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Why Kids Should Be Building Rockets Instead of Taking Tests

Posted by Soulskill on from the because-the-failure-case-is-much-more-exciting dept.

An anonymous reader writes "MAKE Magazine founder Dale Dougherty has an article in Slate about how educators are missing the punchline when it comes to getting kids interested in learning. He describes a recent visit he made to a middle school: 'The science lab was empty, as were the library and the playground. It was not a school holiday: It was a state-mandated STAR testing day. The school was in an academic lockdown. This is what the American public school looks like in 2012, driven by obsessive adherence to standardized testing. The fate of children, their schools, and their teachers are based on these school test scores.' Dougherty's preference would be to more tightly integrate basic engineering projects into the science curriculum. 'I see the power of engaging kids in science and technology through the practices of making and hands-on experiences, through tinkering and taking things apart. Schools seem to have forgotten that students learn best when they are engaged; in fact, the biggest problem in schools is boredom. Students sit passively, expected to absorb all the content that is thrown at them without much context. The context that's missing is the real world."

18 of 381 comments (clear)

  1. Educators aren't missing the punchline... by fotbr · · Score: 5, Insightful

    They're doing exactly what they've been told to do by the system that politics has created. To fix our schools, you need to keep congress's nose out of the process, return responsibility to the individual states and local boards of education.

    1. Re:Educators aren't missing the punchline... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Because if anyone knows how to create a quality education its the idiots that elect your local school board.

    2. Re:Educators aren't missing the punchline... by DesScorp · · Score: 5, Insightful

      They're doing exactly what they've been told to do by the system that politics has created. To fix our schools, you need to keep congress's nose out of the process, return responsibility to the individual states and local boards of education.

      While I agree with your sentiments, educators are not only missing the punchline, they're one of the primary drivers behind the current system. Have a look at the curriculum of various education degree programs at colleges and universities... especially on the graduate side. You'll find a devotion to rigid institutional orthodoxy, and an almost cultish drive to keep non-education majors out of the the teaching ranks. Teaching has become something of a guild.

      --
      Life is hard, and the world is cruel
    3. Re:Educators aren't missing the punchline... by NeutronCowboy · · Score: 4, Insightful

      You mean, "local" schoolboards like the Texas one? See here for an example? I'll never understand why people think that local politicians are somehow better than Washington politicians. If anything, they can be worse, because there are far more possibilities for them to go completely off the deep end and be unchallenged.

      --
      Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
    4. Re:Educators aren't missing the punchline... by magarity · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Because if anyone knows how to create a quality education its the idiots that elect your local school board.

      Are you trying to imply the federal department of education has higher quality idiots than the local school board?

    5. Re:Educators aren't missing the punchline... by realmolo · · Score: 4, Insightful

      You've got it exactly backwards.

      The states and local boards of education are THE PROBLEM.

      Public education in this country is a magnet for failed middle-managers and failed politicians. They use local school districts to build their little fiefdoms, and to line the pockets of their friends with government contracts for construction, and books, and computers, and all that crap. Education is the LAST thing on their minds, and the glorification of standardized testing works right into their hands. Standardized testing means that school districts don't need to worry about actually TEACHING. They just need to teach the test. And they don't want to "teach the test" TOO well, because they want the federal government to keep throwing money at them, which the feds don't like to do for schools that are performing well already.

      It's a giant mess. And almost ALL of the mess starts at the local school board level. They're crooks, the lot of them.

    6. Re:Educators aren't missing the punchline... by Sir_Sri · · Score: 5, Insightful

      So that individual states can ban the teaching of evolution and institutionally ignoring climate change? If they can't find, or don't want to pay for someone who happens to understand alternating current versus direct current that's no problem, they'll just make whomever is the least liked teacher amongst the department do it.

      Education should be a federal responsibility, US students go to schools all around the country, and compete on an international stage. Allowing one state to permanently disadvantage its children by institutionalizing stupidity is precisely the sort of thing that federal governments should work to prevent. Nor is it fair that a child in a poor state will have less education resources just because that's where he or she was born, when someone who had the foresight to be born in a rich neighbourhood in a rich state will get a much better experience.

      That doesn't make any given standardized test a good idea, and it certainly doesn't make a lot of standardized testing a good idea. But you can't serious want a system where you have no idea how the kids are doing or where you need improvement. Big states (think New York, Florida, Texas, California) will still have to have some sort of standardized testing because they are big enough to warrant it, but when each state does it you can't even compare state to state easily.

      The world is in an era where you can be born in India, raised in Dubai for public school, go to highschool in Georgia (the State), got to University in California, work in New York. At no step in that process do you really want states determining your education. Does Georgia (the state) really want to have some criteria on how to assess a student coming in from every country in the world? Does some university in California really want to have thousands of different metrics for every state in every country in the world to try and figure out who to admit, and does some company based in New York really want a situation where it can't trust education from some states, but not others, and to try and figure out how to track all of that? That system is enormously wasteful, and mind numbingly stupid. Part of why the US system has so many holes in it is because individual states and school boards have decided their should be holes. (Think Kansas and Texas on evolution).

