The Future of Education - ReRolled Solves Problems

Our country is massive. That needs to be understood.

One step, all encompassing programs will not work. Take for instance the OP's "Make students learn through video games", it is a great idea, until you actually do the math on what that would take to retrofit our entire nation to have the means to present this new way of teaching, funding for the resources, teaching teachers how to use it, and so on. Not to mention the lack of funds that are already hamstringing our educational system. I support higher taxes, or perhaps re-aligning our current funding into Education, but that is not happening. The State I work in has drastically cut student funding in the last year or so.

You (OP) speak as IF schools have computer labs to even preform these actions. Sure, rich schools do, public schools are not all created equal, and I am not talking solely urban schools, rural schools get the shaft as well. The school I am at shares computers K-12. I have to fight elementary "Math Blasters" to get time for my high school students to research....

To the poster that says, "teachers are lazy, they should make awesome lessons, if they were not lazy that is what they would do... (not verbatim clearly, that was the gist.) This is what I say to you, in theory it sounds great, in practice not so much.

Anecdotal story--- I had this awesome idea to introduce the farce of Christopher Columbus day on Friday, so for Monday's class we could get into the meat of the issue of why we teach misleading half-truths to our kids without introducing the 'real' man that Columbus was. I am not a history teacher, I teach Spanish, this was going to turn into a Cultural cross-curricular exercise.

I prompted the students with this question, "Write down the reason/s that we celebrate Christopher Columbus day?" and also. "Write down anything you know about C.C.?" My entire reason for this prompt was to get the students to answer incorrectly, to write down that Christopher Columbus discovered the Americas, that he fooled the rest of the world that thought the world was flat, et cetera. My idea was to negate everything the students thought they knew and turn it around and present the factual details. By completely turning their beliefs upside down I hoped to have an engaging class Monday with the 'truths' which would segue into Caribbean / Latin American history.

This fell through drastically, half of my class, Freshmen and Sophomores, wrote that "Christopher Columbus founded America/United States." First, what does that even mean, did he find America/The US? Or perhaps does that mean he actually founded the Americas/The US? Either way it's so far off base that I couldn't even get into the cool lesson of refuting the COMMON (Misconceptions) KNOWLEDGE of who Christopher Columbus was because the students didn't even know it in the first place. The class was a bomb, instead of an interesting discussion of revisionist history, of Anglo European preference, of purposely twisting the truth, etc, we became muddled in confusion. Half of the class did follow through by walking into the trap with predictable answers, however I couldn't follow through with the lesson without bringing the stragglers up to speed.

Long story short, it was planned out very well, I spent time thinking about it, creating an interesting angle to get kids engaged, I spent time outside of class (which means NON-COMPENSATED) and it fell through due to what I would say is pure stupidity. Who knows, perhaps these kids have never heard of Christopher Columbus, or perhaps someone actually taught them that he 'founded the United States' either way class sucked.

On a different note, students with parents that care do well, students with parents that don't care don't do well. It's night and day, 95% of the parents that come to PT conferences have students that have As all across the board. I would go out on a limb and say that a huge chunk of the problem with education in our country isn't so much a problem with the way we educate, however instead a problem with the students we are trying to educate, due to the upbringing/support/structure/guidance they do or do not receive.

On a side note, the next time you want to blame a teacher, I want you to do a little exercise, self-reflect on how many hours a week you spend working on work or even thinking about work related issues without COMPENSATION. Then, take your annual income, and compare that with teachers'. I am not telling you what to infer from that, that's up to you.

--Pardon any grammar / spelling errors. It's late and I just went with it.

To the poster that says, "teachers are lazy, they should make awesome lessons, if they were not lazy that is what they would do... (not verbatim clearly, that was the gist.) This is what I say to you, in theory it sounds great, in practice not so much.

Click to expand...

