" to only spend two years in high school. Which in turn has a host of other implications. But it's ridiculous to think that, because there's plenty of space for classes that are agnostic on whether the kid is "gifted" or not, and even if we were unable to maintain AP/IB/honors courses, that would still be better, morally and pragmatically speaking, both because democracy is superior to aristocracy and because "gifted" children are more likely to learn on their own.
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Sep 15, 2015 22:41
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Most high school kids would gain a lot more from spending half the day at a trade school than trying to get calculus shoved in their face in the vain hope that college will get them something.
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Sep 15, 2015 22:45
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Panzeh posted:Most high school kids would gain a lot more from spending half the day at a trade school than trying to get calculus shoved in their face in the vain hope that college will get them something. My high school had this option, though it was the last two years rather than half a day. [ulr=http://snoisletech.com/]Whole bunch of certifications on offer{/url].
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Sep 15, 2015 22:58
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Panzeh posted:Most high school kids would gain a lot more from spending half the day at a trade school than trying to get calculus shoved in their face in the vain hope that college will get them something. Yeah, then they can dream of working 80 hour weeks.
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Sep 15, 2015 23:07
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computer parts posted:Yeah, then they can dream of working 80 hour weeks. Except with a lovely degree/some college you end up doing it for not much north of minimum wage. Sure, smart people can parlay trash degrees into jobs but your average dumbass has a better shot with some kind of trade cert than with a lovely degree or half a degree. Not that the trades are a panacea. A lot of them get poo poo on, too.
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Sep 15, 2015 23:11
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Effectronica posted:Why, exactly? There's nothing in there that requires that "a not-insubstantial number of kids" to run out of classes after two years. He didn't say anything about banning honors classes, or AP classes. He said that the purpose of public education ought to be to educate everyone up to a certain standard, and that the minimal level of this standard is failing to be met. Now, implicit in your response would thus be the belief that educating everyone up to this minimal standard requires "permitting a not-insubstantial number of kids" to only spend two years in high school. Which in turn has a host of other implications. My response was to Main Paineframe, who said Main Paineframe posted:[T]he point of high school is to provide a basic but comprehensive education that is applicable to every industry. Now, when I say "basic but comprehensive", I don't mean "college prep", I mean "ability to read, write, and do simple math" - and high school is failing even at that! This is incredibly important - a number of studies suggest that over 10% of American adults are straight-up illiterate, and many more are barely literate. The latest numbers, from a recent federal study, say that 14% of American adults are essentially illiterate, and 29% of American adults have only "basic" reading abilities at best. Clear statistics are harder to find for math, but anecdotal accounts suggest the situation there is only slightly better.plants because they're too illiterate to read written directions[/url]. If you're saying that there are other objectives in high school education, then I agree, chief among them socialization. But if the paramount objective of high school is to achieve these basic proficiencies, what do you do with the ones who already have, and who are nevertheless compelled to attend? They have achieved the desired end; why shouldn't they go and continue their intellectual development in a place that doesn't mandate you take gym? At some point, incidentally, socialization doesn't hold as a worthwhile end either. My best friend's little sister dropped out of high school at 16, took an equivalency exam, and went straight to community college. I thought this was very clever, as I had no idea it was possible. If you're capable, why bother with tedious junior English, when you can do slightly-less-tedious college freshman English and get credit for transfer?
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Sep 15, 2015 23:14
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Jack of Hearts posted:My response was to Main Paineframe, who said That's not what I'm saying, and that's not what Main Paineframe is saying either. What is being said is that the minimal, absolute minimal, standard of universal education is failing to be met by our schools, so the priority shouldn't be on focusing on the "gifted" kids, it should be about getting things up to that minimal standard of everyone being able to read and write and do math. Furthermore, there's nothing wrong with gym, porky.
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Sep 15, 2015 23:19
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Main Paineframe posted:The point of high school is to not specialize, but rather to assure a standardized level of skills and knowledge that (in theory) every high school graduate has, regardless of what school they graduated from. Some jobs may require a higher educational level than that or some more specialized skills not covered in a standardized education, in which case those students can go to college and specialize in one particular field, but the point of high school is to ensure that every graduate has a wide-ranging level of basic knowledge, skills, and life skills that could be potentially applied toward many jobs. If they want to be an engineer or some other knowledge-heavy field, they may need specialized education on top of that, but the point of high school is to provide a basic but comprehensive education that is applicable to every industry. Now, when I say "basic but comprehensive", I don't mean "college prep", I mean "ability to read, write, and do simple math" - and high school is failing even at that! This is incredibly important - a number of studies suggest that over 10% of American adults are straight-up illiterate, and many more are barely literate. The latest numbers, from a recent federal study, say that 14% of American adults are essentially illiterate, and 29% of American adults have only "basic" reading abilities at best. Clear statistics are harder to find for math, but anecdotal accounts suggest the situation there is only slightly better. What you just described though is just another No Child Left Behind. It's not going to work. High schools are becoming increasingly irrelevant if we're stuck on "can everyone here do babby math?" School shouldn't hold your hand, it should push you and keep you constantly stressed. Those in turn come to help when you have to go to college and actual deal with real pressure. Highschool math is purely arithmetic, and in that sense is total dogshit. It should be thrown in favor of something much more abstract.
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Sep 15, 2015 23:34
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