The Future of Education - ReRolled Solves Problems

Chris_sl said:

As a teacher this is kind of offensive. Do you understand how much time it takes to prepare a lesson like that (and that they are easier to deliver)? Now consider that most of your free time is taken up by students/marking/training/paperwork and you need to plan 3-5 of those types of lessons per day - so you go into unpaid preparation time at home and you are already paid less than people who are equally qualified as you. My facebook is full of my friends in finance/law/science flying around the world.

Then many students are lazy and take those kinds of lessons as a chance to do nothing for an hour. I actually do try to do lessons like that as much as possible but working in an inner city school most of the kids are too badly behaved to handle it and you end up being a glorified babysitter whom the parents expect to raise their kids for them.



For lesson quality like you say, what is really needed are preprepared packs of lessons for different ability levels - I don't see why I need to plan a new lesson from stratch when it's being taught millions of times across the world, yet that is what I do. They need to be tailored to each class and student of course but starting from nothing seems kind of wasteful. Those preprepared lessons that are out there tend to suck, like a teacher didn't design them. Best you can hope for is a pack of resources (worksheets/videos) which you assemble yourself into the lesson.

Then have them online in a format students can access. Khan Academy is fine but last time I looked it was only lecture style exposition, there are others which have markable practice questions with them but still missing key parts of a lesson. It should be possible to develop a website which delivers content in the same way and order a real teacher would using educational theory, this would be the future I think. Stick some MMO style levels and facebook shit on it too.

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I've taught at the middle and high school level so, yes, I understand how much time it takes to prepare good lessons and how frustrating it is when the kids don't give a fuck. I don't see why you think it's offensive. I never said that all teachers are shitty, and god knows I know some absolutely amazing teachers who somehow manage to inspire interest in even the worst students. That said, you can't deny that there are HUGE numbers of teachers who have basically checked out and just do the absolute minimum, whether by choice or simply because the educational system has ground them down into a bitter stub of their former, idealistic selves. My family has a history of working in education so I've been around teachers of various levels my whole life and the sad fact is that most of them are just awful, even if they didn't start that way initially.

One reason I got out of public school teaching was because I saw how bitter and hateful all the veteran teachers were.

Montessori and "incubator" schools with a lot less rigidity and more group problem solving seem to be catching on even in wv.

It's amazing to me there's not more research and experimentation into the methods of teaching on a national scale.

I do think we should have a less nursing system for children but be more open to adult and reenrollment. Some of these old fucks that go to college should be in 7th grade instead of piling on debt and holding up the class... but they're eagerness to learn after seeing a dead end life should be encouraged.

I took that as the implication McCheese sorry if I misunderstood, in the UK all kinds of bullshit about teachers is said at the moment since we get the blame for the politics and parents.

Trollface in the UK it is the "retarded" white kids, since that kind of behaviour is a product of generations of poverty/welfare. I'm pretty happy to see any kind of minority in my class since they tend to work harder.

Adebisi_sl said:

You know what I want to see in public schools? Kids learning to program at an earlier age. Have kids creating their own video games. A Shakespeare RPG mayhaps? There's your english class!

But seriously - the baby thugs need to get into the nerd arts and away from the rap culture. You get a kid into D&D and I bet they'll be less likely to shoot or rob someone irl.

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It doesn't matter what schools do, because kids spend the majority of their time outside the classroom with family and friends. As long as their parents are dealing drugs and their friends are wannabe thugs there will be no changes.

It's no coincidence that the kids whose parents give a shit and participate in their child's education are the kids who manage to be successful in any-and-all subjects.

McCheese_sl said:

It doesn't matter what schools do, because kids spend the majority of their time outside the classroom with family and friends. As long as their parents are dealing drugs and their friends are wannabe thugs there will be no changes.

It's no coincidence that the kids whose parents give a shit and participate in their child's education are the kids who manage to be successful in any-and-all subjects.

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Then perhaps more focus should be put on the parents? Maybe give tax breaks to the parent if their child does well in school. Base it off their GPA or something. Or perhaps require parents to take a parenting class, which again could be tied to tax breaks.

But I guess that would backfire as teachers would be harassed for 'denying' parents tax breaks.

Improving primary education is a thorny problem. The methods that have been proven to work best are extremely harsh and unpalatable. The #1 proven best way to improve education performance is to institute a mandatory test at a certain point and then implement massive consequences for failing at that test. South Korea has one of these where basically your entire life's course depends on your age 18 CSAT score, and guess what? They have the best educated kids anywhere. Of course, that comes with a suicide rate triple the OECD average and a birthrate of 1.2 children per woman - because most families simply cannot afford to provide a future for more than one child. The only way for someone of average intelligence to get a remotely competitive score is to study 12+ hours a day every single day from age 13 to age 18, in addition to going to $10,000+ year private cram schools that teach you how to study even harder.

The higher-scoring European countries also have this, while the consequences are nowhere near as harsh as in South Korea, scoring poorly on their equivalent of a high school entrance exam at age 12-13 tends to get you routed into the "stupid" high school which tends to close off access to most higher education. Europe also has a much more rigid employment system than the US does, many positions simply cannot be held unless you have a degree from an approved list of schools, no matter what your skills or experience might happen to be. In the US it's hard to get your foot in the door without a degree, but if you manage to get in, nobody cares whether you have a degree if you have good performance and years of experience. In Europe for a lot of jobs, it doesn't matter how much experience you have or how successful you were, if you don't have that piece of paper, you can't get the job.

Second, you also have to look at how you're actually ranking the education systems. Remember that a B student only has 10-15 points of possible improvement, while a completely apathetic student has 100 points of possible improvement. A country full of nothing but mediocre schools will rank much, much higher than a country with some great schools and some complete shit schools, which is what the US has.

how do you improve education? get parents to give a shit about their kids and their education.

Eyashusa_sl said:

how do you improve education? get parents to give a shit about their kids and their education.

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Pretty much this.

You don't improve education by making changes to education. You improve education by solving the underlying socioeconomic problems that lead to educational problems.

A couple years ago my mom did a project with a class of first graders about "A person you idolize" or something like that. 90% of the class did their project on Lil' Wayne. Great role model. She routinely has kids in first grade who can not even write their names. She had one who didn't even know his name. How the hell can anyone expect young kids like these to succeed in school when they're being so "broken" by their parents/home life at such an early age?

*edit* Implementing a mandatory test with massive consequences like Xequecal mentions is used in other countries would do fuck all in the U.S.A. If kids don't give a shit about education or learning in general, why would they give a shit about failing the test? Tests like these "work" (I put it in quotes because how well they work is debatable, if you consider the ramifications; i.e high suicide rates) in some other countries is because the underlying culture is considerably different from that in the U.S.A.

McCheese_sl said:

Pretty much this.

You don't improve education by making changes to education. You improve education by solving the underlying socioeconomic problems that lead to educational problems.

A couple years ago my mom did a project with a class of first graders about "A person you idolize" or something like that. 90% of the class did their project on Lil' Wayne. Great role model. She routinely has kids in first grade who can not even write their names. She had one who didn't even know his name. How the hell can anyone expect young kids like these to succeed in school when they're being so "broken" by their parents/home life at such an early age?

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Glad to see we agree about the important things in life.

The education system needs to be overhauled to emphasize children's particular areas of interest and strengths. The problem with the conventional system is that it forces people to learn shit they don't really care about.

All I can remember Lyrical for is arguing with Tenks about dogs.