      Giving individual states responsibility for something makes sense if you can then extract the good ideas and apply them federally. It's not like states would ever be completely excluded from the process no more than the local school board or individual teacher are ever excluded from the process. But if you're all going to be americans, or south koreans or whatever, you should hope that the federal government will make sure you all get a fair opportunity if the states won't. Which they can't anymore.

      If you want a truly harsh example look at what is going to happen to kids in Greece and Spain compared to germany and france. The former two are going to have to savagely cut education (along with everything else) because they're fucked in a currency union without a fiscal union. Those kids are going to have a much harder time helping their countries fix problems in 10 years because they aren't going to be as well prepared. Should some kid born in california get a shitty education because some dipshits voted for more spending and less taxes for the last 30 years, and left no money for schools today? They're having their futures held hostage by a stupid political process which they aren't responsible for nor even a part of.

    7. Re:Educators aren't missing the punchline... by arth1 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      The "better" system this guy proposes wouldn't work any better. How would you know which student learned, and which did not, if you do not have testing?

      You test something you haven't taught them.
      That shows how good the students are at applying what they have been taught.

      The reliance on pre-digested knowledge is the bane of education. You don't teach the kids to learn, you teach them to become notebooks. I have no use for hiring notebooks. But I would like to hire someone who knows how to learn.

    8. Re:Educators aren't missing the punchline... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Yes, because "anti-religious bigots" are imagining things like this:

      http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/13/us-usa-education-tennessee-idUSBRE83C0JR20120413

      The fact of the matter is that a relatively small number of fringe religious lunatics are wielding a HUGELY disproportionate amount of influence in American politics in general (and with respect to "evolution vs creationsim" in schools in particular, to make it relevant to this thread).

      Do you honestly think we're better off with public policy decisions being grounded in religious dogma?

    9. Re:Educators aren't missing the punchline... by AthanasiusKircher · · Score: 4, Interesting

      How would you know which student learned, and which did not, if you do not have testing?

      Umm, believe it or not, as someone who has over a decade of experience teaching, you can actually assess students on the basis of things other than performance on paper tests.

      What would happen is that a few students do all the work, while the other students slackoff and do nada.

      Yeah, there's this thing called: paying attention to what your students are doing in your classroom. As a physics teacher who included a huge amount of lab activities in "conceptual physics" classes, I would continuously wander around the room, talking with groups, asking individual students what's going on, etc. You pretty quickly get a sense of whether someone is actively contributing or whether they're sitting there watching everyone else. And, heck, if you ask them to write a lab report or answer questions as individuals based on what they did after the fact, you can easily tell which students actually understand what's going on.

      How do you eliminate bad teachers like the joker I had who wasted 40 minutes of every class talking about his karate lessons and/or last weekend at the bar? You need testing to see if the teacher is really teaching, or not.

      Umm, no. Standardized testing can give some sort of general baseline about whether any learning at all is going on, but it's not going to tell the whole story.

      Having taught at both public secondary schools and a top-tier elite private secondary school, I can tell you that the solution is easy: real, true professional evaluations by good teachers. Many if not most public school administrators who are tasked with doing teacher evaluations are principals for a good reason -- they often were terrible teachers, and took the administration certification test to get into something they'd be better at. These are the people we have evaluating our teachers... most are hardly experts in classroom teaching.

      The elite private school I taught at had one member of the faculty who was the head of teaching evaluations and teaching coordinator. (I forget his actual title, but that's what he was.) He was an actual teacher. Just about everyone at the school acknowledged that he was one of the top teachers at the school. He would come to sit in on maybe a half dozen or more of your classes each year, not just the 45-minute mandatory evaluation done by some anonymous administrator at a public school.

      And the other administrators were teachers too. The head of the high school still taught a course. He would come and sit in on at least a few classes with every teacher too. Students were used to these people being around, so they didn't behave weirdly (unlike public school evaluations, where students were usually freaked out when the principal came to class once per year). The head of the high school would actually commonly just drop in with very little notice and see what was going on in a classroom, hang out for 15 minutes or so (he was an English teacher, but loved hanging out with students doing science experiments, because he found it all fascinating)... and frankly, because all of this happened so often, it really wasn't stressful for teachers, because everyone at the school was so comfortable with it.

      After you had taught at the school for a few years (and before you had whatever their equivalent of "tenure" was), you were teamed up with one of a handful of very experienced teachers at the school who acted as a mentor for an entire semester or year. (These mentor teachers were usually required to teach one fewer class for their service.) You would do in-depth classroom observations, planning, discussions of teaching improvements and strategies, etc. with this person. And all teachers at the school were required to repeat some lesser version of this program with their peers every 7-10 years or something after the initial intensive one.