I assume this is directed at me, as I'm the one who initially said some blame is on the teachers. First of all, let me reiterate thatI am a teacher, so I fully understand how difficult, time-consuming, and often unsatisfying to prepare quality lessons. It's great that you took the time to prepare a lesson on Christopher Columbus, but for every teacher like you that goes the extra mile, there are ten who say "open your history book to page 10 and read. You'll have a test on the material." (Obviously an exaggeration, but you get my point: uninspired, textbook-based lessons). So, I applaud the effort you go through, but don't pretend as if that's the norm for teachers. It's poorly paid, unforgiving work that most people just can't handle (myself included. Fuck public school teaching). *edit* I wanted to add that shitty teachers aren't just limited to the public or primary schools. You'll run into equally shitty teachers at the college level. I might even argue MORE college teachers are shitty, because the majority of them are there to do research and teaching is just something they do because they have to.

If we really want to improve the quality of our teachers then they need to be paid for the amount of work that they do. It's absolutely insane that my aunt with a bachelors degree who pushes papers all day at the IRS gets paid 6 figures while every teacher I know--all of whom have masters degrees--are lucky to make more than 50k. And this is in the Washington, D.C. area which is one of the most expensive in the country.

Like I said before, the only way to really "fix" education is to resolve the numerous socioeconomic, financial, and political issues. Education is nothing more than a byproduct of those areas, and changes in them will be reflected in education.

Education is far more art than science. Every kid is unique, and learns differently. There are definitely pedagogy styles that work better, generally, than others, but that's generally a function of the social environment the child is being reared in. One school will have amazing success with one comprehensive style or another, while the next will have a nightmare when they try to implement it. In a collectivist society, it is considerably easier to bring kids into a structured, across-the-board system and have them flourish because that's the way their entire life is structured. In a "I AM A UNIQUE INDIVIDUAL AND I'M SUPER AWESOME" culture, it doesn't work so hot, because we're being programmed from the dawn of our social-cognizance to resist that shit. Unfortunately, the things that help facilitate education in individualist cultures (smaller class-sizes, greater differentiation in instruction) are man-hour intensive and expensive as fuck.

Honestly, if parents aren't idiots (which, unfortunately, most of the homeschool parents I encountered during my time when I was working as a lit-tutor were) they are likely the best candidates for providing their child the highly differentiated, direct support needed for proper learning in an individualist mindset. However, doing so is time-intensive and requires knowledge and dedication that most parents in society just don't have. The things our society deems "good" just happen to be really fucking inconvenient/out-of-reach for anyone who isn't on a decent step of the SES ladder (Low-SES families are totally chomping at the bit to have one of their income-earners stay home every day to teach!).

"Fixing" public education is something I can't see happening. The amount of people with Academic-Only knowledge of teaching, or no-knowledge, who get elbows-up-the-system's-ass-deep when it's time to determine whether schools are successful or not, and/or what the funding is going to be this year, pretty much buggers the idea of ever attempting to fix it. There are as many differing ideas on what correct educational practices are as there are people on this planet who have thought about education. If you look through newspaper records people have been bitching about the failure of public education since there has BEEN public education. It's the same shit, different day.

Just try to make sure the kids don't come out too fucked up.

And maybe try to teach some critical thinking skills if you don't think it'll get you fired when their parents complain that little Billy doesn't take everything they say as gospel anymore.

Also, there are a lot of really shitty teachers. Unfortunately, every teacher says that. Even the shitty ones. And none of them think they are the shitty ones. I'm more likely than not one of the shitty ones.


The only good ones have Narwhal posters on their walls.


I will say that Substitute-Teaching was the best lazy-fuck job I ever did, for the time I did it. Don't feel like going to work today? MEH. Feel like going to work? Don't worry, someone's already done all the preparation for you, or likely just handed you 3-4 sessions of SSR.

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?

*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.

Click to expand...

The education system can't do anything to help the completely apathetic and shit inner city druggie parents. It doesn't matter what you change. What such a test/barrier can fix is the "my child is a special special snowflake" parents that expect the school to somehow magically infuse education into their kids despite neither their kids or them doing any work. You know, the ones blame the school/teacher for everything despite not getting involved in the kids' education at all. When their kid fails a test, they call the school and bitch until the grade gets changed.

