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Time To Rethink the School Desk?
theodp writes "As part of its reimagine the 21st-century classroom project, Slate asks: Is the best way to fix the American classroom to improve the furniture? While adults park their butts in $700 Aeron chairs, kids still sprawl and slump and fidget and dangle their way through the day in school furniture designed to meet or beat a $40 price point. 'We've seen in adults that if you put them in the right chair, their performance increases,' says Harvard's Jack Dennerlein. 'Is the same true for children? I can't see why not.' For school districts with deep pockets, there are choices — a tricked-out Node chair from IDEO and Steelcase can be had for $599."
(And I was hating on the teachers' unions before Waiting for Superman, so :b in advance)
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
It's worse than that. Teacher pay is already enough that those who are skilled enough to do the job, mostly don't want to because they can get a better job, with better hours and better working conditions. So many of the "lousy teachers" you mention are in the system merely because they're the dregs that were left over when the pool of prospectives for the career was picked clean. Meanwhile, in order to get warm bodies into public schooling, the standards for certification just get lower and lower. I've seen "student teacher" projects presented at a local school that would have earned an F... in the third grade back when I was in school.
Read up on child labor laws. Otherwise, what's to keep the science department from outsourcing the biology students to grounds care on the pretense of studying botany? The home economics program could be dragooned into becoming the cafeteria staff. Don't even ask what the ROTC department could become.
Sorry, the fundamental premise of primary education is that it is, and must remain, completely useless. In a practical, economic sense.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Yeah, I'm sure a couple dozen kids spending a few hours a week in a small, undersupplied shop with maybe a few usable machines per class can build and maintain 5000+ desks for each school district. All while doing it more cheaply than some factory in China paying employees a couple dollars a day...
but that's the beauty of going back the way it was, we have the shop and electronics classes but also implement the liability policies: "if you lop your finger off, it's because you didn't heed the the instructors safety guidelines, and it's your own damn fault, you stupid slacker. Assume Responsibility".
We didn't have A.D.D. then either, a smack upside the head nipped such a developing condition in the bud.
And no, I am not joking.
Doesn't sound sad to me at all. Now the loss of geography and civics courses, THOSE are sad. Shop? Let the motorheads pound nails on their own time.
-- I'm old enough to have lived through six different meanings of the word "hacker."
Why in the world should geography be taught indoors? Or English, for that matter?
My GCSE[1] English teacher often took the lessons outside when it was sunny. She even made us go outside and 'experience the summer' for one lesson, with the homework assignment being to write a poem about summer. We all thought this was a great dodge, until she decided that we should do the same in the winter. A lesson of 'experiencing the winter' was somehow much less fun...
[1] British exam taken at 16, taught from ages 14-16.
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If you don't take notes, you spend the next day asking "what was that formula we talked about again?" and "who was that general in that war?"
That's interesting - in my world we have books and computers that let us look up that information.
When I was in university, I had one lecturer (in the special relativity / quantum mechanics module) ask me if I was having problems, because I always sat in the front row, paid attention, and never wrote anything down. I ended up getting one of the highest marks for that module, because I actually listened to what the lecturer said, and went and looked up stuff later if I didn't understand it, rather than dividing my attention between note taking and listening.
One of my father's lecturers described lectures as the process by which information is transferred between the blackboard and the students' notes without ever passing through a brain.
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