      You ca

  2. Agreed by MyLongNickName · · Score: 4, Interesting

    My third grader informed me one day that "science is boring". You could have hit my in the nuts with a hammer and it would have hurt me less. I inquired more and found out that he is reading a lot of stuff and he just doesn't find it exciting.

    First, I got ahold of a few interesting science videos dealing with astronomy and robotics. He was intrigued. On a trip to Disney I took him on a behind the scenes tour at their greenhouses where he got to talk to a Botanist and learn more. And I"ve found a few other opportunities to get him involved in some hands on science.

    I'll be damned if I let school choke out his love for learning. He's border-line gifted if not gifted (I'm Triple Nine) and it would be a shame if he limited his options because of school...

    --
    See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
    1. Re:Agreed by DesScorp · · Score: 5, Informative

      My third grader informed me one day that "science is boring". You could have hit my in the nuts with a hammer and it would have hurt me less. I inquired more and found out that he is reading a lot of stuff and he just doesn't find it exciting

      I collect old books, including some old textbooks, and one thing I see is a definite shift from the use of the practical to explain science in texts to an almost complete reliance on theory. The former is interesting and the later bores the hell out of most kids.

      One of my favorite books that I've collected is a junior high school general science text from 1932. If you're used to modern school science texts, the thing that immediately jumps out at you about this book is that for most subjects, practical, real world examples are used to introduce the concept to the students... usually using machines that do our various jobs... and then followed with some light theory behind. For instance, flight is taught not with a dry paragraph of theory, but with a picture of a WWI fighter in action, with notes on how the various parts work. That grabs their interest with the cool factor. Then a paragraph on the opposite page has a brief description of Bernoulli's principle to explain how it gets off the ground. There's a chapter on energy that starts out with a diagram of an old Dynamo, with an incredibly cool description of how everything works, what the various parts do, and thenyou get some info on electrical theory. It's fantastic, and I read it cover to cover. I never had a science text like that, and I was in my mid-30's when I bought it, had a bachelor's degree, and I still learned things from it. It was fun. When's the last time you saw a middle school science text that could be described as fun?

      Go to Google Books, and poke around in some of the old science texts from that period. You'll see what I'm talking about. I absolutely love the idea of teaching by means of examining how a machine works, especially when you do it by building one on a small scale yourself. So I completely get the "have 'em build rockets" notion. There's a lot to that.

      When's the last time you've seen a school science text

      --
      Life is hard, and the world is cruel
  3. Re:Teach the test? by jedidiah · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It may be a suboptimal result but it is at least a demonstrable result.

    People like to whine about rote learning and facts, but before you start applying "more sophisticated thinking" you have to have a solid grasp of the facts.

    You have to have something that can be measured.

    Clearly this idea scares a lot of people.

    --
    A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
  4. Re:Because they'll explode in their faces by Kergan · · Score: 4, Insightful

    You Sir, should watch 5 dangerous things kids should do:

    http://www.ted.com/talks/gever_tulley_on_5_dangerous_things_for_kids.html

  5. Does that include localizing the funding? by John+Jorsett · · Score: 5, Insightful

    To fix our schools, you need to keep congress's nose out of the process, return responsibility to the individual states and local boards of education.

    Would you also eliminate federal funding and let states and localities pay for their own schools? Unless you do, the feds are going to put conditions on what they're paying for, and justifiably so. Personally I'd like to see the feds out of many areas, including education, since their participation comes with a lot of strings.

  6. Re:Because they'll explode in their faces by HornWumpus · · Score: 5, Informative

    I've never had an Estes rocket blow up by accident.

    They are safe as houses.

    --
    John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
  7. Re:Because they'll explode in their faces by v1 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    My mom hit at least three of those with me at an early age. I just love the saying "Don't childproof the world, worldproof the child"

    We seem to be raising generations of ever-less-capable people by trying to childproof the world

    --
    I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
  8. Nerd recommends Rockets, nothing to see here. by CronoCloud · · Score: 4, Informative

    Every so often we get articles on Slashdot where some Engineer/IT guy/Progammer thinks he knows best and recommends adding more "nerd stuff" like LInux or model rockets or RPG's in education. Then all of Slashdot hops on the "Wow, I loved model rockets....this is a great idea" bandwagon.

    Most kids, aren't nerds. And while we might love to see our pet hobbies in schools. a la "All kids should learn Python!", this is no different from a concert Pianist saying "all kids should study piano because it makes them smarter"

    And lets not forget class differences...model rockets is one of those usual upper middle class son of an engineer" hobbies we see so many Slashdotters have. It's like all those articles where Slashdotters reminisce about their C64's and they don't even realize that most people "didn't" have a home computer in the 80's. Even the consoles of that time had less household penetration of today.

    So no, turning every school into a Slashdotters affluent suburban school with rocketry and computer clubs, isn't the solution, even if they mean well.