If you run out a standardized test and make it extremely clear that, "If your child fails this test, he/she will never be employed in anything more difficult than fast food. There are no retakes, no appeals, you are forever fucked if you fuck this up." you damn well better believe they'll get involved and make their kids learn something.

No sane educator would ever want a single-data point, one-attempt assessment to be the determiner of their student's future.

At least, no educator who wasn't a complete and total shit-ass who shouldn't be working with kids.

Xequecal_sl said:

The education system can't do anything to help the completely apathetic and shit inner city druggie parents. It doesn't matter what you change. What such a test/barrier can fix is the "my child is a special special snowflake" parents that expect the school to somehow magically infuse education into their kids despite neither their kids or them doing any work. You know, the ones blame the school/teacher for everything despite not getting involved in the kids' education at all. When their kid fails a test, they call the school and bitch until the grade gets changed.

If you run out a standardized test and make it extremely clear that, "If your child fails this test, he/she will never be employed in anything more difficult than fast food. There are no retakes, no appeals, you are forever fucked if you fuck this up." you damn well better believe they'll get involved and make their kids learn something.

Click to expand...

Standardized tests are full of problems in and of themselves, though. Especially for a country as diverse as the United States, how do you make a truly "standardized" test? How do you account for language differences? How do you account for different cultural knowledge? How do you fairly mark the test? How do you account for the student just having a bad day? In theory a test like you're talking about is good, but I just don't see it working in practical terms. The SAT, for a while at least, was close to what you're describing, although not quite as severe. Nonetheless, it has been repeatedly attacked for a long time for being unfair and biased.

*edit*

The education system can't do anything to help the completely apathetic and shit inner city druggie parents. It doesn't matter what you change.

Click to expand...

It's not just apathetic, druggy parents, though. A lot of my experience is with immigrants, and a big problem among immigrants is that, although they want their kids to succeed, they simply don't have time to devote to helping their kids like a typical middle class American does. Another, similar situation that I've seen a lot of is parents (Americans, not immigrants) having to move their kid to a new school every 12 months because they can't afford the rent increase in their apartments. They parents don't want to move and they want to give their children stability, but what choice do they have when they're stuck in this never-ending cycle of barely making ends meet?

These (among others) are the problems that need to be solved before the education system in the U.S.A can have any hope of improving.

Asking for definitions of Yachting terms on the SAT was a pretty fabulous example of "standardization."

Kuro_sl said:

No sane educator would ever want a single-data point, one-attempt assessment to be the determiner of their student's future.

At least, no educator who wasn't a complete and total shit-ass who shouldn't be working with kids.

Click to expand...

Like I said before, South Korea uses it, and they have the best educated kids in the world by miles.

I'm pretty sure if we took children from their families at about 2 years of age and locked them in forced-learning camps we'd have some pretty awesomely educated kids.

And hell, we can take the remedial students amongst them and finally actually find out how many 3rd Graders we can take in a fight!

McCheese_sl said:

Standardized tests are full of problems in and of themselves, though. Especially for a country as diverse as the United States, how do you make a truly "standardized" test? How do you account for language differences? How do you account for different cultural knowledge? How do you fairly mark the test? How do you account for the student just having a bad day? In theory a test like you're talking about is good, but I just don't see it working in practical terms. The SAT, for a while at least, was close to what you're describing, although not quite as severe. Nonetheless, it has been repeatedly attacked for a long time for being unfair and biased.

Click to expand...

The actual content of the test is basically irrelevant. It's a lot of rote memorization anyway, which is not really learning. The test exists to prove that you have a work ethic, that you can learn material that's presented to you, and that you're not a fuckup. It's the same reason everyone requires a college degree even if none of the job duties are even remotely relevant to anything you learn in college, the degree proves you can actually do something.

Xequecal_sl said:

Like I said before, South Korea uses it, and they have the best educated kids in the world by miles.

Click to expand...

It's a completely different culture, though. You can't reasonably say that because it works in South Korea that it would work in the United States.

The actual content of the test is basically irrelevant. It's a lot of rote memorization anyway, which is not really learning. The test exists to prove that you have a work ethic, that you can learn material that's presented to you, and that you're not a fuckup. It's the same reason everyone requires a college degree even if none of the job duties are even remotely relevant to anything you learn in college, the degree proves you can actually do something.

Click to expand...

If that were the case, underachieving students would just say "fuck it". Putting an extremely difficult barrier in front of kids isn't going to make them work harder. It won't give their families more time and money to support them. It won't give some school districts enough money to finally buy a couple computers for their schools.

It's not a solution to the root problems.

McCheese_sl said:

If that were the case, underachieving students would just say "fuck it". Putting an extremely difficult barrier in front of kids isn't going to make them work harder. It won't give their families more time and money to support them. It won't give some school districts enough money to finally buy a couple computers for their schools.

It's not a solution to the root problems.

Click to expand...

Like I said before, if the parents don't give a shit there's really nothing the education system can do in any event. If the kids don't care, it's their parents' job to make them care. If the parents can't do it, who can? If "you" don't want to work harder, then why should we give a shit about you? Have fun with your life flipping burgers, we'll give the real jobs to people who have proven they can try. Very few parents actually don't care at all about their kids, and if you can demonstrate that scoring well on this test is guaranteed to lead to great opportunities, even if you come from some inner city shithole, you'll get people to rise to the challenge.

Now to be clear, I'm not advocating for such a system, because I don't think the benefits are worth the costs either. In fact, IMHO the main reason Americans score so "low" on education worldwide is that unlike most other countries, the education system is not run by the federal government and as such there's a lot more variation. Rich areas have great schools and poor areas have shit schools, and since the scoring system is top-heavy, that results in much worse scores. Three ninety-fives and one zero is a worse average than four seventy-fives. That's not to say that over in Europe all the schools are the same quality, but their schools don't get anywhere near as bad as our worst schools do. At the same time, if you pull up a list of say the 20 best schools in some category, probably 19 of them will be in the US. It's not clear that this system is actually worse than what they have over there.

Cad_sl said:

Not everyone will make it. Life isn't fair. Decisions need to be made. Immigrants might take a generation or two to get settled and integrated and fully on-board with life in the US. This is "okay". There will be kids who "have a bad day" and end up working below their level.

These are problems but to act like their existence means we should just be paralyzed in our educational outcomes because "everyone should go to college" (no they should not) is just stupid.

Click to expand...

I agree. I'm not saying we shouldn't attempt to improve education. My point is that these blanket statements people love to make (not just here, but in general) about how to improve education, such as "we need tougher tests" or "we need to use technology more effectively in the classroom", etc., aren't really a) possible and b) likely to solve much of anything in the long term.

Cad_sl said:

Not everyone will make it. Life isn't fair. Decisions need to be made. Immigrants might take a generation or two to get settled and integrated and fully on-board with life in the US. This is "okay". There will be kids who "have a bad day" and end up working below their level.

These are problems but to act like their existence means we should just be paralyzed in our educational outcomes because "everyone should go to college" (no they should not) is just stupid.

Click to expand...

Let's be perfectly honest with ourselves, how many of us would have actually made it into the advanced placement courses/track if we would have been tested in late middle school with a make it/break it test.

I know perfectly well that I was an animal in middle school, there is no way I would have passed a test, I would not have gone on to college, I would not be where I am today. I do not think these tests are the way to go.

Yeah, in a year I'll be done with school and have my degree in Secondary education (Middle-High school). Already I'm thinking I'm wasting my time, common core seems like such bullshit. It seems more and more like all they want us to do is teach to a test so we get big numbers and can feel good about ourselves. I suppose that's what happens when business people run a country, profits (test grades) are the only things that matter.

Jx3_sl said:

Yeah, in a year I'll be done with school and have my degree in Secondary education (Middle-High school). Already I'm thinking I'm wasting my time, common core seems like such bullshit. It seems more and more like all they want us to do is teach to a test so we get big numbers and can feel good about ourselves. I suppose that's what happens when business people run a country, profits (test grades) are the only things that matter.

Click to expand...

Become a teacher it's alright. I work in a rural district and I really enjoy it most days. I try my best to push all the administrative/state/federal mandated shenanigans out of my head. I comply and then go right back to what I was doing.